Microsoft Research Podcast

Latest Episodes:

077 - The productive software engineer with Dr. Tom Zimmermann May 22, 2019

Show notes

If you’re in software development, Dr. Tom Zimmermann, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, wants you to be more productive, and he’s here to help. How, you might ask? Well, while productivity can be hard to measure, his research in the Empirical Software Engineering group is attempting to do just that by using insights from actual data, rather than just gut feelings, to improve the software development process.

On today’s podcast, Dr. Zimmermann talks about why we need to rethink productivity in software engineering, explains why work environments matter, tells us how AI and machine learning are impacting traditional software workflows, and reveals the difference between a typical day and a good day in the life of a software developer, and what it would take to make a good day typical!

076 - Speech and language: the crown jewel of AI with Dr. Xuedong Huang May 15, 2019

Show notes

When was the last time you had a meaningful conversation with your computer… and felt like it truly understood you? Well, if Dr. Xuedong Huang, a Microsoft Technical Fellow and head of Microsoft’s Speech and Language group, is successful, you will. And if his track record holds true, it’ll be sooner than you think!

On today’s podcast, Dr. Huang talks about his role as Microsoft’s Chief Speech Scientist, gives us some inside details on the latest milestones in speech and language technology, and explains how mastering speech recognition, translation and conversation will move machines further along the path from “perceptive AI” to “cognitive AI” and that much closer to truly human intelligence.

075 - Reinforcement learning for the real world with Dr. John Langford and Rafah Hosn May 08, 2019

Show notes

Dr. John Langford, a partner researcher in the Machine Learning group at Microsoft Research New York City, is a reinforcement learning expert who is working, in his own words, to solve machine learning. Rafah Hosn, also of MSR New York, is a principal program manager who’s working to take that work to the world. If that sounds like big thinking in the Big Apple, well, New York City has always been a “go big, or go home” kind of town, and MSR NYC is a “go big, or go home” kind of lab.

Today, Dr. Langford explains why online reinforcement learning is critical to solving machine learning and how moving from the current foundation of a Markov decision process toward a contextual bandit future might be part of the solution. Rafah Hosn talks about why it’s important, from a business perspective, to move RL agents out of simulated environments and into the open world, and gives us an under-the-hood look at the product side of MSR’s “research, incubate, transfer” process, focusing on real world reinforcement learning which, at Microsoft, is now called Azure Cognitive Services Personalizer.

074 - CHI squared with Dr. Ken Hinckley and Dr. Meredith Ringel Morris May 01, 2019

Show notes

If you want to know what’s going on in the world of human computer interaction research, or what’s new at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, you should hang out with Dr. Ken Hinckley, a principal researcher and research manager in the EPIC group at Microsoft Research, and Dr. Merrie Ringel Morris, a principal researcher and research manager in the Ability group. Both are prolific HCI researchers who are seeking, from different angles, to augment the capability of technologies and improve the experiences people have with them.

On today’s podcast, we get to hang out with both Dr. Hinckley and Dr. Morris as they talk about life at the intersection of hardware, software and human potential, discuss how computers can enhance human lives, especially in some of the most marginalized populations, and share their unique approaches to designing and building technologies that really work for people and for society.

073 - Froid and the relational database query quandry with Dr. Karthik Ramachandra Apr 24, 2019

Show notes

In the world of relational databases, structured query language, or SQL, has long been King of the Queries, primarily because of its ubiquity and unparalleled performance. But many users prefer a mix of imperative programming, along with declarative SQL, because its user-defined functions (or UDFs) allow for good software engineering practices like modularity, readability and re-usability. Sadly, these benefits have traditionally come with a huge performance penalty, rendering them impractical in most situations. That bothered Dr. Karthik Ramachandra, a Senior Applied Scientist at Microsoft Research India, so he’s spent a great deal of his career working on improving an imperative complement to SQL in database systems.

Today, Dr. Ramachandra gives us an overview of the historic trade-offs between declarative and imperative programming paradigms, tells us some fantastic stories, including The Tale of Two Engineers and The UDF Story, Parts 1 and 2, and introduces us to Froid – that’s F-R-O-I-D, not the Austrian psychoanalyst – which is an extensible, language-agnostic framework for optimizing imperative functions in databases, offering the benefits of UDFs without sacrificing performance.

072 - AI for Earth with Dr. Lucas Joppa Apr 17, 2019

Show notes

We hear a lot these days about “AI for good” and the efforts of many companies to harness the power of artificial intelligence to solve some of our biggest environmental challenges. It’s rare, however, that you find a company willing to bring its environmental bona fides all the way to the C Suite. Well, meet Dr. Lucas Joppa. A former environmental and computer science researcher at MSR who was tapped in 2017 to become the company’s first Chief Environmental Scientist, Dr. Joppa is now the Chief Environmental Officer at Microsoft, another first, and is responsible for managing the company’s overall environmental sustainability efforts from operations to policy to technology.

Today, Dr. Joppa shares how his love for nature and the joy of discovery actually helped shape his career path, and tells us all about AI for Earth, a multi-year, multi-million dollar initiative to deploy the full scale of Microsoft’s products, policies and partnerships across four key areas of agriculture, water, biodiversity and climate, and transform the way society monitors, models, and ultimately manages Earth’s natural resources.

071 - Holograms, spatial anchors and the future of computer vision with Dr. Marc Pollefeys Apr 10, 2019

Show notes

Dr. Marc Pollefeys is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, a Partner Director of Science for Microsoft, and the Director of a new Microsoft Mixed Reality and AI lab in Switzerland. He’s a leader in the field of computer vision research, but it’s hard to pin down whether his work is really about the future of computer vision, or about a vision of future computers. Arguably, it’s both!

On today’s podcast, Dr. Pollefeys brings us up to speed on the latest in computer vision research, including his innovative work with Azure Spatial Anchors, tells us how devices like Kinect and HoloLens may have cut their teeth in gaming, but turned out to be game changers for both research and industrial applications, and explains how, while it’s still early days now, in the future, you’re much more likely to put your computer on your head than on your desk or your lap.

070 - Enabling design with Ann Paradiso Apr 03, 2019

Show notes

Ann Paradiso is an interaction designer and the Principal User Experience Designer for the NExT Enable group at Microsoft Research. She’s also the epitome of a phrase she often uses to describe other people: a force of nature. Together with a diverse array of team members and collaborators, many of whom have ALS or other conditions that affect mobility and speech, Ann works on new interaction paradigms for assistive technologies hoping to make a more bespoke approach to technology solutions accessible, at scale, to the people who need it most.

On today’s podcast, Ann tells us all about life in the extreme constraint design lane, explains what a PALS is, and tells us some incredibly entertaining stories about how the eye tracking technology behind the Eye Controlled Wheelchair and the Hands-Free Music Project has made its way from Microsoft’s campus to some surprising events around the country, including South by Southwest and Mardi Gras.

069 - All about automated machine learning with Dr. Nicolo Fusi Mar 27, 2019

Show notes

This episode first aired in September, 2018:

You may have heard the phrase, necessity is the mother of invention, but for Dr. Nicolo Fusi, a researcher at the Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the mother of his invention wasn’t so much necessity as it was boredom: the special machine learning boredom of manually fine-tuning models and hyper-parameters that can eat up tons of human and computational resources, but bring no guarantee of a good result. His solution? Automate machine learning with a meta-model that figures out what other models are doing, and then predicts how they’ll work on a given dataset.

On today’s podcast, Dr. Fusi gives us an inside look at Automated Machine Learning – Microsoft’s version of the industry’s AutoML technology – and shares the story of how an idea he had while working on a gene editing problem with CRISPR/Cas9 turned into a bit of a machine learning side quest and, ultimately, a surprisingly useful instantiation of Automated Machine Learning – now a feature of Azure Machine Learning – that reduces dependence on intuition and takes some of the tedium out of data science at the same time.

068 - Project Triton and the physics of sound with Dr. Nikunj Raghuvanshi Mar 20, 2019

Show notes

If you’ve ever played video games, you know that for the most part, they look a lot better than they sound. That’s largely due to the fact that audible sound waves are much longer – and a lot more crafty – than visual light waves, and therefore, much more difficult to replicate in simulated environments. But Dr. Nikunj Raghuvanshi, a Senior Researcher in the Interactive Media Group at Microsoft Research, is working to change that by bringing the quality of game audio up to speed with the quality of game video. He wants you to hear how sound really travels – in rooms, around corners, behind walls, out doors – and he’s using computational physics to do it.

Today, Dr. Raghuvanshi talks about the unique challenges of simulating realistic sound on a budget (both money and CPU), explains how classic ideas in concert hall acoustics need a fresh take for complex games like Gears of War, reveals the computational secret sauce you need to deliver the right sound at the right time, and tells us about Project Triton, an acoustic system that models how real sound waves behave in 3-D game environments to makes us believe with our ears as well as our eyes.

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