Microsoft Research Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Ideas: Economics and computation with Nicole Immorlica Dec 05, 2024

Show notes

When Senior Principal Research Manager Nicole Immorlica discovered she could use math to make the world a better place for people, she was all in. She discusses working in computer science theory and economics, including studying the impact of algorithms and AI on markets.

Ideas: The journey to DNA data storage Nov 19, 2024

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Research manager Karin Strauss and members of the DNA Data Storage Project reflect on the path to developing a synthetic DNA–based system for archival data storage, including the recent open-source release of its most powerful algorithm for DNA error correction.

Get the Trellis BMA code: GitHub - microsoft/TrellisBMA: Trellis BMA: coded trace reconstruction on IDS channels for DNA storage

Abstracts: November 14, 2024 Nov 14, 2024

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The efficient simulation of molecules has the potential to change how the world understands biological systems and designs new drugs and biomaterials. Tong Wang discusses AI2BMD, an AI-based system designed to simulate large biomolecules with speed and accuracy.

Read the paper

Get the code

Collaborators: Prompt engineering with Siddharth Suri and David Holtz Nov 11, 2024

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Researcher Siddharth Suri and professor David Holtz give a brief history of prompt engineering, discuss the debate behind their recent collaboration, and share what they found from studying how people’s approaches to prompting change as models advance.

Learn more:

As Generative Models Improve, People Adapt Their Prompts | Publication, July 2024
AI, Cognition, and the Economy (AICE) | Initiative page

Abstracts: November 5, 2024 Nov 05, 2024

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Researchers Chris Hawblitzel and Jay Lorch share how progress in programming languages and verification approaches are bringing bug-free software within reach. Their work on the Rust verification tool Verus won the Distinguished Artifact Award at SOSP ’24.

Read the paper

Abstracts: November 4, 2024 Nov 04, 2024

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In their 2024 SOSP paper, researchers explore a common—though often undertested—software system issue: retry bugs. Research manager Shan Lu and PhD candidate Bogdan Stoica share how they’re combining traditional program analysis and LLMs to address the challenge.

Read the paper

Intern Insights: Vaishnavi Ranganathan with Angela Busheska Oct 24, 2024

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Every year, interns from academic institutions around the world apply and grow their knowledge as members of the research community at Microsoft. In this Microsoft Research Podcast series, these students join their internship supervisors to share their experience working alongside some of the leading researchers in their respective fields.

In this episode, Angela Busheska, an undergraduate engineering student at Lafayette College, talks to Senior Researcher Vaishnavi Ranganathan, about her work on TerraTrace, a platform that brings together statistics and large language models to track land use over time for agricultural and forestry applications. Busheska discusses the personal loss that drew her to climate activism, the chain of events that led to a memorable face-to-face meeting with Microsoft’s chief sustainability officer, and her advice for going after the internship you want and making the experience count.

Learn more:

TerraTrace | GitHub repo
Project FarmVibes | Project homepage
Project FoodVibes | Project homepage

Abstracts: September 30, 2024 Sep 30, 2024

Show notes

The personalizable object recognizer Find My Things was recently recognized for accessible design. Researcher Daniela Massiceti and software development engineer Martin Grayson talk about the research project’s origins and the tech advances making it possible.

The Find My Things story is an example of research at Microsoft enhancing Microsoft products and services. To try the Find My Things tool, download the free, publicly available Seeing AI app.

Learn more:

Find My Things: Personalized Accessibility through Teachable AI for People who are Blind or Low Vision | Publication, May 2024
Understanding Personalized Accessibility through Teachable AI: Designing and Evaluating Find My Things for People who are Blind or Low Vision | Publication, October 2023
Teachable AI Experiences (Tai X) | Project page
PeopleLens | Publication, June 2021
ORBIT: A Real-World Few-Shot Dataset for Teachable Object Recognition | Publication, October 2021
Collaborators: Teachable AI with Cecily Morrison and Karolina Pakėnaitė | Microsoft Research Podcast, December 2023

Collaborators: Silica in space with Richard Black and Dexter Greene Sep 05, 2024

Show notes

College freshman Dexter Greene and Microsoft research manager Richard Black discuss how technology that stores data in glass is supporting students as they expand earlier efforts to communicate what it means to be human to extraterrestrials.

Learn more:

Avenues: The World School — Golden Record 2.0
Project homepage
Golden Record: Overview
NASA Science
Project Silica
Project homepage
Sealed in glass
Microsoft Unlocked innovation story, 2023
Optics for the cloud: storage in the zettabyte era with Dr. Ant Rowstron and Mark Russinovich
Microsoft Research Podcast, November 2019
Project Silica proof of concept stores Warner Bros. ‘Superman’ movie on quartz glass
Microsoft Source blog, November 2019

What’s Your Story: Lex Story Aug 22, 2024

Show notes

Model maker and fabricator Lex Story helps bring research to life through prototyping. He discusses his take on failure; the encouragement and advice that has supported his pursuit of art and science; and the sabbatical that might inspire his next career move.

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