Microsoft Research Podcast

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Abstracts: August 15, 2024 Aug 15, 2024

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In this episode, Microsoft Product Manager Shrey Jain and OpenAI Research Scientist Zoë Hitzig join host Amber Tingle to discuss “Personhood credentials: Artificial intelligence and the value of privacy-preserving tools to distinguish who is real online.” In their paper, Jain, Hitzig, and their coauthors describe how malicious actors can draw on increasingly advanced AI tools to carry out deception, making online deception harder to detect and more harmful. Bringing ideas from cryptography into AI policy conversations, they identify a possible mitigation: a credential that allows its holder to prove they’re a person––not a bot––without sharing any identifying information. This exploratory research reflects a broad range of collaborators from across industry, academia, and the civil sector specializing in areas such as security, digital identity, advocacy, and policy.

Collaborators: AI and the economy with Brendan Lucier and Mert Demirer Aug 08, 2024

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Researcher Brendan Lucier and professor Mert Demirer are applying their micro- and macroeconomic expertise, respectively, to forecasting the economic impact of AI. They share how they’re using a task-level breakdown of occupations to help predict the future.

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AI, Cognition, and the Economy (AICE) | Initiative page
Ideas: Designing AI for people with Abigail Sellen | Microsoft Research Podcast, May 2024

What’s Your Story: Emre Kiciman Aug 01, 2024

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Emre Kiciman shares how some keen observations and a desire to have front-end impact led him to make the jump from systems and networking to computational social science and now causal analysis and large-scale AI—and how systems thinking still impacts his work.

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Abstracts: July 29, 2024 Jul 29, 2024

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A lack of appropriate data, decreased model performance, and other obstacles have made it difficult to expand the input language models can receive. Li Lyna Zhang introduces LongRoPE, a method capable of extending content windows to more than 2 million tokens.

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Abstracts: July 18, 2024 Jul 18, 2024

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Senior Researcher Arindam Mitra introduces AgentInstruct. Using raw data sources, the automated multi-agent framework can create diverse, high-quality synthetic data at scale for the post-training of small and large language models.

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Collaborators: Sustainable electronics with Jake Smith and Aniruddh Vashisth Jul 11, 2024

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Printed circuit boards are abundant—in the stuff we use and in landfills. Researcher Jake Smith and professor Aniruddh Vashisth discuss the development of vitrimer-based PCBs that perform comparably to traditional PCBs but have less environmental impact.

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Recyclable vitrimer-based printed circuit boards for sustainable electronics | Nature Sustainability, April 2024
Microsoft Climate Research Initiative
Microsoft Research AI for Science
Storing digital data in synthetic DNA with Dr. Karin Strauss | Microsoft Research Podcast, October 2018

Ideas: Solving network management puzzles with Behnaz Arzani Jun 13, 2024

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Behnaz Arzani loves hard problems and the freedom to explore. That makes research a great fit! She discusses her work in network management, including the potential role of LLMs in the field; the challenges that excite her; and how storytelling changed her life.

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Solving Max-Min Fair Resource Allocations Quickly on Large Graphs | Publication, February 2024
Finding Adversarial Inputs for Heuristics using Multi-level Optimization | Publication, February 2024
MetaOpt: Examining, explaining, and improving heuristic performance | Microsoft Research blog, January 2024
A Holistic View of AI-driven Network Incident Management | Publication, October 2023
Behnaz Arzani: Painting, storytelling, and other hobbies | Microsoft Research bio page

What’s Your Story: Weishung Liu May 30, 2024

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Principal PM Manager Weishung Liu shares how a career delivering products and customer experiences aligns with her love of people and storytelling and how—despite efforts to defy the expectations that come with growing up in Silicon Valley—she landed in tech.

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Weishung Liu at Microsoft Research
Watch For | Project page
Developer Tech Minutes: Watch For | Video, 2021

Ideas: Designing AI for people with Abigail Sellen May 23, 2024

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Social scientist and HCI expert Abigail Sellen explores the critical understanding needed to build human-centric AI through the lens of the new AICE initiative, a collective of interdisciplinary researchers studying AI impact on human cognition and the economy.

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Abstracts: May 20, 2024 May 20, 2024

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Andrey Kolobov discusses WindSeer, a small CNN capable of estimating the wind field around an sUAV in flight more finely and with less compute and data than traditional models. The advancement can help support longer and safer autonomous flights.

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