Microsoft Research Podcast

Latest Episodes:

What’s Your Story: Jacki O’Neill May 16, 2024

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Jacki O'Neill saw an opportunity to expand Microsoft research efforts to Africa. She now leads Microsoft Research Africa, Nairobi (formerly MARI). O'Neill talks about the choices that got her there, the lab’s impact, and how living abroad is good for innovation.

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Abstracts: May 6, 2024 May 06, 2024

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Researcher Michel Galley explores how he and fellow researchers combined new and existing data to create MathVista, an open-source benchmark for measuring the mathematical reasoning capabilities of foundation models in scenarios that involve text and images.

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Ideas: Exploring AI frontiers with Rafah Hosn Apr 25, 2024

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Energized by disruption, partner group product manager Rafah Hosn is helping to drive scientific advancement in AI for Microsoft. She talks about the mindset needed to work at the frontiers of AI and how the research-to-product pipeline is changing in the GenAI era.

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Abstracts: April 16, 2024 Apr 16, 2024

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Tusher Chakraborty talks about the paper “Spectrumize: Spectrum-efficient Satellite Networks for the Internet of Things,” including a method for supporting communication between a large IoT-satellite constellation and devices on Earth within a limited spectrum.

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Ideas: Language technologies for everyone with Kalika Bali Apr 11, 2024

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The new series “Ideas” debuts with guest Kalika Bali. The speech and language tech researcher talks sci-fi and its impact on her career, the design thinking philosophy behind her research, and the “outrageous idea” she had to work with low-resource languages.

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The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World | Publication, July 2020
Project VeLLM | Project page
Kahani: Visual Storytelling | Project page
Kahani: Visual Storytelling through Culturally Nuanced Images | Microsoft Research Forum | Episode 1, January 2024
Teachers in India help Microsoft Research design AI tool for creating great classroom content | Microsoft Research blog, October 2023
Digital Labor: Project Karya | Project page
Village by village, creating the building blocks for AI tools with work that also educates | Microsoft Source Asia blog, February 2024

AI Frontiers: Rethinking intelligence with Ashley Llorens and Ida Momennejad Mar 28, 2024

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Principal Researcher Ida Momennejad brings her expertise in cognitive neuroscience and computer science to this in-depth conversation about general intelligence and what the evolution of the brain across species can teach us about building AI.

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AI and Microsoft Research | Focus Area
Evaluating Cognitive Maps and Planning in Large Language Models with CogEval | Publication, October 2023
Imitating Human Behaviour with Diffusion Models | Publication, May 2023
Navigates Like Me: Understanding How People Evaluate Human-Like AI in Video Games | Publication, April 2023
Navigation Turing Test (NTT): Learning to Evaluate Human-Like Navigation | Publication, July 2021
Predictive Representations in Hippocampal and Prefrontal Hierarchies | Publication, January 2022
The successor representation in human reinforcement learning | Publication, September 2017
Encoding of Prospective Tasks in the Human Prefrontal Cortex under Varying Task Loads | Publication, October 2013

Abstracts: March 21, 2024 Mar 21, 2024

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Senior Researcher Chang Liu discusses M-OFDFT, a variation of orbital-free density functional theory (OFDFT) that leverages deep learning to help identify molecular properties in a way that minimizes the tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency.

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Abstracts: February 29, 2024 Feb 29, 2024

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Can how we think about our thinking help us better incorporate generative AI in our lives & work? Explore metacognition’s potential to improve the tech’s usability on “Abstracts,” then sign up for Microsoft Research Forum for more on this & other AI work.

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What’s Your Story: Nicole Forsgren Feb 15, 2024

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Partner Research Manager and developer experience expert Nicole Forsgren talks about the future of software engineering with AI, why she loves tech, and her reliance on a spreadsheet and her gut when making career-changing decisions.

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Nicole Forsgren at Microsoft Research
Nicole Forsgren website
Quantifying the impact of developer experience | Microsoft Azure Blog, January 2024
Yes, good DevEx increases productivity. Here is the data. | GitHub blog, January 2024
Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations | Book, 2018

What’s Your Story: Ivan Tashev Feb 01, 2024

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Partner Software Architect Ivan Tashev talks about applying his expertise in audio signal processing to the design and study of audio components for Microsoft products such as Kinect and shares how a focus on what he can control has fueled professional success.

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