Microsoft Research Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Abstracts: October 9, 2023 Oct 09, 2023

Show notes

In this episode, Dr. Sheng Zhang, a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, joins host Dr. Gretchen Huizinga to discuss “UniversalNER: Targeted Distillation from Large Language Models for Open Named Entity Recognition.” In this paper, Zhang and his coauthors present mission-focused instruction tuning, a method for distilling large language models into smaller, more efficient ones for a broad application class. Their UniversalNER models achieved state-of-the-art performance in named entity recognition, an important natural language processing (NLP) task. Model distillation has the potential to make NLP and other capabilities more accessible, particularly in specialized domains such as biomedicine, which could benefit from more resource-efficient and transparent options.

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Intern Insights: Dr. Madeleine Daepp with Jennifer Scurrell and Alejandro Cuevas Oct 05, 2023

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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, PhD students Jennifer Scurrell and Alejandro Cuevas talk to Senior Researcher Dr. Madeleine Daepp. They discuss the internship culture at Microsoft Research, from opportunities to connect with researchers they admire over coffee to the teamwork they say helped make it possible for them to succeed in the fast-paced environment of industry, and the impact they hope to have with their work.

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Automated Interviewer or Augmented Survey? Collecting Social Data with Large Language Models | Publication, September 2023

AI Frontiers: Measuring and mitigating harms with Hanna Wallach Sep 28, 2023

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Powerful large-scale AI models like GPT-4 are showing dramatic improvements in reasoning, problem-solving, and language capabilities. This marks a phase change for artificial intelligence—and a signal of accelerating progress to come.

In this Microsoft Research Podcast series, AI scientist and engineer Ashley Llorens hosts conversations with his collaborators and colleagues about what these models—and the models that will come next—mean for our approach to creating, understanding, and deploying AI, its applications in areas such as healthcare and education, and its potential to benefit humanity.

This episode features Partner Research Manager Hanna Wallach, whose research into fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics in AI and machine learning has helped inform the use of AI in Microsoft products and services for years. Wallach describes how she and a team of applied scientists expanded their tools for measuring fairness-related harms in AI systems to address harmful content more broadly during their involvement in the deployment of Bing Chat; her interest in filtering, a technique for mitigating harms that she describes as widely used but not often talked about; and the cross-company collaboration that brings policy, engineering, and research together to evolve and execute the Microsoft approach to developing and deploying AI responsibly.

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Microsoft AI: Responsible AI Principles and Approach

AI and Microsoft Research

AI Frontiers: The future of scale with Ahmed Awadallah and Ashley Llorens Sep 14, 2023

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This episode features Senior Principal Research Manager Ahmed H. Awadallah, whose work improving the efficiency of large-scale AI models and efforts to help move advancements in the space from research to practice have put him at the forefront of this new era of AI. Awadallah discusses the shift in dynamics between model size and amount—and quality—of data when it comes to model training; the recently published paper “Orca: Progressive Learning from Complex Explanation Traces of GPT-4,” which further explores the use of large-scale AI models to improve the performance of smaller, less powerful ones; and the need for better evaluation strategies, particularly as we move into a future in which Awadallah hopes to see gains in these models’ ability to continually learn.

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Orca: Progressive Learning from Complex Explanation Traces of GPT-4, June 2023
Textbooks Are All You Need II: phi-1.5 technical report, September 2023
AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation Framework, August 2023
LIDA: Automatic Generation of Grammar-Agnostic Visualizations and Infographics using Large Language Models, March 2023
AI Explainer: Foundation models and the next era of AI, March 2023
AI and Microsoft Research

Abstracts: September 13, 2023 Sep 13, 2023

Show notes

Members of the research community at Microsoft work continuously to advance their respective fields. Abstracts brings its audience to the cutting edge with them through short, compelling conversations about new and noteworthy achievements. In the inaugural episode of the series, Dr. Ava Amini and Dr. Kevin K. Yang, both Senior Researchers with Microsoft Health Futures, join host Dr. Gretchen Huizinga to discuss “Protein generation with evolutionary diffusion: Sequence is all you need.” The paper introduces EvoDiff, a suite of models that leverages evolutionary-scale protein data to help design novel proteins more efficiently. Improved protein engineering has the potential to help create new vaccines to prevent disease and new ways to recycle plastics.

Intern Insights: Dr. Josh Benaloh with Anunay Kulshrestha and Karan Newatia Sep 08, 2023

Show notes

In this episode, PhD students Anunay Kulshrestha and Karan Newatia talk to Senior Cryptographer Josh Benaloh about their work this summer on ElectionGuard, a free, open-source toolkit that enables voters to verify that their votes have been accurately counted. Kulshrestha and Newatia discuss their contributions to extending ElectionGuard to mail-in voting and rank-choice voting, respectively; what is needed for widespread adoption of the verifiable election technology; and why they’d recommend a Microsoft internship to other students.

(Editor’s note: After its design and development by Microsoft, ElectionGuard is now part of the newly formed nonprofit Election Technology Initiative, which will join with Microsoft to further ElectionGuard’s growth and help advance its adoption.)

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ElectionGuard | Project page
The next frontier in elections: Microsoft supports the Council of State Governments’ Election Technology Initiative | Microsoft On the Issues blog, July 2023
Security and Cryptography | Group page

AI Frontiers: AI in India and beyond with Sriram Rajamani Aug 31, 2023

Show notes

This episode features Sriram Rajamani, Distinguished Scientist and Managing Director of Microsoft Research India. Rajamani talks about how the lab’s work is being influenced by today’s rapidly advancing AI. One example? The development of a conversational agent in India capable of providing information about governmental agricultural programs in farmers’ natural language, particularly significant in a country with more than 30 languages, including 22 government-recognized languages. It’s an application Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described as the “mic drop moment” of his trip to the lab early this year.

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AI4Bhārat | Organization homepage
MEGA: Multilingual Evaluation of Generative AI | Publication, May 2023
AI and Microsoft Research | Learn more about the breadth of AI research at Microsoft

Collaborators: Project InnerEye with Javier Alvarez and Raj Jena Aug 17, 2023

Show notes

Transforming research ideas into meaningful impact is no small feat. It often requires the knowledge and experience of individuals from across disciplines and institutions. Collaborators, a new Microsoft Research Podcast series, explores the relationships—both expected and unexpected—behind the projects, products, and services being pursued and delivered by researchers at Microsoft and the diverse range of people they’re teaming up with.

In this episode, Dr. Gretchen Huizinga talks with Microsoft Health Futures Senior Director Javier Alvarez and Dr. Raj Jena, a radiation oncologist at Addenbrooke’s hospital, part of Cambridge University Hospitals in the United Kingdom, about Project InnerEye, a Microsoft Research effort that applies machine learning to medical image analysis. The pair shares how a 10-plus-year collaborative journey—and a combination of research and good software engineering—has resulted in the hospital’s creation of an AI system that is helping to decrease the time cancer patients have to wait to begin treatment. Alvarez and Jena chart the path of their collaboration in AI-assisted medical imaging, from Microsoft Research’s initiation of Project InnerEye and its decision to make the resulting research tools available in open source to Addenbrooke’s subsequent testing and validation of these tools to meet the regulatory requirements for use in a clinical setting. They also discuss supporting clinician productivity—and ultimately patient outcomes—and the important role patients play in incorporating AI into healthcare.

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Project InnerEye | Project page
How AI is helping to shrink waiting times for NHS cancer patients | Microsoft News Centre UK blog post, June 2023
Accounting for past imaging studies: Enhancing radiology AI and reporting | Microsoft Research blog, June 2023
Microsoft Health Futures | Lab page
Biomedical Imaging | Research group page
Evaluation of Deep Learning to Augment Image Guided Radiotherapy for Head and Neck and Prostate Cancers | JAMA publication, November 2020

Collaborators: Data-driven decision-making with Jina Suh and Shamsi Iqbal Aug 03, 2023

Show notes

In this episode of the podcast, Dr. Gretchen Huizinga welcomes Principal Researcher Dr. Jina Suh and Principal Applied and Data Science Manager Dr. Shamsi Iqbal to the show to discuss their most recent work together, a research project aimed at developing data-driven tools to support organizational leaders and executives in their decision-making. The longtime collaborators explore how a long history of collaboration helps them thrive in their work to help workplaces thrive, how their relationship has evolved over the years, particularly with Iqbal’s move from the research side to the product side, and how research and product can align to achieve impact.

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HUE: Human Understanding and Empathy | Project page
Microsoft Viva | Product page

Collaborators: Gaming AI with Haiyan Zhang Jul 20, 2023

Show notes

In the world of gaming, Haiyan Zhang has situated herself where research meets real-world challenges, helping to bring product teams and researchers together to elevate the player experience with the latest AI advances even before the job became official with the creation of her current role, General Manager of Gaming AI. In this episode, she talks with host Dr. Gretchen Huizinga about the variety of expertise needed to avoid the discomfort experienced by players when they encounter a humanlike character displaying inhuman behavior, the potential for generative AI to make gaming better for both players and creators, and the games she grew up playing and what she plays now.

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