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.
Researcher Dr. Sheng Zhang joins “Abstracts”—your source for cutting-edge research in brief—to discuss a recent paper on distilling large language models into smaller, more efficient ones capable of excelling in broad application classes.
The third episode of AI Frontiers features Ece Kamar, deputy lab director at Microsoft Research Redmond. Kamar draws on decades of experience in AI research and an opportunity she and Microsoft colleagues had to evaluate and experiment with GPT-4 prior to its release in discussing…
Many computer science researchers set their sights on building general AI technologies that could impact hundreds of millions – or even billions – of people. But Dr. Danielle Bragg, a senior researcher at MSR’s New England lab, has a slightly smaller and more specific population…
Rangan Majumder is the Partner Group Program Manager of Microsoft’s Search and AI, and he has a simple goal: to make the world smarter and more productive. But nobody said simple was easy, so he and his team are working on better – and faster…
In a world where productivity is paramount and only a handful of people have personal assistants, many of us are frustrated by the amount of time we spend in meetings, and worse, the amount time we spend planning, scheduling and rescheduling those meetings! Fortunately, Dr.…
Dr. Jianfeng Gao is a veteran computer scientist, an IEEE Fellow and the current head of the Deep Learning Group at Microsoft Research. He and his team are exploring novel approaches to advancing the state-of-the-art on deep learning in areas like NLP, computer vision, multi-modal…
Machine learning is a powerful tool that enables conversational agents to provide general question-answer services. But in domains with more specific taxonomies – or simply for requests that are longer and more complicated than “Play Baby Shark” – custom conversational AI has long been the…
The ability to read and understand unstructured text, and then answer questions about it, is a common skill among literate humans. But for machines? Not so much. At least not yet! And not if Dr. T.J. Hazen, Senior Principal Research Manager in the Engineering and…
Episode 76, May 15, 2019 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…
Episode 64, February 20, 2019 - Dr. Layla El Asri talks about the particular challenges she and other scientists face in building sophisticated dialogue systems that lay the foundation for talking machines. She also explains how reinforcement learning, in the form of a text game…
Episode 24, May 16, 2018 - Menezes talks about how the advent of deep learning has enabled exciting advances in machine translation, including applications for people with disabilities, and gives us an inside look at the recent “human parity” milestone at Microsoft Research, where machines…
