News & features
Collaborators: Silica in space with Richard Black and Dexter Greene
| Gretchen Huizinga, Richard Black, and Dexter Greene
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.
In the news | GeekWire
Microsoft joins with students to document humanity with a ‘Golden Record’ of glass
Forty-seven years after NASA sent a “Golden Record” into deep space to document humanity’s view of the world, Microsoft’s Project Silica is teaming up with a citizen-science effort to lay the groundwork — or, more aptly, the glasswork — for…
Research Focus: Week of August 12, 2024
In this issue: Research Forum Ep. 4 explores multimodal AI. Registration is now open; Surveying developers’ AI needs; SuperBench improves cloud AI infrastructure reliability; Virtual Voices: Exploring factors influencing participation in virtual meetings.
Research Focus: Week of July 29, 2024
In this issue: Skeleton Posterior-guided OpTimization (SPOT) exhibits potential in various causal discovery tasks; Using visual imagery for an EEG-based brain–computer interface; Developing human-centered AI systems to assist creative professionals.
Awards | ACM SIGIR
Bhaskar Mitra receives two ACM SIGIR Early Career Researcher Awards
Bhaskar Mitra recently received the ACM SIGIR Early Career Researcher Awards for the following two categories: Excellence in Research: “For high-impact work, including research in neural IR and the establishing the MS-MARCO ranking benchmark” and Excellence in Community Engagement: “For…
Research Focus: Week of June 24, 2024
In this issue: RENC makes 5G vRAN servers more energy efficient; CoExplorer uses AI to keep video meetings on track; Automatic bug detection in LLM-powered text-based games; MAIRA-2: Grounded radiology report generation.
MicroCode: Portable programming for the BBC micro:bit
| Eric Anderson, Thomas Ball, Peli de Halleux, James Devine, and Michal Moskal
MicroCode offers an affordable way to program the BBC micro:bit without needing an internet connection, fostering exploratory learning.
Microsoft Research Forum Episode 3: Globally inclusive and equitable AI, new use cases for AI, and more
“We’re at the very early stage of generative AI and the impacts it will have on work. This is a fast-moving field, and there’s an immense opportunity to take control of the agenda and build truly globally equitable AI systems”,…
Daniela Massiceti delves into the transformative potential of multimodal models such as CLIP for assistive technologies. Specifically focusing on the blind/low-vision community, the talk explores the current distance from realizing this potential and the advancements needed to bridge this gap.