News & features
Thinking beyond audio: Augmenting headphones for everyday digital interactions
| Payod Panda
Because headphones rank among the most popular wearables in the market, we have an exciting opportunity to expand their capabilities through integrating existing sensors with supplementary ones to enable a wide variety of experiences that go beyond traditional audio control.
Unlocking the future of computing: The Analog Iterative Machine’s lightning-fast approach to optimization
| Hitesh Ballani
Picture a world where computing is not limited by the binary confines of zeros and ones, but instead, is free to explore the vast possibilities of continuous value data. Over the past three years a team of Microsoft researchers has…
In the news | Finextra
Microsoft and Barclays test analog optical computer
Microsoft has enlisted Barclays to help it test the world’s first analog optical computer that uses photons and electrons to process continuous value data.
In the news | Microsoft Innovation
Building a computer that solves practical problems at the speed of light
There’s an old saying: When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Sometimes referred to as “the law of the instrument,” that hammer-and-nail idea is a common pitfall in research; when you’re not…
Research Focus: Week of June 5, 2023
In this issue: Peter Lee discusses AI in medicine. Plus, new research on data inference privacy in machine learning; PII leakage in language models; and automatic prompt organization with gradient descent and beam search.
Awards | AAMAS 2023
Best Paper Award at AAMAS 2023
Best Paper Award at the 2023 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems for “Trust Region Bounds for Decentralized PPO Under Non-stationarity” by Mingfei Sun, Sam Devlin, Jacob Beck, Katja Hofmann and Shimon Whiteson
Highlights from CHI 2023
The ways in which people are able to interact with technologies can have a profound effect on a technology’s utility and adoptability. Building computing tools and services around people’s natural styles of work, communication, and play can give technology the…
Microsoft at EuroSys 2023: Systems innovation across the stack to help support an easier, faster, safer, and smarter cloud
| Rodrigo Fonseca
EuroSys 2023 (opens in new tab) is the premier systems conference in Europe, and 2023 marks its 18th edition. Sponsored by ACM SIGOPS Europe and hosted May 8 to May 12, the conference covers a wide range of topics, including…
Using generative AI to imitate human behavior
| Tim Pearce, Tabish Rashid, Anssi Kanervisto, Dave Bignell, Mingfei Sun, Raluca Stevenson, Sergio Valcarcel Macua, Shanzheng Tan, Ida Momennejad, Katja Hofmann, and Sam Devlin
Diffusion models have been used to generate photorealistic images and short videos, compose music, and synthesize speech. In a new paper, Microsoft Researchers explore how they can be used to imitate human behavior in interactive environments.