News & features
NeurIPS 2020: Moving toward real-world reinforcement learning via batch RL, strategic exploration, and representation learning
As human beings, we encounter unfamiliar situations all the time—learning to drive, living on our own for the first time, starting a new job. And while we can anticipate what to expect based on what others have told us or…
Awards | The David & Lucile Packard Foundation
Lorin Crawford awarded Packard Fellowship
Lorin Crawford, Senior Researcher at the Microsoft Research New England Lab, was one of 20 innovative early-career scientists and engineers, who will each receive $875,000 over five years to pursue their research. Packard Fellows are at the cutting edge of…
Awards | MacArthur Foundation
Mary Gray awarded 2020 MacArthur Fellow
Mary L. Gray, Senior Researcher, Anthropologist and Media Scholar, was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, with 20 others in 2020. Mary is investigating the ways in which labor, identity, and human rights are transformed by the digital economy. Cecilia Conrad,…
Measuring dataset similarity using optimal transport
| David Alvarez-Melis and Nicolo Fusi
Is FashionMNIST, a dataset of images of clothing items labeled by category, more similar to MNIST or to USPS, both of which are classification datasets of handwritten digits? This is a pretty hard question to answer, but the solution could…
In the news | Microsoft Garage Blog
MIT students build Mosaic to explore art across cultures at Microsoft Garage
Art is one of the few languages which transcends barriers of country, culture, and time. Most people view art subjectively through a lens shaped by their experiences and environment. Finding commonalities among pieces from different eras and mediums calls for…
Awards | Informs
Rothkopf Prize awarded to Yannai Gonczarowski and co-authors
Yannai Gonczarowski, along with co-authors Lior Kovalio, Noam Nisan, and Assaf Romm, receive Rothkopf Prize for Matching for the Israeli ‘Mechinot’ Gap-Year Programs: Handling Rich Diversity Requirements
In the news | TED2020
COVID-19 unraveled the workforce. Here’s how to fix it
“We are living through the tech-enabled unraveling of full-time employment itself,” says anthropologist Mary L. Gray. As the pandemic exposes and accelerates the shift to on-demand online labor, Gray takes us inside the jobs being created to solve the problems…
In the news | Medium
‘Colorblind’ Tech is Killing Us: Why COVID-19 Tech Must Focus on Equity
COVID-19 has taken the lives of more than 120,000 people in the United States and debilitated millions more since arriving on our shores. While anyone can contract the virus, there is a pattern to who gets sick and dies from…
Accessible systems for sign language computation with Dr. Danielle Bragg
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…