Portrait of Besmira Nushi

Besmira Nushi

Principal Research Manager

About

I am a researcher in the AI Frontiers (opens in new tab) lab at Microsoft Research (opens in new tab). My research work lies in the intersection of human and machine intelligence aiming at improving current systems either with better debugging tools or by optimizing them for human-centered properties. I am currently excited about two main directions in this intersection:

Debugging and Failure Analysis of AI\ML Systems for accelerating the software development lifecycle of reliable and robust learning systems. I build tools that enable machine learning practitioners identify and diagnose failures in learned models. Take a look at Error Analysis (opens in new tab) and BackwardCompatibilityML (opens in new tab) as examples of such tools in the open source community.

Human-AI Collaboration for enhancing human capabilities while solving complex decision-making tasks. I study properties of ML models that make them better collaborators with people and design new optimization techniques encode such properties into models. Check out my recent talk on this topic: The Utopia of Human-AI Collaboration. (opens in new tab)

I am also involved in various research initiatives that study the societal impact of artificial intelligence as well as various quality-of-service aspects of AI including interpretabilityreliabilityaccountability, and fairness.

If you are a PhD student looking for an internship position around these topics send me an email. We are currently pursuing research on understanding and evaluating foundation models. Example topics include mechanistic interpretability, tools for failure understanding and model comparison, data synthesis for training and evaluation, methods and benchmarks for evaluating fundamental and generative capabilities of large foundation models.

Prior to joining Microsoft Research, in 2016 I completed my PhD degree at ETH Zurich (opens in new tab) (Switzerland) in the Systems Group (opens in new tab), advised by Prof. Donald Kossmann (opens in new tab) and Prof. Andreas Krause (opens in new tab). In 2011, I completed my master studies in computer science in a double-degree MSc program at RWTH University of Aachen (opens in new tab) (Germany) and University of Trento (opens in new tab) (Italy) as an Erasmus Mundus (opens in new tab) scholar. I also have a Diploma in Informatics  (opens in new tab)from University of Tirana (opens in new tab) (Albania) from where I graduated in 2007.