John Langford
Partner Researcher Manager
News & features
In the news | ICML 2023
Tutorial: Discovering Agent-Centric Latent Dynamics in Theory and in Practice
A latent state can enable vastly better planning, exploration, and credit assignment by keeping task-relevant information while discarding distractions and irrelevant details. For example, in video games, there is a game-engine state which has all relevant information for the underlying…
Awards | International World Wide Web Conference
John Langford, Rob Schapire and co-authors receive the 2023 Seoul Test of Time Award
The International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2) announced today that the 2023 Seoul Test of Time Award will be presented to the authors of the paper “A Contextual-Bandit Approach to Personalized News Article Recommendation;” Wei Chu, (Ant Group), Lihong…
In the news | Analytics India Magazine
Microsoft Is Going Big On Reinforcement Learning. Here’s How
When it comes to research in new-age technologies, Microsoft has been striving hard to stay ahead of its competitors. From recommendations to gaming, the tech giant has been using popular techniques like reinforcement learning to create efficient products for customers that match their interests.
In the news | The AI Blog
With reinforcement learning, Microsoft brings a new class of AI solutions to customers
Countless companies use online recommendation engines to show customers products and experiences that match their interests. And yet, traditional machine learning models that predict what people might prefer are often based on data from past experience.
In the news | Machine Learning (Theory)
HOMER: Provable Exploration in Reinforcement Learning
Last week at ICML 2020, Mikael Henaff, Akshay Krishnamurthy, John Langford and Dipendra Misra had a paper on a new reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that solves three key problems in RL: (i) global exploration, (ii) decoding latent dynamics, and (iii) optimizing a given…
In the news | Medium | Machine Learning
HOMER: Provable Exploration in Reinforcement Learning
At ICML 2020, Mikael Henaff, Akshay Krishnamurthy, John Langford and Dipendra Misra published a paper presenting a new reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm called HOMER that addresses three main problems in real-world RL problem: (i) exploration, (ii) decoding latent dynamics, and (iii) optimizing…
In the news | GeekWire
UW and Microsoft release contact-tracing app, aiming to battle COVID-19 while preserving privacy
Microsoft and University of Washington researchers have teamed up on a new app, CovidSafe, that promises to alert people automatically if they’ve been in close proximity to someone infected by COVID-19, seeking to strike a balance between the sometimes competing…
In the news | Microsoft Research Blog
Machine Learning for fair decisions
New research focuses on the challenges of machine learning biases, and provides a provably and empirically sound method for turning any common classifier into a 'fair' classifier according to any of a wide range of fairness definitions.