[MUSIC FADES] 

I’m excited to share the mic today with three guests to talk about a really cool program called Accelerating Foundation Models Research, or AFMR for short. With me is Cesar Torres, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Texas, Arlington, and the director of a program called The Hybrid Atelier. More on that soon. I’m also joined by Muhammed Idris, an assistant professor of medicine at the Morehouse School of Medicine. And finally, I welcome Evelyne Viegas, a technical advisor at Microsoft Research. Cesar, Muhammed, Evelyne, welcome to Ideas! 

EVELYNE VIEGAS: Pleasure. 

CESAR TORRES: Thank you. 

MUHAMMED IDRIS: Thank you. 

HUIZINGA: So I like to start these episodes with what I’ve been calling the “research origin story” and since there are three of you, I’d like you each to give us a brief overview of your work. And if there was one, what big idea or larger than life person inspired you to do what you’re doing today? Cesar let’s start with you and then we’ll have Muhammed and Evelyne give their stories as well. 

CESAR TORRES: Sure, thanks for having me. So, I work at the frontier of creativity especially thinking about how technology could support or augment the ways that we manipulate our world and our ideas. And I would say that the origin of why I happened into this space can really come back down to a “bring your kid to work” day. [LAUGHTER] My dad, who worked at Maquiladora, which is a factory on the border, took me over – he was an accountant – and so he first showed me the accountants and he’s like look at the amazing work that these folks are doing. But the reality is that a lot of what they do is hidden behind spreadsheets and so it wasn’t necessarily the most engaging. Suffice to say I did not go into accounting like my dad! [LAUGHTER] But then he showed us the chemical engineer in the factory, and he would tell me this chemical engineer holds the secret formula to the most important processes in the entire company. But again, it was this black box, right? And I got a little bit closer when I looked at this process engineer who was melting metal and pulling it out of a furnace making solder and I thought wow, that’s super engaging but at the same time it’s like it was hidden behind machinery and heat and it was just unattainable. And so finally I saw my future career and it was a factory line worker who was opening boxes. And the way that she opened boxes was incredible. Every movement, every like shift of weight was so perfectly coordinated. And I thought, here is the peak of human ability. [LAUGHTER] This was a person who had just like found a way to leverage her surroundings, to leverage her body, the material she was working with. And I thought, this is what I want to study. I want to study how people acquire skills. And I realized … that moment, I realized just how important the environment and visibility was to being able to acquire skills. And so from that moment, everything that I’ve done to this point has been trying to develop technologies that could get everybody to develop a skill in the same way that I saw that factory line worker that day. 

HUIZINGA: Wow, well, we’ll get to the specifics on what you’re doing now and how that’s relevant in a bit. But thank you for that. So Muhammed, what’s the big idea behind your work and how did you get to where you are today? 

MUHAMMED IDRIS: Yeah, no. First off, Cesar, I think it’s a really cool story. I wish I had an origin story [LAUGHTER] from when I was a kid, and I knew exactly what my life’s work was going to be. Actually, my story, I figured out my “why” much later. Actually, my background was in finance. And I started my career in the hedge fund space at a company called BlackRock, really large financial institution you might have heard of. Then I went off and I did a PhD at Penn State. And I fully intended on going back. I was going to basically be working in spreadsheets for the rest of my life. But actually during my postdoc at the time I was living in Montreal, I actually had distant relatives of mine who were coming to Montreal to apply for asylum and it was actually in helping them navigate the process, that it became clear to me, you know, the role, it was very obvious to me, the role that technology can play in helping people help themselves. And kind of the big idea that I realized is that, you know, oftentimes, you know, the world kind of provides a set of conditions, right, that strip away our rights and our dignity and our ability to really fend for ourselves. But it was so amazing to see, you know, 10-, 12-year-old kids who, just because they had a phone, were able to help their families navigate what shelter to go to, how to apply for school, and more importantly, how do they actually start the rest of their lives? And so actually at the time, I, you know, got together a few friends, and, you know, we started to think about, well, you know, all of this information is really sitting on a bulletin board somewhere. How can we digitize it? And so we put together a pretty, I would say, bad-ass team, interdisciplinary team, included developers and refugees, and we built a prototype over a weekend. And essentially what happened was we built this really cool platform called Atar. And in many ways, I would say that it was the first real solution that leveraged a lot of the natural language processing capabilities that everyone is using today to actually help people help themselves. And it did that in three really important ways. The first way is that people could essentially ask what they needed help with in natural language. And so we had some algorithms developed that would allow us to identify somebody’s intent. Taking that information then, we had a set of models that would then ask you a set of questions to understand your circumstances and determine your eligibility for resources. And then from that, we’d create a customized checklist for them with everything that they needed to know, where to go, what to bring, and who to talk to in order to accomplish that thing. And it was amazing to see how that very simple prototype that we developed over a weekend really became a lifeline for a lot of people. And so that’s really, I think, what motivated my work in terms of trying to combine data science, emerging technologies like AI and machine learning, with the sort of community-based research that I think is important for us to truly identify applications where, in my world right now, it’s really studying health disparities. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah. Evelyne, tell us how you got into doing what you’re doing as a technical advisor. What’s the big idea behind what you do and how you got here? 

EVELYNE VIEGAS: So as a technical advisor in Microsoft Research, I really look for ideas out there. So ideas can come from anywhere. And so think it of scanning the horizon to look for some of those ideas out there and then figuring out, are there scientific hypotheses we should be looking at? And so the idea here is, once we have identified some of those ideas, the goal is really to help nurture a healthy pipeline for potential big bets. What I do is really about “subtle science and exact art” and we discover as we do and it involves a lot of discussions and conversations working with our researchers here, our scientists, but of course with the external research community. And how I got here … well first I will say that I am so excited to be alive in a moment where AI has made it to industry because I’ve looked and worked in AI for as long as I can remember with very different approaches. And actually as important, importantly for me is really natural languages which have enabled this big evolution. People sometimes also talk about revolution in AI, via the language models. Because when I started, so I was very fortunate growing up in an environment where my family, my extended family spoke different languages, but then it was interesting to see the different idioms in those natural languages. Just to give you an example, in English you say, it rains cats and dogs. Well, in France, in French it doesn’t mean anything, right? In French, actually, it rains ropes, right? Which probably doesn’t mean anything in English. [LAUGHTER] And so I was really curious about natural languages and communication. When I went to school, being good at math, I ended up doing math, realizing very quickly that I didn’t want to do a career in math. You know, proofs all that is good in high school, doing a full career, was not my thing, math. You know, proofs, all that. It’s good in high school, but doing a full career, it was not my thing, math. But there was that class I really, really enjoyed, which was mathematical logic. And so little by little, I started discovering people working in that field. And at the same time, I was still restless with natural languages. And so I also took some classes in linguistics on the humanity university in Toulouse in France. And I stumbled on those people who were actually working in … some in linguistics, some in computer science, and then there was this lab doing computational linguistics. And then that was it for me. I was like, that’s, you know, so that’s how I ended up doing my PhD in computational linguistics. And the last aspect I’ll talk about, because in my role today, the aspect of working with a network of people, with a global network, is still so important to me, and I think for science as a whole. At the time, there was this nascent field of computational lexical semantics. And for me, it was so important to bring people together because I realized that we all had different approaches, different theories, not even in France, but across the world, and actually, I worked with somebody else, and we co-edited the first book on computational lexical semantics, where we started exposing what it meant to do lexical semantics and the relationships between words within a larger context, with a larger context of conversations, discourse, and all those different approaches. And that’s an aspect which for me to this day is so important and that was also really important to keep as we develop what we’re going to talk about today, Accelerating Foundation Models Research program. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah, this is fascinating because I didn’t even know all of these stories. I just knew that there were stories here and this is the first time I’m hearing them. So it’s like this discovery process and the sort of pushing on a door and having it be, well, that’s not quite the door I want. [LAUGHTER] Let’s try door number two. Let’s try door number three. Well, let’s get onto the topic of Accelerating Foundation Models Research and unpack the big idea behind that. Evelyne, I want to stay with you on this for a minute because I’m curious as to how this initiative even came to exist and what it hopes to achieve. So, maybe start out with a breakdown of the title. It might be confusing for some people, Accelerating Foundation Models Research. What is it? 

VIEGAS: Yeah, thank you for the question. So I think I’m going to skip quickly on accelerate research. I think people can understand it’s just like to bring … 

HUIZINGA: Make it faster … 

VIEGAS: … well, faster and deeper advances. I mean, there are some nuances there, but I think the terms like foundation models, maybe that’s where I’ll start here. So when we talk about foundation models, just think about any model which has been trained on broad data, and which actually enables you to really do any task. That’s, I think, the simplest way to talk about it. And indeed, actually people talk a lot about large language models or language models. And so think of language models as just one part, right, for those foundation models. The term was actually coined at Stanford when people started looking at GPTs, the generative pre-trained transformers, this new architecture. And so that term was coined like to go not just talk about language models, but foundation models, because actually it’s not just language models, but there are also vision models. And so there are other types of models and modalities really. And so when we started with Accelerating Foundation Models Research and from now on, I will say AFMR if that’s okay. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah. Not to be confused with ASMR, which is that sort of tingly feeling you get in your head when you hear a good sound, but AFMR, yes. 

VIEGAS: So with the AFMR, so actually I need to come a little bit before that and just remind us that actually that this is not just new. The point I was making earlier about it’s so important to engage with the external research community in academia. So Microsoft Research has been doing it for as long as I’ve been at Microsoft and I’ve been 25 years, I just did 25 in January. 

HUIZINGA: Congrats! 

VIEGAS: And so, I … thank you! …  and so, it’s really important for Microsoft Research, for Microsoft. And so we had some programs even before the GPT, ChatGPT moment where we had engaged with the external research community on a program called the Microsoft Turing Academic Program where we provided access to the Turing model, which was a smaller model than the one then developed by OpenAI. But at that time, it was very clear that we needed to be responsible, to look at safety, to look at trustworthiness of those models. And so we cannot just drink our own Kool-Aid and so we really had to work with people externally. And so we were already doing that. But that was an effort which we couldn’t scale really because to scale an effort and having multiple people that can have access to the resources, you need more of a programmatic way to be able to do that and rely on some platform, like for instance, Azure, which has security and privacy, confidentiality which enables to scale those type of efforts. And so what happens as we’re developing this program on the Turing model with a small set of academic people, then there was this ChatGPT moment in November 2022, which was the moment like the “aha moment,” I think, as I mentioned, for me, it’s like, wow, AI now has made it to industry. And so for us, it became very clear that we could not with this moment and the amount of resources needed on the compute side, access to actually OpenAI that new that GPT, at the beginning of GPT-3 and then 4 and then … So how could we build a program? First, should we, and was there interest? And academia responded “Yes! Please! Of course!” right? [LAUGHTER] I mean, what are you waiting for? So AFMR is really a program which enabled us to provide access to foundation models, but it’s also a global network of researchers. And so for us, I think when we started that program, it was making sure that AI was made available to anyone and not just the few, right? And really important to hear from our academic colleagues, what they were discovering and covering and what were those questions that we were not even really thinking about, right? So that’s how we started with AFMR. 

HUIZINGA: This is funny, again, on the podcast, you can’t see people shaking their heads, nodding in agreement, [LAUGHTER] but the two academic researchers are going, yep, that’s right. Well, Muhammed, let’s talk to you for a minute. I understand AFMR started a little more than a year ago with a pilot project that revolved around health applications, so this is a prime question for you. And since you’re in medicine, give us a little bit of a “how it started, how it’s going” from your perspective, and why it’s important for you at the Morehouse School of Medicine. 

IDRIS: For sure. You know, it’s something as we mentioned that really, I remember vividly is when I saw my first GPT-3 demo, and I was absolutely blown away. This was a little bit before the ChatGPT moment that Evelyne was mentioning, but just the possibilities, oh my God, were so exciting! And again, if I tie that back to the work that we were doing, where we were trying to kind of mimic what ChatGPT is today, there were so many models that we had to build, very complex architectures, edge cases that we didn’t even realize. So you could imagine when I saw that, I said, wow, this is amazing. It’s going to unlock so many possibilities. But at the same time, this demo was coming out, I actually saw a tweet about the inherent biases that were baked into these models. And I’ll never forget this. I think it was at the time he was a grad student at Stanford, and they were able to show that if you asked the model to complete a very simple sentence, a sort of joke, “Two Muslims walk into a bar …” what is it going to finish? And it was scary.  

HUIZINGA: Wow. 

IDRIS: Two thirds, it was about 66% of the time, the responses referenced some sort of violence, right? And that really was an “aha moment” for me personally, of course, not being that I’m Muslim, but beyond that, that there are all of these possibilities. At the same time, there’s a lot that we don’t know about how these models might operate in the real world. And of course, the first thing that this made me do as a researcher was wonder how do these emerging technologies, how may they unintentionally lead to greater health disparities? Maybe they do. Maybe they don’t. The reality is that we don’t know. 

HUIZINGA: Right. 

IDRIS: Now I tie that back to something that I’ve been fleshing out for myself, given my time here at Morehouse School of Medicine. And kind of what I believe is that, you know, the likely outcome, and I would say this is the case for really any sort of emerging technology, but let’s specifically talk about AI, machine learning, large language models, is that if we’re not intentional in interrogating how they perform, then what’s likely going to happen is that despite overall improvements in health, we’re going to see greater health disparities, right? It’s almost kind of that trickle-down economics type model, right? And it’s really this addressing of health disparities, which is at the core of the mission of Morehouse School of Medicine. It is literally the reason why I came here a few years ago. Now, the overarching goal of our program, without getting too specific, is really around evaluating the capabilities of foundation models. And those, course, as Evelyne mentioned, are large language models. And we’re specifically working on facilitating accessible and culturally congruent cancer-related health information. And specifically, we need to understand that communities that are disproportionately impacted have specific challenges around trust. And all of these are kind of obstacles to taking advantage of things like cancer screenings, which we know significantly reduce the likelihood of mortality. And it’s going very well. We have a pretty amazing interdisciplinary team. And I think we’ve been able to develop a pretty cool research agenda, a few papers and a few grants. I’d be happy to share about a little bit later. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah, that’s awesome. And I will ask you about those because your project is really interesting. But I want Cesar to weigh in here on sort of the goals that are the underpinning of AFMR, which is aligning AI with human values, improving AI-human interaction, and accelerating scientific discovery. Cesar, how do these goals, writ large, align with the work you’re doing at UT Arlington and how has this program helped? 

TORRES: Yeah, I love this moment in time that everybody’s been talking about, that GPT or large language model exposure. Definitely when I experienced it, the first thing that came to my head was, I need to get this technology into the hands of my students because it is so nascent, there’s so many open research questions, there’s so many things that can go wrong, but there’s also so much potential, right? And so when I saw this research program by Microsoft I was actually surprised. I saw that, hey, they are actually acknowledging the human element. And so the fact that there was this call for research that was looking at that human dimension was really refreshing. So like what Muhammad was saying, one of the most exciting things about these large language models is you don’t have to be a computer scientist in order to use them. And it reminded me to this moment in time within the arts when digital media started getting produced. And we had this crisis. There was this idea that we would lose all the skills that we have learned from working traditionally with physical materials and having to move into a digital canvas.  

HUIZINGA: Right. 

TORRES: And it’s kind of this, the birth of a new medium. And we’re kind of at this unique position to guide how this medium is produced and to make sure that people develop that virtuosity in being able to use that medium but also understand its limitations, right? And so one of the fun projects that we’ve done here has been around working with our glass shop. Specifically, we have this amazing neon-bending artists here at UTA, Jeremy Scidmore and Justin Ginsberg. We’ve been doing some collaborations with them, and we’ve been essentially monitoring how they bend glass. I run an undergraduate research program here and I’ve had undergrads try to tackle this problem of how do you transfer that skill of neon bending? And the fact is that because of AFMR, here is just kind of a way to structure that undergraduate research process so that people feel comfortable to ask those dumb questions exactly where they are. But what I think is even more exciting is that they start to see that questions like skill acquisition is still something that our AI is not able to do. And so it’s refreshing to see; it’s like the research problems have not all been solved. It just means that new ones have opened and ones that we previously thought were unattainable now have this groundwork, this foundation in order to be researched, to be investigated. And so it’s really fertile ground. And I really thank AFMR … the AFMR program for letting us have access to those grounds. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah. I’m really eager to get into both your projects because they’re both so cool. But Evelyne, I want you to just go on this “access” line of thought for a second because Microsoft has given grants in this program, AFMR, to several Minority Serving Institutions, or MSIs, as they’re called, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Hispanic Serving Institutions, so what do these grants involve? You’ve alluded to it already, but can you give us some more specifics on how Microsoft is uniquely positioned to give these and what they’re doing? 

VIEGAS: Yes. So the grant program, per se, is really access to resources, actually compute and API access to frontier models. So think about Azure, OpenAI … but also now actually as the program evolves, it’s also providing access to even our research models, so Phi, I mean if you … like smaller models … 

HUIZINGA: Yeah, P-H-I. 

VIEGAS: Yes, Phi! [LAUGHTER] OK! So, so it’s really about access to those resources. It’s also access to people. I was talking about this global research network and the importance of it. And I’ll come back to that specifically with the Minority Serving Institutions, what we did. But actually when we started, I think we started a bit in a naive way, thinking … we did an open call for proposals, a global one, and we got a great response. But actually at the beginning, we really had no participation from MSIs. [LAUGHTER] And then we thought, why? It’s open … it’s … and I think what we missed there, at the beginning, is like we really focused on the technology and some people who were already a part of the kind of, this global network, started approaching us, but actually a lot of people didn’t even know, didn’t think they could apply, right? And so we ended up doing a more targeted call where we provided not only access to the compute resources, access to the APIs to be able to develop applications or validate or expand the work which is being done with foundation models, but also we acknowledged that it was important, with MSIs, to also enable the students of the researchers like Cesar, Muhammed, and other professors who are part of the program so that they could actually spend the time working on those projects because there are some communities where the teaching load is really high compared to other communities or other colleges. So we already had a good sense that one size doesn’t fit all. And I think what came also with the MSIs and others, it’s like also one culture doesn’t fit all, right? So it’s about access. It’s about access to people, access to the resources and really co-designing so that we can really, really make more advances together. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah. Cesar let’s go over to you because big general terms don’t tell a story as well as specific projects with specific people. So your project is called, and I’m going to read this, AI-Enhanced Bricolage: Augmenting Creative Decision Making in Creative Practices. That falls under the big umbrella of Creativity and Design. So tell our audience, and as you do make sure to explain what bricolage is and why you work in a Hybrid Atelier, terms I’m sure are near and dear to Evelyne’s heart … the French language. Talk about that, Cesar. 

TORRES: So at UTA, I run a lab called The Hybrid Atelier. And I chose that name because “lab” is almost too siloed into thinking about scientific methods in order to solve problems. And I wanted something that really spoke to the ethos of the different communities of practice that generate knowledge. And so The Hybrid Atelier is a space, it’s a makerspace, and it’s filled with the tools and knowledge that you might find in creative practices like ceramics, glass working, textiles, polymer fabrication, 3D printing. And so every year I throw something new in there. And this last year, what I threw in there was GPT and large language models. And it has been exciting to see how it has transformed. But speaking to this specific project, I think the best way I can describe bricolage is to ask you a question: what would you do if you had a paperclip, duct tape, and a chewing gum wrapper? What could you make with that, right? [LAUGHTER] And so some of us have these MacGyver-type mentalities, and that is what Claude Lévi-Strauss kind of terms as the “bricoleur,” a person who is able to improvise solutions with the materials that they have at hand. But all too often, when we think about bricolage, it’s about the physical world. But the reality is that we very much live in a hybrid reality where we are behind our screens. And that does not mean that we cannot engage in these bricoleur activities. And so this project that I was looking at, it’s both a vice and an opportunity of the human psyche, and it’s known as “functional fixation.” And that is to say, for example, if I were to give you a hammer, you would see everything as a nail. And while this helps kind of constrain creative thought and action to say, okay, if I have this tool, I’m going to use it in this particular way. At the same time, it limits the other potential solutions, the ways that you could use a hammer in unexpected ways, whether it’s to weigh something down or like jewelers to texturize a metal piece or, I don’t know, even to use it as a pendulum … But my point here is that this is where large language models can come in because they can, from a more unbiased perspective, not having the cognitive bias of functional fixation say, hey, here is some tool, here’s some material, here’s some machine. Here are all the ways that I know people have used it. Here are other ways that it could be extended. And so we have been exploring, you know, how can we alter the physical and virtual environment in such a way so that this information just percolates into the creative practitioner’s mind in that moment when they’re trying to have that creative thought? And we’ve had some fun with it. I did a workshop at an event known as OurCS here at DFW. It’s a research weekend where we bring a couple of undergrads and expose them to research. And we found that it’s actually the case that it’s not AI that does better, and it’s also not the case that the practitioner does better! [LAUGHTER] It’s when they hybridize that you really kind of lock into the full kind of creative thought that could emerge. And so we’ve been steadily moving this project forward, expanding from our data sets, essentially, to look at the corpus of video tutorials that people have published all around the web to find the weird and quirky ways that they have extended and shaped new techniques and materials to advance creative thought. So … 

HUIZINGA: Wow.  

TORRES: … it’s been an exciting project to say the least. 

HUIZINGA: Okay, again, my face hurts because I’m grinning so hard for so long. I have to stop. No, I don’t because it’s amazing. You made me think of that movie Apollo 13 when they’re stuck up in space and this engineer comes in with a box of, we’ll call it bricolage, throws it down on the table and says, we need to make this fit into this using this, go. And they didn’t have AI models to help them figure it out, but they did a pretty good job. Okay, Cesar, that’s fabulous. I want Muhammed’s story now. I have to also calm down. It’s so much fun. [LAUGHTER] 

IDRIS: No, know I love it. I love it and actually to bring it back to what Evelyne was mentioning earlier about just getting different perspectives in a room, I think this is a perfect example of it. Actually, Cesar, I never thought of myself as being a creative person but as soon as you said a paperclip and was it the gum wrapper … 

HUIZINGA: Duct tape. 

IDRIS: … duct tape or gum wrapper, I thought to myself, my first internship I was able to figure out how to make two paper clips and a rubber band into a … this was of course before AirPods, right? But something that I could wrap my wires around and it was perfect! [LAUGHTER] I almost started thinking to myself, how could I even scale this, or maybe get a patent on it, but it was a paper clip … yeah. Uh, so, no, no, I mean, this is really exciting stuff, yeah. 

HUIZINGA: Well, Muhammed, let me tee you up because I want to actually … I want to say your project out loud … 

IDRIS: Please. 

HUIZINGA: … because it’s called Advancing Culturally Congruent Cancer Communication with Foundation Models. You might just beat Cesar’s long title with yours. I don’t know. [LAUGHTER] You include alliteration, which as an English major, that makes my heart happy, but it’s positioned under the Cognition and Societal Benefits bucket, whereas Cesar’s was under Creativity and Design, but I see some crossover. Evelyne’s probably grinning too, because this is the whole thing about research is how do these things come together and help? Tell us, Muhammed, about this cultury … culturally … Tell us about your project! [LAUGHTER] 

IDRIS: So, you know, I think again, whenever I talk about our work, especially the mission and the “why” of Morehouse School of Medicine, everything really centers around health disparities, right? And if you think about it, health disparities usually comes from one of many, but let’s focus on kind of three potential areas. You might not know you need help, right? If you know you need help, you might not know where to go. And if you end up there, you might not get the help that you need. And if you think about it, a lot of like the kind of the through line through all of these, it really comes down to health communication at the end of the day. It’s not just what people are saying, it’s how people are saying it as well. And so our project focuses right now on language and text, right? But we are, as I’ll talk about in a second, really exploring the kind of multimodal nature of communication more broadly and so, you know, I think another thing that’s important in terms of just background context is that for us, these models are more than just tools, right? We really do feel that if we’re intentional about it that they can be important facilitators for public health more broadly. And that’s where this idea of our project fitting under the bucket at benefiting society as a whole. Now, you know, the context is that over the past couple of decades, how we’ve talked about cancer, how we’ve shared health information has just changed dramatically. And a lot of this has to do with the rise, of course, of digital technologies more broadly, social media, and now there’s AI. People have more access to health information than ever before. And despite all of these advancements, of course, as I keep saying over and over again, not everyone’s benefiting equally, especially when it comes to cancer screening. Now, breast and cervical cancer, that’s what we’re focusing on specifically, are two of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths in women worldwide. And actually, black and Hispanic women in the US are at particular risk and disproportionately impacted by not just lower screening rates, but later diagnoses, and of course from that, higher mortality rates as well. Now again, an important part of the context here is COVID-19. I think there are, by some estimates, about 10 million cancer screenings that didn’t happen. And this is also happening within a context of just a massive amount of misinformation. It’s actually something that the WHO termed as an infodemic. And so our project is trying to kind of look for creative emerging technologies-based solutions for this. And I think we’re doing it in a few unique ways. Now the first way is that we’re looking at how foundation models like the GPTs but also open-source models and those that are, let’s say, specifically fine-tuned on medical texts, how do they perform in terms of their ability to generate health information? How accurate are they? How well is it written? And whether it’s actually useful for the communities that need it the most. We developed an evaluation framework, and we embedded within that some qualitative dimensions that are important to health communications. And we just wrapped up an analysis where we compared the general-purpose models, like a ChatGPT, with medical and more science-specific domain models and as you’d expect, the general-purpose models kind of produced information that was easier to understand, but that was of course at the risk of safety and more accurate responses that the medically tuned models were able to produce. Now a second aspect of our work, and I think this is really a unique part of not what I’ve called, but actually literally there’s a book called The Morehouse Model, is how is it that we could actually integrate communities into research? And specifically, my work is thinking about how do we integrate communities into the development and evaluation of language models? And that’s where we get the term “culturally congruent.” That these models are not just accurate, but they’re also aligned with the values, the beliefs, and even the communication styles of the communities that they’re meant to serve. One of the things that we’re thinking, you know, quite a bit about, right, is that these are not just tools to be published on and maybe put in a GitHub, you know, repo somewhere, right? That these are actually meant to drive the sort of interventions that we need within community. So of course, implementation is really key. And so for this, you know, not only do you need to understand the context within which these models will be deployed, the goal here really is to activate you and prepare you with information to be able to advocate for yourself once you actually see your doctor, right? So that again, I think is a good example of that. But you also have to keep in mind Gretchen that, you know, our goal here is, we don’t want to create greater disparities between those who have and those who don’t, right? And so for example, thinking about accessibility is a big thing and that’s been a part of our project as well. And so for example, we’re leveraging some of Azure API services for speech-to-text and we’re even going as far as trying to leverage some of the text-to-image models to develop visuals that address health literacy barriers and try to leverage these tools to truly, truly benefit health. 

HUIZINGA: One of the most delightful and sometimes surprising benefits of programs like AFMR is that the technologies developed in conjunction with people in minority communities have a big impact for people in majority communities as well, often called the Curb Cut Effect. Evelyne, I wonder if you’ve seen any of this happen in the short time that AFMR has been going? 

VIEGAS: Yeah, so, I’m going to focus a bit more maybe on education and examples there where we’ve seen, as Cesar was also talking about it, you know for scaling and all that. But we’ve seen a few examples of professors working with their students where English is not the first language.  

HUIZINGA: Yeah … 

VIEGAS: Another one I would mention is in the context of domains. So for domains, what I mean here is application domains, like not just in CS, but we’ve been working with professors who are, for instance, astronomers, or lawyers, or musicians working in universities. So they started looking actually at these LLMs as more of the “super advisor” helping them. And so it’s another way of looking at it. And actually they started focusing on, can we actually build small astronomy models, right? And I’m thinking, okay, that could … maybe also we learn something which could be potentially applied to some other domain. So these are some of the things we are seeing. 

HUIZINGA: Yes. 

VIEGAS: But I will finish with something which may, for me, kind of challenges this Curb Cut Effect to certain extent, if I understand the concept correctly, is that I think, with this technology and the way AI and foundation models work compared to previous technologies, I feel it’s kind of potentially the opposite. It’s kind of like the tail catching up with the head. But here I feel that with the foundation models, I think it’s a different way to find information and gain some knowledge. I think that actually when we look at that, these are really broad tools that now actually can be used to help customize your own curb, as it were! So kind of the other way around. 

HUIZINGA: Oh, interesting … 

VIEGAS: So I think it’s maybe there are two dimensions. It’s not just I work on something small, and it applies to everyone. I feel there is also a dimension of, this is broad, this is any tasks, and it enables many more people. I think Cesar and Muhammed made that point earlier, is you don’t have to be a CS expert or rocket scientist to start using those tools and make progress in your field. So I think that maybe there is this dimension of it. 

HUIZINGA: I love the way you guys are flipping my questions back on me. [LAUGHTER] So, and again, that is fascinating, you know, a custom curb, not a curb cut. Cesar, Muhammad, do you, either of you, have any examples of how perhaps this is being used in your work and you’re having accidental or serendipitous discoveries that sort of have a bigger impact than what you might’ve thought? 

TORRES: Well, one thing comes to mind. It’s a project that two PhD students in my lab, Adam Emerson and Shreyosi Endow have been working on. It’s around this idea of communities of practice and that is to say, when we talk about how people develop skills as a group, it’s often through some sort of tiered structure. And I’m making a tree diagram with my hands here! [LAUGHTER] And so we often talk about what it’s like for an outsider to enter from outside of the community, and just how much effort it takes to get through that gate, to go through the different rungs, through the different rites of passage, to finally be a part of the inner circle, so to speak. And one of the projects that we’ve been doing, we started to examine these known communities of practice, where they exist. But in doing this analysis, we realized that there’s a couple of folks out there that exist on the periphery. And by really focusing on them, we could start to see where the field is starting to move. And these are folks that have said, I’m neither in this community or another, I’m going to kind of pave my own way. While we’re still seeing those effects of that research go through, I think being able to monitor the communities at the fringe is a really telling sign of how we’re advancing as a society. I think shining some light into these fringe areas, it’s exactly how research develops, how it’s really just about expanding at some bleeding edge. And I think sometimes we just have to recontextualize that that bleeding edge is sometimes the group of people that we haven’t been necessarily paying attention to. 

HUIZINGA: Right. Love it. Muhammad, do you have a quick example … or, I mean, you don’t have to, but I just was curious. 

IDRIS: Yeah, maybe I’ll just give one quick example that I think keeps me excited, actually has to do with the idea of kind of small language models, right? And so, you know, I gave the example of GPT-3 and how it’s trained on the entirety of the internet and with that is kind of baked in some unfortunate biases, right? And so we asked ourselves the flip side of that question. Well, how is it that we can go about actually baking in some of the good bias, right? The cultural context that’s important to train these models on. And the reality is that we started off by saying, let’s just have focus groups. Let’s talk to people. But of course that takes time, it takes money, it takes effort. And what we quickly realized actually is there are literally generations of people who have done these focus groups specifically on breast and cervical cancer screening. And so what we actually have since done is leverage that real world data in order to actually start developing synthetic data sets that are … 

HUIZINGA: Ahhhh.  

IDRIS: … small enough but are of higher quality enough that allow us to address the specific concerns around bias that might not exist. And so for me, that’s a really like awesome thing that we came across that I think in trying to solve a problem for our kind of specific use case, I think this could actually be a method for developing more representative, context-aware, culturally sensitive models and I think overall this contributes to the overall safety and reliability of these large language models and hopefully can create a method for people to be able to do it as well. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah. Evelyne, I see why it’s so cool for you to be sitting at Microsoft Research and working with these guys … It’s about now that I pose the “what could possibly go wrong if you got everything right?” question on this podcast. And I’m really interested in how researchers are thinking about the potential downsides and consequences of their work. So, Evelyne, do you have any insights on things that you’ve discovered along the path that might make you take preemptive steps to mitigate? 

VIEGAS: Yeah, I think it’s coming back to actually what Muhammed was just talking about, I think Cesar, too, around data, the importance of data and the cultural value and the local value. I think an important piece of continuing to be positive for me [LAUGHTER] is to make sure that we fully understand that at the end of the day, data, which is so important to build those foundation models is, especially language models in particular, are just proxies to human beings. And I feel that it’s uh … we need to remember that it’s a proxy to humans and that we all have some different beliefs, values, goals, preferences. And so how do we take all that into account? And I think that beyond the data safety, provenance, I think there’s an aspect of “data caring.” I don’t know how to say it differently, [LAUGHTER] but it’s kind of in the same way that we care for people, how do we care for the data as a proxy to humans? And I’m thinking of, you know, when we talk about like in, especially in cases where there is no economic value, right? [LAUGHTER] And so, but there is local value for those communities. And I think actually there is cultural value across countries. So just wanted to say that there is also an aspect, I think we need to do more research on, as data as proxies to humans. And as complex humans we are, right? 

HUIZINGA: Right. Well, one of the other questions I like to ask on these Ideas episodes is, is about the idea of “blue sky” or “moonshot” research, kind of outrageous ideas. And sometimes they’re not so much outrageous as they are just living outside the box of traditional research, kind of the “what if” questions that make us excited. So just briefly, is there anything on your horizon, specifically Cesar and Muhammed, that you would say, in light of this program, AFMR, that you’ve had access to things that you think, boy, this now would enable me to ask those bigger questions or that bigger question. I don’t know what it is. Can you share anything on that line? 

TORRES: I guess from my end, one of the things that the AFMR program has allowed me to see is this kind of ability to better visualize the terrain of creativity. And it’s a little bit of a double-edged sword because when we talk about disrupting creativity and we think about tools, it’s typically the case that the tool is making something easier for us. But at the same time, if something’s easier, then some other thing is harder. And then we run into this really strange case where if everything is easy, then we are faced with the “blank canvas syndrome,” right? Like what do you even do if everything is just equally weighted with ease? And so my big idea is to actually think about tools that are purposely making us slower … 

HUIZINGA: Mmmmm … 

TORRES: … that have friction, that have errors, that have failures and really design how those moments can change our attitudes towards how we move around in space. To say that maybe the easiest path is not the most advantageous, but the one that you can feel the most fulfillment or agency towards. And so I really do think that this is hidden in the latent space of the data that we collect. And so we just need to be immersed in that data. We need to traverse it and really it becomes an infrastructure problem. And so the more that we expose people to these foundational models, the more that we’re going to be able to see how we can enable these new ways of walking through and exploring our environment. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah. I love this so much because I’ve actually been thinking some of the best experiences in our lives haven’t seemed like the best experiences when we went through them, right? The tough times are what make us grow. And this idea that AI makes everything accessible and easy and frictionless is what you’ve said. I’ve used that term too. I think of the people floating around in that movie WALL-E and all they have to do is pick whether I’m wearing red or blue today and which drink I want. I love this, Cesar. That’s something I hadn’t even expected you might say and boom, out of the park. Muhammad, do you have any sort of outrageous …? That was flipping it back! 

IDRIS: I was going to say, yeah, no, I listen, I don’t know how I could top that. But no, I mean, so it’s funny, Cesar, as you were mentioning that I was thinking about grad school, how at the time, it was the most, you know, friction-filled life experience. But in hindsight, I wouldn’t trade it in for the world. For me, you know, one of the things I’m often thinking about in my job is that, you know, what if we lived in a world where everyone had all the information that they needed, access to all the care they need? What would happen then? Would we magically all be the healthiest version of ourselves? I’m a little bit skeptical. I’m not going to lie, right? [LAUGHTER] But that’s something that I’m often thinking about. Now, bringing that back down to our project, one of the things that I find a little bit amusing is that I tend to ping-pong between, this is amazing, the capabilities are just, the possibilities are endless; and then there will be kind of one or two small things where it’s pretty obvious that there’s still a lot of research that needs to be done, right? So my whole, my big “what if” actually, I want to bring that back down to a kind of a technical thing which is, what if AI can truly understand culture, not just language, right? And so right now, right, an AI model can translate a public health message. It’s pretty straightforward from English to Spanish, right? But it doesn’t inherently understand why some Spanish speaking countries may be more hesitant about certain medical interventions. It doesn’t inherently appreciate the historical context that shapes that hesitancy or what kinds of messaging would build trust rather than skepticism, right? So there’s literal like cultural nuances. That to me is what, when I say culturally congruent or cultural context, what it is that I mean. And I think for me, I think what programs like AFMR have enabled us to do is really start thinking outside the box as to how will these, or how can these, emerging technologies revolutionize public health? What truly would it take for an LLM to understand context? And really, I think for the first time, we can truly, truly achieve personalized, if you want to use that term, health communication. And so that’s what I would say for me is like, what would that world look like? 

HUIZINGA: Yeah, the big animating “what if?” I love this. Go ahead, Evelyne, you had something. Please. 

VIEGAS: Can I expand? I cannot talk. I’m going to do like Muhammed, I cannot talk! Like that friction and the cultural aspect, but can I expand? And as I was listening to Cesar on the education, I think I heard you talk about the educational rite of passage at some point, and Muhammed on those cultural nuances. So first, before talking about “what if?” I want to say that there is some work, again, when we talk about AFMR, is the technology is all the brain power of people thinking, having crazy ideas, very creative in the research being done. And there is some research where people are looking at what it means, actually, when you build those language models and how you can take into account different language and different culture or different languages within the same culture or between different cultures speaking the same language, or … So there is very interesting research. And so it made me think, expanding on what Muhammed and Cesar were talking about, so this educational rite of passage, I don’t know if you’re aware, so in Europe in the 17th, 18th century, there was this grand tour of Europe and that was reserved to just some people who had the funds to do that grand tour of Europe, [LAUGHTER] let’s be clear! But it was this educational rite of passage where actually they had to physically go to different countries to actually get familiar and experience, experiment, philosophy and different types of politics, and … So that was kind of this “passage obligé” we say in French. I don’t know if there is a translation in English, but kind of this rite of passage basically. And so I am like, wow, what if actually we could have, thanks to the AI looking at different nuances of cultures, of languages … not just language, but in a multimodal point of viewpoint, what if we could have this “citizen of the world” rite of passage, where we … before we are really citizens of the world, we need to understand other cultures, at least be exposed to them. So that would be my “what if?” How do we make AI do that? And so without … and for anyone, right, not just people who can afford it. 

HUIZINGA: Well, I don’t even want to close, but we have to. And I’d like each of you to reflect a bit. I think I want to frame this in a way you can sort of pick what you’d like to talk about. But I often have a little bit of vision casting in this section. But there are some specific things I’d like you to talk about. What learnings can you share from your experience with AFMR? Or/and what’s something that strikes you as important now that may not have seemed that way when you started? And you can also, I’m anticipating you people are going to flip that and say, what wasn’t important that is now? And also, how do see yourself moving forward in light of this experience that you’ve had? So Muhammed, let’s go first with you, then Cesar, and then Evelyne, you can close the show. 

IDRIS: Awesome. One of the things that, that I’m often thinking about and one of the concepts I’m often reminded of, given the significance of the work that institutions like a Morehouse School of Medicine and UT Arlington and kind of Minority Serving Institutions, right, it almost feels like there is an onslaught of pushback to addressing some of these more systemic issues that we all struggle with, is what does it mean to strive for excellence, right? So in our tradition there’s a concept called Ihsan. Ihsan … you know there’s a lot of definitions of it but essentially to do more than just the bare minimum to truly strive for excellence and I think it was interesting, having spent time at Microsoft Research in Redmond as part of the AFMR program, meeting other folks who also participated in the program that, that I started to appreciate for myself the importance of this idea of the responsible design, development, and deployment of technologies if we truly are going to achieve the potential benefits. And I think this is one of the things that I could kind of throw out there as something to take away from this podcast, it’s really, don’t just think of what we’re developing as tools, but also think of them as how will they be applied in the real world? And when you’re thinking about the context within which something is going to be deployed, that brings up a lot of interesting constraints, opportunities, and just context that I think is important, again, to not just work on an interesting technology for the sake of an interesting technology, but to truly achieve that benefit for society. 

HUIZINGA: Hmm. Cesar. 

TORRES: I mean, echoing Muhammad, I think the community is really at the center of how we can move forward. I would say the one element that really struck a chord with me, and something that I very much undervalued, was the power of infrastructure and spending time laying down the proper scaffolds and steppingstones, not just for you to do what you’re trying to do, but to allow others to also find their own path. I was setting up Azure from one of my classes and it took time, it took effort, but the payoff has been incredible in … in so much the impact that I see now of students from my class sharing with their peers. And I think this culture of entrepreneurship really comes from taking ownership of where you’ve been and where you can go. But it really just, it all comes down to infrastructure. And so AFMR for me has been that infrastructure to kind of get my foot out the door and also have the ability to bring some folks along the journey with me, so … 

HUIZINGA: Yeah. Evelyne, how blessed are you to be working with people like this? Again, my face hurts from grinning so hard. Bring us home. What are your thoughts on this? 

VIEGAS: Yeah, so first of all, I mean, it’s so wonderful just here live, like listening to the feedback from Muhammed and Cesar of what AFMR brings and has the potential to bring. And first, let me acknowledge that to put a program like AFMR, it takes a village. So I’m here, the face here, or well, not the face, the voice rather! [LAUGHTER] But it’s so many people who have, at Microsoft on the engineering side, we’re just talking about infrastructure, Cesar was talking about, you know, the pain and gain of leveraging an industry-grade infrastructure like Azure and Azure AI services. So, also our policy teams, of course, our researchers. But above all, the external research community … so grateful to see. It’s, as you said, I feel super blessed and fortunate to be working on this program and really listening what we need to do next. How can we together do better? There is one thing for me, I want to end on the community, right? Muhammed talked about this, Cesar too, the human aspect, right? The technology is super important but also understanding the human aspect. And I will say, actually, my “curb cut moment” for me [LAUGHTER] was really working with the MSIs and the cohort, including Muhammed and Cesar, when they came to Redmond, and really understanding some of the needs which were going beyond the infrastructure, beyond you know a small network, how we can put it bigger and deployments ideas too, coming from the community and that’s something which actually we also try to bring to the whole of AFMR moving forward. And I will finish on one note, which for me is really important moving forward. We heard from Muhammed talking about the really importance of interdisciplinarity, right, and let us not work in silo. And so, and I want to see AFMR go more international, internationality if the word exists … [LAUGHTER] 

HUIZINGA: It does now! 

VIEGAS: It does now! But it’s just making sure that when we have those collaborations, it’s really hard actually, time zones, you know, practically it’s a nightmare! But I think there is definitely an opportunity here for all of us. 

HUIZINGA: Well, Cesar Torres, Muhammed Idris, Evelyne Viegas. This has been so fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on the show to share your insights on AFMR today. 

[MUSIC PLAYS] 

TORRES: It was a pleasure.  

IDRIS: Thank you so much. 

VIEGAS: Pleasure. 

CHETAN NAYAK: Thank you. Thanks for having me. And I’m excited to tell you about this stuff.

HUIZINGA: Well, you have a huge list of accomplishments, accolades, and awards—little alliteration there. But I want to start by getting to know a bit more about you and what got you there. So specifically, what’s your “research origin story,” as it were? What big idea inspired you to study the smallest parts of the universe?

NAYAK: It’s a great question. I think if I really have to go back to the origin story, it starts when I was a kid, you know, probably a preteen. And, you know, I’d go to bookstores to … I know, I guess many of the people listening to this may not know what that is, [LAUGHTER] but there used to be these brick-and-mortar storefronts where they would sell books, physical books, …

HUIZINGA: Right.

NAYAK: … and I’d go to bookstores to, you know, to buy books to read, you know, fiction. But I would browse through them, and there’d be a nonfiction section. And often there’d be used books, you know, sometimes used textbooks or used popular science books. And I remember, even though they were bookstores, not libraries, I would spend a lot of time there leafing through books and got exposed to—accidentally exposed to—a lot of ideas that I wouldn’t otherwise have been. You know, just, sort of, you know, I maybe went there, you know, looking to pick up the next Lord of the Rings book, and while I was there, you know, wander into a book that was sort of explaining the theory of relativity to non-scientists. And I remember leafing through those books and actually reading about Einstein’s discoveries, you know, most famously E = mc², but actually a lot of those books were explaining these thought experiments that Einstein did where he was thinking about, you know, if he were on a train that were traveling at the speed of light, what would light look like to him? [LAUGHTER] Would he catch up to it? You know, and all these incredible thought experiments that he did to try to figure out, you know, to really play around with the basic laws as they were currently understood, of physics, and by, you know, stretching and pulling them and going into extreme … taking them to extreme situations, you could either find the flaws in them or in some cases see what the next steps were. And that was, you know, really inspirational to me. I, you know, around the same time, also started leafing through various advanced math books and a little later picked up a book on calculus and started flipping through it, used book with, like, you know, the cover falling apart and the pages starting to fall out. But there was a lot of, you know, accidental discovery of topics through wandering through bookstores, actually. I also, you know, went to this great magnet high school in New York City called Stuyvesant High School, where I was surrounded by people who were really interested in science and math and technology. So I think, you know, for me, that origin story really starts, you know, maybe even earlier, but at least in my preteen years when, you know, I went through a process of learning new things and trying to understand them in my own way. And the more you do that, eventually you find maybe you’re understanding things in a little different way than anybody else ever did. And then pretty soon, you know, you’re discovering things that no one’s ever discovered before. So that’s, sort of, how it started.

HUIZINGA: Yeah. Well, I want to drill in a little bit there because you’ve brought to mind a couple of images. One is from a Harry Potter movie, And the Half-Blood Prince, where he discovers the potions handbook, but it’s all torn up and they were fighting about who didn’t get that book. And it turned out to be … so there’s you in a bookstore somewhere between the sci-fi and the non-fi, shall we call it. And you’re, kind of, melding the two together. And I love how you say, I was accidentally exposed. [LAUGHTER] Sounds kind of like radiation of some kind and you’ve turned into a scientist. A little bit more on that. This idea of quantum, because you’ve mentioned Albert Einstein, there’s quantum physics, quantum mechanics, now quantum computing. Do these all go together? I mean, what came out of what in that initial, sort of, exploration with you? Where did you start getting interested in the quantum of things?

NAYAK: Yeah, so I definitely started with relativity, not quantum. That was the first thing I heard about. And I would say in a lot of ways, that’s the easier one. I mean, those are the two big revolutions in physics in the 20th century, relativity and quantum theory, and quantum mechanics is by far, at least for me and for many people, the harder one to get your head around because it is so counterintuitive. Quantum mechanics in some sense, or quantum theory in some sense, for most of what we experience in the world is down many abstraction layers away from what we experience. What I find amazing is that the people who created, you know, discovered quantum mechanics, they had nothing but the equations to guide them. You know, they didn’t really understand what they were doing. They knew that there were some holes or gaps in the fundamental theory, and they kind of stumbled into these equations, and they gave the right answers, and they just had to follow it. I was actually just a few weeks ago, I was in Arosa, which is a small Swiss town in the Alps. That’s actually the town where Schrödinger discovered Schrödinger’s equation.

HUIZINGA: No!

NAYAK: Yeah, a hundred years ago, this summer …

HUIZINGA: Amazing!

NAYAK: So Schrödinger suffered tuberculosis, which eventually actually killed him much later in his life. And so he went into the mountains …

HUIZINGA: … for the cure.

NAYAK: … for his health, yeah, to a sanatorium to recover from tuberculosis. And while he was there in Arosa, he discovered his equation. And it’s a remarkable story because, you know, that equation, he didn’t even know what the equation meant. He just knew, well, particles are waves, and waves have wave equations. Because that’s ultimately Maxwell’s equation. You can derive wave equations for light waves and radio waves and microwaves, x-rays. And he said, you know, there has to be a wave equation for this thing and this wave equation needs to somehow correctly predict the energy levels in hydrogen.

HUIZINGA: Oh, my gosh.

NAYAK: And he, you know, worked out this equation and then solved it, which is for that time period not entirely trivial. And he got correctly the energy levels of hydrogen, which people had … the spectra, the different wavelengths of light that hydrogen emits. And lo and behold, it works. He had no idea why. No idea what it even meant. And, um, but knew that he was onto something. And then remarkably, other people were able to build on what he’d done, were able to say, no, there must be a grain of truth here, if not the whole story, and let’s build on this, and let’s make something that is richer and encompasses more and try to understand the connections between this and other things. And Heisenberg was, around the same time, developing his what’s called matrix mechanics, a different way of thinking about quantum computing, and then people realize the connections between those, like Dirac. So it’s a remarkable story how people, how scientists, took these things they understood, you know, imposed on it a certain level of mathematical consistency and a need for the math to predict things that you could observe, and once you had, sort of, the internal mathematical consistency and it was correctly explaining a couple of data points about the world, you could build this huge edifice based on that. And so that was really impressive to me as I learned that. And that’s 100 years ago! It was 1925.

HUIZINGA: Right. Well, let me …

NAYAK: And that’s quantum mechanics!

HUIZINGA: OK.

NAYAK: You’re probably going to say, well, how does quantum computing fit into this, you know? [LAUGHTER] Right? And that’s a much later development. People spent a long time just trying to understand quantum mechanics, extend it, use it to understand more things, to understand, you know, other particles. So it was initially introduced to understand the electron, but you could understand atoms, molecules, and subatomic things and quarks and positrons. So there was a rich, you know, decades of development and understanding, and then eventually it got combined with relativity, at least to some extent. So there was a lot to do there to really understand and build upon the early discoveries of quantum mechanics. One of those directions, which was kicked off by Feynman around, I think, 1982 and independently by a Russian mathematician named Yuri Manin was, OK, great, you know, today’s computers, again, is many abstraction layers away from anything quantum mechanical, and in fact, it’s sort of separated from the quantum world by many classical abstraction layers. But what if we built a technology that didn’t do that? Like, that’s a choice. It was a choice. It was a choice that was partially forced on us just because of the scale of the things we could build. But as computers get smaller and smaller and the way Moore’s law is heading, you know, at some point, you’re going to get very close to that point at which you cannot abstract away quantum mechanics, [LAUGHTER] where you must deal with quantum mechanics, and it’s part and parcel of everything. You are not in the fortunate case where, out of quantum theory has emerged the classical world that behaves the way we expect it to intuitively. And, you know, once we go past that, that potentially is really catastrophic and scary because, you know, you’re trying to make things smaller for the sake of, you know, Moore’s law and for making computers faster and potentially more energy efficient. But, you know, if you get down to this place where the momentum and position of things, of the electrons, you know, or of the currents that you’re relying on for computation, if they’re not simultaneously well-defined, how are you going to compute with that? It looks like this is all going to break down. And so it looks like a real crisis. But, you know, what they realized and what Feynman realized was actually it’s an opportunity. It’s actually not just a crisis. Because if you do it the right way, then actually it gives you way more computational power than you would otherwise have. And so rather than looking at it as a crisis, it’s an opportunity. And it’s an opportunity to do something that would be otherwise unimaginable.

HUIZINGA: Chetan, you mentioned a bunch of names there. I have to say I feel sorry for Dr. Schrödinger because most of what he’s known for to people outside your field is a cat, a mysterious cat in a box, meme after meme. But you’ve mentioned a number of really important scientists in the field of quantum everything. I wonder, who are your particular quantum heroes? Are there any particular, sort of, modern-day 21st-century or 20th-century people that have influenced you in such a way that it’s like, I really want to go deep here?

NAYAK: Well, definitely, you know, the one person I mentioned, Feynman, is later, so he’s the second wave, you could say, of, OK, so if the first wave is like Schrödinger and Heisenberg, and you could say Einstein was the leading edge of that first wave, and Planck. But … and the second wave, maybe you’d say is, is, I don’t know, if Dirac is first or second wave. You might say Dirac is second wave and potentially Landau, a great Russian physicist, second wave. Then maybe Feynman’s the third wave, I guess? I’m not sure if he’s second or third wave, but anyway, he’s post-war and was really instrumental in the founding of quantum computing as a field. He had a famous statement, which is, you know, in his lectures, “There’s always room at the bottom.” And, you know, what he was thinking about there was, you can go to these extreme conditions, like very low temperatures and in some cases very high magnetic fields, and new phenomena emerge when you go there, phenomena that you wouldn’t otherwise observe. And in a lot of ways, many of the early quantum theorists, to some extent, were extreme reductionists because, you know, they were really trying to understand smaller and smaller things and things that in some ways are more and more basic. At the same time, you know, some of them, if not all of them, at the same time held in their mind the idea that, you know, actually, more complex behaviors emerge out of simple constituents. Einstein famously, in his miracle year of 1905, one of the things he did was he discovered … he proposed the theory of Brownian motion, which is an emergent behavior that relies on underlying atomic theory, but it is several layers of abstraction away from the underlying atoms and molecules and it’s a macroscopic thing. So Schrödinger famously, among the other things, he’s the person who came up with the concept of entanglement …

HUIZINGA: Yes.

NAYAK: … in understanding his theory. And for that matter, Schrödinger’s cat is a way to understand the paradoxes that occur when the classical world emerges from quantum mechanics. So they were thinking a lot about how these really incredible, complicated things arise or emerge from very simple constituents. And I think Feynman is one those people who really bridged that as a post-war scientist because he was thinking a lot about quantum electrodynamics and the basic underlying theory of electrons and photons and how they interact. But he also thought a lot about liquid helium and ultimately about quantum computing. Motivation for him in quantum computing was, you have these complex systems with many underlying constituents and it’s really hard to solve the equation. The equations are basically unsolvable.

HUIZINGA: Right.

NAYAK: They’re complicated equations. You can’t just, sort of, solve them analytically. Schrödinger was able to do that with his equation because it was one electron, one proton, OK. But when you have, you know, for a typical solid, you’ll have Avogadro’s number of electrons and ions inside something like that, there’s no way you’re going to solve that. And what Feynman recognized, as others did, really, coming back to Schrödinger’s observation on entanglement, is you actually can’t even put it on a computer and solve a problem like that. And in fact, it’s not just that with Avogadro’s number you can’t; you can’t put it on a computer and solve it with a thousand, you know, [LAUGHTER] atoms, right? And actually, you aren’t even going to be able to do it with a hundred, right. And when I say you can’t do that on a computer, it’s not that, well, datacenters are getting bigger, and we’re going to have gigawatt datacenters, and then that’s the point at which we’ll be able to see—no, the fact is the amazing thing about quantum theory is if, you know, you go from, let’s say, you’re trying to solve a problem with 1,000 atoms in it. You know, if you go to 1,001, you’re doubling the size of the problem. As far as if you were to store it on a cloud, just to store the problem on the classical computer, just to store the answer, I should say, on a classical computer, you’d have to double the size. So there’s no chance of getting to 100, even if, you know, with all the buildout of datacenters that’s happening at this amazing pace, which is fantastic and is driving all these amazing advances in AI, that buildout is never going to lead to a classical computer that can even store the answer to a difficult quantum mechanical problem.

HUIZINGA: Yeah, so basically in answer to the “who are your quantum heroes,” you’ve kind of given us a little history of quantum computing, kind of, the leadup and the questions that prompted it. So we’ll get back to that in one second, because I want you to go a little bit further on where we are today. But before we do that, you’ve also alluded to something that’s super interesting to me, which is in light of all the recent advances and claims in AI, especially generative AI, that are making claims like we’ll be able to shorten the timeline on scientific discovery and things like that, why then, do we need quantum computing? Why do we need it?

NAYAK: Great question, so at least AI is … AI and machine learning, at least so far, is only as good as the training data that you have for it. So if you train AI on all the data we have, and if you train AI on problems we can solve, which at some level are classical, you will be able to solve classical problems. Now, protein folding is one of those problems where the solution is basically classical, very complicated and difficult to predict but basically classical, and there was a lot of data on it, right. And so it was clearly a big data problem that’s basically classical. As far as we know, there’s no classical way to simulate or mimic quantum systems at scale, that there’s a clean separation between the classical and quantum worlds. And so, you know, that the quantum theory is the fundamental theory of the world, and there is no hidden classical model that is lurking [LAUGHTER] in the background behind it, and people sometimes would call these things like hidden variable theories, you know, which Einstein actually really was hoping, late in his life, that there was. That there was, hiding behind quantum mechanics, some hidden classical theory that was just obscured from our view. We didn’t know enough about it, and the quantum thing was just our best approximation. If that’s true, then, yeah, maybe an AI can actually discover that classical theory that’s hiding behind the quantum world and therefore would be able to discover it and answer the problems we need to answer. But that’s almost certainly not the case. You know, there’s just so much experimental evidence about the correctness of quantum mechanics and quantum theory and many experiments that really, kind of, rule out many aspects of such a classical theory that I think we’re fairly confident there isn’t going to be some classical approximation or underlying theory hiding behind quantum mechanics. And therefore, an AI model, which at the end of the day is some kind of very large matrix—you know, a neural network is some very large classical model obeying some very classical rules about, you take inputs and you produce outputs through many layers—that that’s not going to produce, you know, a quantum theory. Now, on the other hand, if you have a quantum computer and you can use that quantum computer to train an AI model, then the AI model is learning—you’re teaching it quantum mechanics—and at least within a certain realm of quantum problems, it can interpolate what we’ve learned about quantum mechanics and quantum problems to solve new problems that, you know, you hadn’t already solved. Actually, you know, like I said, in the early days, I was reading these books and flipping through these bookstores, and I’d sometimes figure out my own ways to solve problems different from how it was in the books. And then eventually I ended up solving problems that hadn’t been solved. Well, that’s sort of what an AI does, right? It trains off of the internet or off of playing chess against itself many times. You know, it learns and then takes that and eventually by learning its own way to do things, you know, it learns things that we as humans haven’t discovered yet.

HUIZINGA: Yeah.

NAYAK: And it could probably do that with quantum mechanics if it were trained on quantum data. So, but without that, you know, the world is ultimately quantum mechanical. It’s not classical. And so something classical is not going to be a general-purpose substitute for quantum theory.

HUIZINGA: OK, Chetan, this is fascinating. And as you’ve talked about pretty well everything so far, that’s given us a really good, sort of, background on quantum history as we know it in our time. Talk a little bit about where we are now, particularly—and we’re going get into topology in a minute, topological stuff—but I want to know where you feel like the science is now, and be as concise as you can because I really want get to your cool work that we’re going to talk about. And this question includes, what’s a Majorana and why is it important?

NAYAK: Yeah. So … OK, unfortunately, it won’t be that concise an answer. OK, so, you know, early ’80s, ideas about quantum computing were put forward. But I think most people thought, A, this is going to be very difficult, you know, to do. And I think, B, it wasn’t clear that there was enough motivation. You know, I think Feynman said, yes, if you really want to simulate quantum systems, you need a quantum computer. And I think at that point, people weren’t really sure, is that the most pressing thing in the world? You know, simulating quantum systems? It’s great to understand more about physics, understand more about materials, understand more about chemistry, but we weren’t even at that stage, I think, there where, hey, that’s the limiting thing that’s limiting progress for society. And then, secondly, there was also this feeling that, you know, what you’re really doing is some kind of analog computing. You know, this doesn’t feel digital, and if it doesn’t feel digital, there’s this question about error correction and how reliable is it going to be. So Peter Shor actually, you know, did two amazing things, one of which is a little more famous in the general public but one of which is probably more important technically, is he did these two amazing things in the mid-’90s. He first came up with Shor’s algorithm, where he said, if you have a quantum computer, yeah, great for simulating quantum systems, but actually you can also factor large numbers. You can find the prime factors of large numbers, and the difficulty of that problem is the underlying security feature under RSA [encryption], and many of these public key cryptography systems rely on certain types of problems that are really hard. It’s easy to multiply two large primes together and get the output, and you can use that to encrypt data. But to decrypt it, you need to know those two numbers, and it’s hard to find those factors. What Peter Shor discovered is that ideally, a quantum computer, an ideal quantum computer, would be really good at this, OK. So that was the first discovery. And at that point, what seemed at the time an academic problem of simulating quantum systems, which seemed like in Feynman’s vision, that’s what quantum computers are for, that seemingly academic problem, all of a sudden, also, you know, it turns out there’s this very important both financially and … economically and national security-wise other application of a quantum computer. And a lot of people sat up and took notice at that point. So that’s huge. But then there’s a second thing that he, you know, discovered, which was quantum error correction. Because everyone, when he first discovered it, said, sure, ideally that’s how a quantum computer works. But quantum error correction, you know, this thing sounds like an analog system. How are you going to correct errors? This thing will never work because it’ll never operate perfectly. Schrödinger’s problem with the cat’s going to happen, is that you’re going to have entanglement. The thing is going to just end up being basically classical, and you’ll lose all the supposed gains you’re getting from quantum mechanics. And quantum error correction, that second discovery of Peter Shor’s, really, you know, suddenly made it look like, OK, at least in principle, this thing can happen. And people built on that. Peter Shor’s original quantum error correction, I would say, it was based on a lot of ideas from classical error correction. Because you have the same problem with classical communication and classical computing. Alexei Kitaev then came up with, you know, a new set of quantum error correction procedures, which really don’t rely in the same way on classical error correction. Or if they do, it’s more indirect and in many ways rely on ideas in topology and physics. And, you know, those ideas, which lead to quantum error correcting codes, but also ideas about what kind of underlying physical systems would have built-in hardware error protection, led to what we now call topological quantum computing and topological qubits, because it’s this idea that, you know, just like people went from the early days of computers from vacuum tubes to silicon, actually, initially germanium transistors and then silicon transistors, that similarly that you had to have the right underlying material in order to make qubits.

HUIZINGA: OK.

NAYAK: And that the right underlying material platform, just as for classical computing, it’s been silicon for decades and decades, it was going to be at one of these so-called topological states of matter. And that these would be states of matter whose defining feature, in a sense, would be that they protect quantum information from errors, at least to some extent. Nothing’s perfect, but, you know, in a controllable way so that you can make it better as needed and good enough that any subsequent error correction that you might call software-level error correction would not be so cumbersome and introduce so much overhead as to make a quantum computer impractical. I would say, you know, there were these … the field had a, I would say, a reboot or a rebirth in the mid-1990s, and pretty quickly those ideas, in addition to the applications and algorithms, you know, coalesced around error correction and what’s called fault tolerance. And many of those ideas came, you know, freely interchanged between ideas in topology and the physics of what are called topological phases and, you know, gave birth to this, I would say, to the set of ideas on which Microsoft’s program has been based, which is to look for the right material … create the right material and qubits based on it so that you can get to a quantum computer at scale. Because there’s a number of constraints there. And the work that we’re really excited about right now is about getting the right material and harnessing that material for qubits.

HUIZINGA: Well, let’s talk about that in the context of this paper that you’re publishing and some pretty big news in topology. You just published a paper in Nature that demonstrates—with receipts—a fundamental operation for a scalable topological quantum computer relying on, as I referred to before, Majorana zero modes. That’s super important. So tell us about this and why it’s important.

NAYAK: Yeah, great. So building on what I was just saying about having the right material, what we’re relying on is, to an extent, is superconductivity. So that’s one of the, you know, really cool, amazing things about the physical world. That many metals, including aluminum, for instance, when you cool them down, they’re able to carry electricity with no dissipation, OK. No energy loss associated with that. And that property, the remarkable … that property, what underlies it is that the electrons form up into pairs. These things called Cooper pairs. And those Cooper pairs, their wave functions kind of lock up and go in lockstep, and as a result, actually the number of them fluctuates wildly, you know, in any place locally. And that enables them to, you know, to move easily and carry current. But also, a fundamental feature, because they form pairs, is that there’s a big difference between an even and odd number of electrons. Because if there’s an odd electron, then actually there’s some electron that’s unpaired somewhere, and there’s an energy penalty associated, an energy cost to that. It turns out that that’s not always true. There’s actually a subclass of superconductors called topological superconductors, or topoconductors, as we call them, and topoconductors have this amazing property that actually they’re perfectly OK with an odd number of electrons! In fact, when there’s an odd number of electrons, there isn’t any unpaired electron floating around. But actually, topological superconductors, they don’t have that. That’s the remarkable thing about it. I’ve been warned not to say what I’m about to say, but I’ll just go ahead [LAUGHTER] and say it anyway. I guess that’s bad way to introduce something …

HUIZINGA: No, it’s actually really exciting!

NAYAK: OK, but since you brought up, you know, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, you know, Voldemort famously split his soul into seven or, I guess, technically eight, accidentally. [LAUGHTER] He split his soul into seven Horcruxes, so in some sense, there was no place where you could say, well, that’s where his soul is.

HUIZINGA: Oh, my gosh!

NAYAK: So Majorana zero modes do kind of the same thing! Like, there’s this unpaired electron potentially in the system, but you can’t find it anywhere. Because to an extent, you’ve actually figured out a way to split it and put it … you know, sometimes we say like you put it at the two ends of the system, but that’s sort of a mathematical construct. The reality is there is no place where that unpaired electron is!

HUIZINGA: That’s crazy. Tell me, before you go on, we’re talking about Majorana. I had to look it up. That’s a guy’s name, right? So do a little dive into what this whole Majorana zero mode is.

NAYAK: Yeah, so Majorana was an Italian physicist, or maybe technically Sicilian physicist. He was very active in the ’20s and ’30s and then just disappeared mysteriously around 1937, ’38, around that time. So no one knows exactly what happened to him. You know, but one of his last works, which I think may have only been published after he disappeared, he proposed this equation called the Majorana equation. And he was actually thinking about neutrinos at the time and particles, subatomic particles that carry no charge. And so, you know, he was thinking about something very, very different from quantum computing, actually, right. So Majorana—didn’t know anything about quantum computing, didn’t know anything about topological superconductors, maybe even didn’t know much about superconductivity at all—was thinking about subatomic particles, but he wrote down this equation for neutral objects, or some things that don’t carry any charge. And so when people started, you know, in the ’90s and 2000s looking at topological superconductors, they realized that there are these things called Majorana zero modes. So, as I said, and let me explain how they enter the story, so Majorana zero modes are … I just said that topological superconductors, there’s no place you can find that even or odd number of electrons. There’s no penalty. Now superconductors, they do have a penalty—and it’s called the energy gap—for breaking a pair. Even topological superconductors. You take a pair, a Cooper pair, you break it, you have to pay that energy cost, OK. And it’s, like, double the energy, in a sense, of having an unpaired electron because you’ve created two unpaired electrons and you break that pair. Now, somehow a topological superconductor has to accommodate that unpaired electron. It turns out the way it accommodates it is it can absorb or emit one of these at the ends of the wire. If you have a topological superconductor, a topoconductor wire, at the ends, it can absorb or emit one of these things. And once it goes into one end, then it’s totally delocalized over the system, and you can’t find it anywhere. You can say, oh, it got absorbed at this end, and you can look and there’s nothing you can tell. Nothing has changed about the other end. It’s now a global property of the whole thing that you actually need to somehow figure out, and I’ll come to this, somehow figure out how to connect the two ends and actually measure the whole thing collectively to see if there’s an even or odd number of electrons. Which is why it’s so great as a qubit because the reason it’s hard for Schrödinger’s cat to be both dead and alive is because you’re going to look at it, and then you look at it, photons are going to bounce off it and you’re going to know if it’s dead or alive. And the thing is, the thing that was slightly paradoxical is actually a person doesn’t have to perceive it. If there’s anything in the environment that, you know, if a photon bounces off, it’s sort of like if a tree falls in the forest …

HUIZINGA: I was just going to say that!

NAYAK: … it still makes a sound. I know! It still makes a sound in the sense that Schrödinger’s cat is still going to be dead or alive once a photon or an air molecule bounces off it because of the fact that it’s gotten entangled with, effectively, the rest of the universe … you know many other parts of the universe at that point. And so the fact that there is no place where you can go and point to that unpaired electron means it does that “even or oddness” which we call parity, whether something’s even or odd is parity. And, you know, these are wires with, you know, 100 million electrons in them. And it’s a difference between 100 million and 100 million and one. You know, because one’s an even or odd number. And that difference, you have to be able to, like, the environment can’t detect it. So it doesn’t get entangled with anything, and so it can actually be dead and alive at the same time, you know, unlike Schrödinger’s cat, and that’s what you need to make a qubit, is to create those superpositions. And so Majorana zero modes are these features of the system that actually don’t actually carry an electrical charge. But they are a place where a single unpaired electron can enter the system and then disappear. And so they are this remarkable thing where you can hide stuff. [LAUGHS]

HUIZINGA: So how does that relate to your paper and the discoveries that you’ve made here?

NAYAK: Yeah, so in an earlier paper … so now the difficulty is you have to actually make this thing. So, you know, you put a lot of problems up front, is that you’re saying, OK, the solution to our problem is we need this new material and we need to harness it for qubits, right. Great. Well, where are we going to get this material from, right? You might discover it in nature. Nature may hand it to you. But in many cases, it doesn’t. And that’s … this is one of those cases where we actually had to engineer the material. And so engineering the material is, it turns out to be a challenge. People had ideas early on that they could put some combination of semiconductors and superconductors. But, you know, for us to really make progress, we realized that, you know, it’s a very particular combination. And we had to develop—and we did develop—simulation capabilities, classical. Unfortunately, we don’t have a quantum computer, so we had to do this classically with classical computers. We had to classically simulate various kinds of materials combinations to find one, or find a class, that would get us into the topological phase. And it turned out lots of details mattered there, OK. It involves a semiconductor, which is indium arsenide. It’s not silicon, and it’s not the second most common semiconductor, which is gallium nitride, which is used in LED lights. It’s something called indium arsenide. It has some uses as an infrared detector, but it’s a different semiconductor. And we’re using it in a nonstandard way, putting it into contact with aluminum and getting, kind of, the best of both worlds of a superconductor and a semiconductor so that we can control it and get into this topological phase. And that’s a previously published paper in American Physical [Society] journal. But that’s great. So that enables … that shows that you can create this state of matter. Now we need to then build on it; we have to harness it, and we have to, as I said, we have to make one of these wires or, in many cases, multiple wires, qubits, et cetera, complex devices, and we need to figure out, how do we measure whether we have 100 million or 100 million and one electrons in one of these wires? And that was the problem we solved, which is we made a device where we took something called a quantum dot—you should think of [it] as a tiny little capacitor—and that quantum dot is coupled to the wire in such a way that the coupling … that an electron—it’s kind of remarkable—an electron can quantum mechanically tunnel from … you know, this is like an electron, you don’t know where it is at any given time. You know, its momentum and its position aren’t well defined. So it’s, you know, an electron whose, let’s say, energy is well defined … actually, there is some probability amplitude that it’s on the wire and not on the dot. Even though it should be on the dot, it actually can, kind of, leak out or quantum mechanically end up on the wire and come back. And because of that fact—the simple fact that its quantum mechanical wave function can actually have it be on the wire—it actually becomes sensitive to that even or oddness.

HUIZINGA: Interesting.

NAYAK: And that causes a small change in the capacitance of this tiny little parallel plate capacitor, effectively, that we have. And that tiny little change in capacitance, which is, just to put into numbers, is the femtofarad, OK. So that’s a decimal point followed by, you know, 15 zeros and a one … 14 zeros and a one. So that’s how tiny it is. That that tiny change in the capacitance, if we put it into a larger resonant circuit, then that larger resonant circuit shows a small shift in its resonant frequency, which we can detect. And so what we demonstrated is we can detect the difference, that one electron difference, that even or oddness, which is, again, it’s not local property of anywhere in the wire, that we can nevertheless detect. And that’s, kind of, the fundamental thing you have to have if you want to be able to use these things for quantum information processing, you know, this parity, you have to be able to measure what that parity is, right. That’s a fundamental thing. Because ultimately, the information you need is classical information. You’re going to want to know the answer to some problem. It’s going to be a string of zeros and ones. You have to measure that. But moreover, the particular architecture we’re using, the basic operations for us are measurements of this type, which is a … it’s a very digital process. The process … I mentioned, sort of, how quantum computing looks a little analog in some ways, but it’s not really analog. Well, that’s very manifestly true in our architecture, that our operations are a succession of measurements that we turn on and off, but different kinds of measurements. And so what the paper shows is that we can do these measurements. We can do them fast. We can do them accurately.

HUIZINGA: OK.

NAYAK: And the additional, you know, announcements that we’re making, you know, right now are work that we’ve done extending and building on that with showing additional types of measurements, a scalable qubit design, and then building on that to multi-qubit arrays.

HUIZINGA: Right.

NAYAK: So that really unlocked our ability to do a number of things. And I think you can see the acceleration now with the announcements we have right now.

HUIZINGA: So, Chetan, you’ve just talked about the idea of living in a classical world and having to simulate quantum stuff.

NAYAK: Yup.

HUIZINGA: Tell us about the full stack here and how we go from, in your mind, from quantum computing at the bottom all the way to the top.

NAYAK: OK, so one thing to keep in mind is quantum computers are not a general-purpose accelerator for every problem. You know, so people sometimes say, well, quantum computers are just going to be like classical computers but faster. And that’s not the case. So I really want to emphasize the fact that quantum computers are an entirely different modality of computing. You know, there are certain problems which quantum computers are not just faster at than classical computers but quantum computers can solve and classical computers have no chance of solving. On the other hand, there are lots of things that classical computers are good at that quantum computers aren’t going to be good at, because it’s not going to give you any big scale up. Like a lot of big data problems where you have lots of classical data, you know, a quantum computer with, let’s say, let’s call it 1,000 qubits, and here I mean 1,000 logical qubits, and we come back to what that means, but 1,000 error-corrected qubits can solve problems that you have no chance of solving with a classical computer, even with all the world’s computing. But in fact, if it were a 1,000 qubits, you would have to take every single atom in the entire universe, OK, and turn that into a transistor, and it still wouldn’t be big enough. You don’t have enough bytes, even if every single atom in the universe were a byte. So that’s how big these quantum problems are when you try to store them on a classical computer, just to store the answer, let’s say.

HUIZINGA: Yeah.

NAYAK: But conversely, if you have a lot of classical data, like all the data in the internet, which we train, you know, our AI models with, you can’t store that on 1,000 qubits, right. You actually can’t really store more than 1,000 bits of classical information on 1,000 qubits. So many things that we have big data in classically, we don’t have the ability to really, truly store within a quantum computer in a way that you can do anything with it. So we should definitely not view quantum computers as replacing classical computers. There’s lots of things that classical computers are already good at and we’re not trying to do those things. But there many things that classical computers are not good at all. Quantum computer we should think of as a complimentary thing, an accelerator for those types of problems. It will have to work in collaboration with a classical computer that is going to do the classical steps, and the quantum computer will do the quantum steps. So that’s one thing to just keep in mind. When we talk about a quantum computer, it is part of a larger computing, you know, framework where there are many classical elements. It might be CPUs, it might be GPUs, might be custom ASICs for certain things, and then quantum computer, you know, a quantum processor, as well. So …

HUIZINGA: Is that called a QPU?

NAYAK: A QPU is the quantum processing unit, exactly! So we’ll have CPUs, GPUs, and QPUs. And so that is, you know, at the lowest layer of that stack, is the underlying substrate, physical substrate. That’s our topoconductor. It’s the material which we build our QPUs. That’s the quantum processing unit. The quantum processing unit includes all of the qubits that we have in our architecture on a single chip. And that’s, kind of, one of the big key features, key design features, that the qubits be small and small and manufacturable on a single wafer. And then the QPU also has to enable that quantum world to talk to the classical world …

HUIZINGA: Right.

NAYAK: … because you have to send it, you know, instructions and you have to get back answers. And for us, that is turning on and off measurements because our instructions are a sequence of measurements. And then, we ultimately have to get back a string of zeros and ones. But that initially is these measurements where we’re getting, you know, phase shifts on microwaves, and … which are in turn telling us about small capacitance shifts, which are in turn telling us the parity of electrons in a wire.

HUIZINGA: Right.

NAYAK: So really, this is a quantum machine in which, you know, you have the qubits that are built on the quantum plane. You’ve then got this quantum-classical interface where the classical information is going in and out of the quantum processor. And then there’s a lot of classical processing that has to happen, both to enable error correction and to enable computations. And the whole thing has to be inside of a cryogenic environment. So it’s a very special environment in which we … in which, A, it’s kept cold because that’s what you need in order to have a topoconductor, and that’s also what you need in order just in general for the qubits to be very stable. So that … when we talk about the full stack, just on the hardware side, there are many layers to this. And then of course, you know, there is the classical firmware that takes instructions and turns them into the physical things that need to happen. And then, of course, we have algorithms and then ultimately applications.

HUIZINGA: Yeah, so I would say, Chetan, that people can probably go do their own little research on how you go from temperatures that are lower than deep space to the room you’re working in. And we don’t have time to unpack that on this show. And also, I was going to ask you what could possibly go wrong if you indeed got everything right. And you mentioned earlier about, you know, what happens in an AI world if we get everything right. If you put quantum and AI together, it’s an interesting question, what that world looks like. Can you just take a brief second to say that you’re thinking about what could happen to cryptography, to, you know, just all kinds of things that we might be wondering about in a post-quantum world?

NAYAK: Great question. So, you know, first of all, you know, one of the things I want to, kind of, emphasize is, ultimately, a lot of, you know, when we think about the potential for technology, often the limit comes down to physics. There are physics limits. You know, if you think about, like, interstellar travel and things like that, well, the speed of light is kind of a hard cutoff, [LAUGHTER] and actually, you’re not going to be able to go faster than the speed light, and you have to bake that in. That ultimately, you know, if you think of a datacenter, ultimately, like there’s a certain amount of energy, and there’s a certain amount of cooling power you have. And you can say, well, this datacenter is 100 megawatts, and then in the future, we’ll have a gigawatt to use it. But ultimately, then that energy has to come from somewhere, and you’ve got some hard physical constraints. So similarly, you could ask, you know, with quantum computers, what are the hard physical constraints? What are the things that just … because you can’t make a perpetual motion machine; you can’t violate, I think, laws of quantum mechanics. And I think in the early days, there was this concern that, you know, this idea relies on violating something. You’re doing something that’s not going to work. You know, I’d say the theory of quantum error correction, the theory of fault tolerance, you know, many of the algorithms have been developed, they really do show that there is no fundamental physical constraint saying that this isn’t going to happen, you know. That, you know, that somehow you would need to have either more power than you can really generate or you would need to go much colder than you can actually get. That, you know, there’s no physical, you know, no-go result. So that’s an important thing to keep in mind. Now, the thing is, some people might then be tempted to say, well, OK, now it’s just an engineering problem because we know this in principle can work, and we just have to figure out how to work. But the truth is, there isn’t any such, like, hard barrier where you say, well, oh, up until here, it’s fundamental physics, and then beyond this, it’s just an engineering problem. The reality is, you know, new difficulties and challenges arise every step along the way. And one person might call it an engineering or an implementation challenge, and one person may call it a fundamental, you know, barrier obstruction, and I think people will probably profitably disagree, you know, agree to disagree on, like, where that goes. I think for us, like, it was really crucial, you know, as we look out at a scale to realize quantum computers are going to really make an impact. We’re going to need thousands, you know, hundreds to thousands of logical qubits. That is error-corrected qubits. And when you look at what that means, that means really million physical qubits. That is a very large scale in a world in which people have mostly learned what we know about these things from 10 to 100 qubits. To project out from that to a million, you know, it would surprise me if the solutions that are optimal for 10 to 100 qubits are the same solutions that are optimal for a million qubits, right.

HUIZINGA: Yeah.

NAYAK: And that has been a motivation for us, is let’s try to think, based on what we now know, of things that at least have a chance to work at that million qubit. Let’s not do anything that looks like it’s going to clearly hit a dead end before then.

HUIZINGA: Right.

NAYAK: Now, obviously in science, nothing is certain, and you learn new things along the way, but we didn’t want to start out with things that looked like they were not going to be, you know, work for a million qubits. That was the reason that we developed this new material, that we created this, engineered this new material, you know, these topoconductors, precisely because we said we need to have a material that can give us something where we can operate it fast and make it small and be able to control these things. So, you know, I think that’s one key thing. And, you know, what we’ve demonstrated now is that we can harness this; that we’ve got a qubit. And that’s why we have a lot of confidence that, you know, these are things that aren’t going to be decades away. That these things are going to be years away. And that was the basis for our interaction with DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]. We’ve just been … signed a contract with DARPA to go into the next phase of the DARPA US2QC program. And, you know, DARPA, the US government, wants to see a fault-tolerant quantum computer. And … because they do not want any surprises.

HUIZINGA: Right?!? [LAUGHS]

NAYAK: And, you know, there are people out there who said, you know, quantum computers are decades away; don’t worry about it. But I think the US government realizes they might be years, not decades away, and they want to get ahead of that. And so that’s why they’ve entered into this agreement with us and the contract with us.

HUIZINGA: Yeah.

NAYAK: And so that is, you know, the thing I just want to make sure that, you know, listeners to the podcast understand that we are, you know, the reason that we fundamentally re-engineered, re-architected, what we think a quantum computer should look like and what the qubit should be and even … going all the way down to the underlying materials was … which is high risk, right? I mean, there was no guarantee … there’s no guarantee that any of this is going to work, A. And, B, there was no guarantee we would even be able to do the things we’ve done so far. I mean, you know, that’s the nature of it. If you’re going to try to do something really different, you’re going to have to take risks. And we did take risks by really starting at, you know, the ground floor and trying to redesign and re-engineer these things. So that was a necessary part of this journey and the story, was for us to re-engineer these things in a high-risk way. What that leads to is, you know, potentially changing that timeline. And so in that context, it’s really important to make this transition to post-quantum crypto because, you know, the cryptography systems in use up until now are things that are not safe from quantum attacks if you have a utility-scale quantum computer. We do know that there are crypto systems which, at least as far as we know, appear to be safe from quantum attacks. That’s what’s called post-quantum cryptography. You know, they rely on different types of hard math problems, which quantum computers aren’t probably good at. And so, you know, and changing over to a new crypto standard isn’t something that happens at the flip of a switch.

HUIZINGA: No.

NAYAK: It’s something that takes time. You know, first, you know, early part of that was based around the National Institute of Standards and Technology aligning around one or a few standard systems that people would implement, which they certified would be quantum safe and, you know, those processes have occurred. And so now is the time to switch over. Given that we know that we can do this and that it won’t happen overnight, now’s the time to make that switch.

HUIZINGA: And we’ve had several cryptographers on the show who’ve been working on this for years. It’s not like they’re just starting. They saw this coming even before you had some solidity in your work. But listen, I would love to talk to you for hours, but we’re coming to a close here. And as we close, I want to refer to a conversation you had with distinguished university professor Sankar Das Sarma. He suggested that with the emergence of Majorana zero modes, you had reached the end of the beginning and that you were now sort of embarking on the beginning of the end in this work. Well, maybe that’s a sort of romanticized vision of what it is. But could you give us a little bit of a hint on what are the next milestones on your road to a scalable, reliable quantum computer, and what’s on your research roadmap to reach them?

NAYAK: Yeah, so interestingly, we actually just also posted on the arXiv a paper that shows some aspects of our roadmap, kind of the more scientific aspects of our roadmap. And that roadmap is, kind of, continuously going from the scientific discovery phase through the engineering phase, OK. Again, as I said, it’s a matter of debate and even taste of what exactly you want to call scientific discovery versus engineering, but—which will be hotly debated, I’m sure—but it is definitely a continuum that’s going more towards … from one towards the other. And I would say, you know, at a high level, logical qubits, you know, error-corrected, reliable qubits, are, you know, the basis of quantum computation at scale and developing, demonstrating, and building those logical qubits and logic qubits at scale is kind of a big thing that—for us and for the whole industry—is, I would say, is, sort of, the next level of quantum computing. Jason Zander wrote this blog where he talked about level one, level two, level three, where level one was this NISQ—noisy intermediate-scale quantum—era; level two is foundations of, you know, reliable and logical qubits; and level three is the, you know, at-scale logical qubits. I think we’re heading towards level two, and so in my mind, that’s sort of, you know, the next North Star is really around that. I think there will be a lot of very interesting and important things that are more technical and maybe are not as accessible to a big audience. But I’d say that’s, kind of, the … I would say, if you’re, you know, a thing to keep in mind as a big exciting thing happening in the field.

HUIZINGA: Yeah. Well, Chetan Nayak, what a ride this show has been. I’m going to be watching this space—and the timelines thereof because they keep getting adjusted!

[MUSIC]

Thank you for taking time to share your important work with us today.

NAYAK: Thank you very much, my pleasure!

[MUSIC FADES]

AKSHAY NAMBI: Thanks for having me.

STETKIEWICZ: I’d like to begin by asking you to tell us your origin story. How did you get started on your path? Was there a big idea or experience that captured your imagination or motivated you to do what you’re doing today?

NAMBI: If I look back, my journey into research wasn’t a straight line. It was more about discovering my passion through some unexpected opportunities and also finding purpose along the way. So before I started with my undergrad studies, I was very interested in electronics and systems. My passion for electronics, kind of, started when I was in school. I was more like an average student, not a nerd or not too curious, but I was always tinkering around, doing things, building stuff, and playing with gadgets and that, kind of, made me very keen on electronics and putting things together, and that was my passion. But sometimes things don’t go as planned. So I didn’t get into the college which I had hoped to join for electronics, so I ended up pursuing computer science, which wasn’t too bad either. So during my final year of bachelor’s, I had to do a final semester project, which turned out to be a very pivotal moment. And that’s when I got to know this institute called Indian Institute of Science (IISc), which is a top research institute in India and also globally. And I had a chance to work on a project there. And it was my first real exposure to open-ended research, right, so I remember … where we were trying to build a solution that helped to efficiently construct an ontology for a specific domain, which simply means that we were building systems to help users uncover relationships in the data and allow them to query it more efficiently, right. And it was super exciting for me to design and build something new. And that experience made me realize that I wanted to pursue research further. And right after that project, I decided to explore research opportunities, which led me to join Indian Institute of Science again as a research assistant.

STETKIEWICZ: So what made you want to take the skills you were developing and apply them to a research career?

NAMBI: So interestingly when I joined IISc, the professor I worked with specialized in electronics, so things come back, so something I had always been passionate about. And I was the only computer science graduate in the lab at that time with others being electronic engineers, and I didn’t even know how to solder. But the lab environment was super encouraging, collaborative, so I, kind of, caught up very quickly. In that lab, basically, I worked on several projects in the emerging fields of embedded device and energy harvesting systems. Specifically, we were designing systems that could harvest energy from sources like sun, hydro, and even RF (radio frequency) signals. And my role was kind of twofold. One, I designed circuits and systems to make energy harvesting more efficient so that you can store this energy. And then I also wrote programs, software, to ensure that the harvested energy can be used efficiently. For instance, as we harvest some of this energy, you want to have your programs run very quickly so that you are able to sense the data, send it to the server in an efficient way. And one of the most exciting projects I worked during that time was on data-driven agriculture. So this was back in 2008, 2009, right, where we developed an embedded system device with sensors to monitor the agricultural fields, collecting data like soil moisture, soil temperature. And that was sent to the agronomists who were able to analyze this data and provide feedback to farmers. In many remote areas, still access to power is a huge challenge. So we used many of the technologies we were developing in the lab, specifically energy harvesting techniques, to power these sensors and devices in the rural farms, and that’s when I really got to see firsthand how technology could help people’s lives, particularly in rural settings. And that’s what, kind of, stood out in my experience at IISc, right, was that it was [the] end-to-end nature of the work. And it was not just writing code or designing circuits. It was about identifying the real-world problems, solving them efficiently, and deploying solutions in the field. And this cemented my passion for creating technology that solves real-world problems, and that’s what keeps me driving even today.

STETKIEWICZ: And as you’re thinking about those problems that you want to try and solve, where did you look for, for inspiration? It sounds like some of these are happening right there in your home.

NAMBI: That’s right. Growing up and living in India, I’ve been surrounded by these, kind of, many challenges. And these are not distant problems. These are right in front of us. And some of them are quite literally outside the door. So being here in India provides a unique opportunity to tackle some of the pressing real-world challenges in agriculture, education, or in road safety, where even small advancements can create significant impact.

STETKIEWICZ: So how would you describe your research philosophy? Do you have some big goals that guide you?

NAMBI: Right, as I mentioned, right, my research philosophy is mainly rooted in solving real-world problems through end-to-end innovation. For me, research is just not about pushing the boundaries of the knowledge. It’s about ensuring that these advancements translate to meaningful impact on the ground, right. So, yes, the big goals that guide most of my work is twofold. One, how do we build technology that’s scaled to benefit large populations? And two, at the same time, I’m motivated by the challenge of tackling complex problems. That provides opportunity to explore, learn, and also create something new. And that’s what keeps me excited.

STETKIEWICZ: So let’s talk a little bit about your journey at Microsoft Research. I know you began as an intern, and some of the initial work you did was focused on computer vision, road safety, energy efficiency. Tell us about some of those projects.

NAMBI: As I was nearing the completion of my PhD, I was eager to look for opportunities in industrial labs, and Microsoft Research obviously stood out as an exciting opportunity. And additionally, the fact that Microsoft Research India was in my hometown, Bangalore, made it even more appealing. So when I joined as an intern, I worked together with Venkat Padmanabhan, who now leads the lab, and we started this project called HAMS, which stands for Harnessing Automobiles for Safety. As you know, road safety is a major public health issue globally, responsible for almost 1.35 million fatalities annually and with the situation being even more severe in countries like India. For instance, there are estimates that there’s a life lost on the road every four minutes in India. When analyzing the factors which affect road safety, we saw mainly three elements. One, the vehicle. Second, the infrastructure. And then the driver. Among these, the driver plays the most critical role in many incidents, whether it’s over-speeding, driving without seat belts, drowsiness, fatigue, any of these, right. And this realization motivated us to focus on driver monitoring, which led to the development of HAMS. In a nutshell, HAMS is basically a smartphone-based system where you’re mounting your smartphone on a windshield of a vehicle to monitor both the driver and the driving in real time with the goal of improving road safety. Basically, it observes key aspects such as where the driver is looking, whether they are distracted or fatigued[1], while also considering the external driving environment, because we truly believe to improve road safety, we need to understand not just the driver’s action but also the context in which they are driving. For example, if the smartphone’s accelerometer detects sharp braking, the system would automatically check the distance to the vehicle in the front using the rear camera and whether the driver was distracted or fatigued using the front camera. And this holistic approach ensures a more accurate and comprehensive assessment of the driving behavior, enabling a more meaningful feedback.

STETKIEWICZ: So that sounds like a system that’s got several moving parts to it. And I imagine you had some technical challenges you had to deal with there. Can you talk about that?

NAMBI: One of our guiding principles in HAMS was to use commodity, off-the-shelf smartphone devices, right. This should be affordable, in the range of $100 to $200, so that you can just take out regular smartphones and enable this driver and driving monitoring. And that led to handling several technical challenges. For instance, we had to develop efficient computer vision algorithms that could run locally on the device with cheap smartphone processing units while still performing very well at low-light conditions. We wrote multiple papers and developed many of the novel algorithms which we implemented on very low-cost smartphones. And once we had such a monitoring system, right, you can imagine there’s several deployment opportunities, starting from fleet monitoring to even training new drivers, right. However, one application we hadn’t originally envisioned but turned out to be its most impactful use case even today is automated driver’s license testing. As you know, before you get a license, a driver is supposed to pass a test, but what happens in many places, including India, is that licenses are issued with very minimal or no actual testing, leading to unsafe and untrained drivers on the road. At the same time as we were working on HAMS, Indian government were looking at introducing technology to make testing more transparent and also automated. So we worked with the right set of partners, and we demonstrated to the government that HAMS could actually completely automate the entire license testing process. So we first deployed this system in Dehradun RTO (Regional Transport Office)—which is the equivalent of a DMV in the US—in 2019, working very closely with RTO officials to define what should be some of the evaluation criteria, right. Some of these would be very simple like, oh, is it the same candidate who is taking the test who actually registered for the test, right? And whether they are wearing seat belts. Did they scan their mirrors before taking a left turn and how well they performed in tasks like reverse parking and things like that.

STETKIEWICZ: So what’s been the government response to that? Have they embraced it or deployed it in a wider extent?

NAMBI: Yes, yes. So after the deployment in Dehradun in 2019, we actually open sourced the entire HAMS technology and our partners are now working with several state governments and scaled HAMS to several states in India. And as of today, we have around 28 RTOs where HAMS is actually being deployed, and the pass rate of such license test is just 60% as compared to 90-plus percent with manual testing. That’s the extensive rigor the system brings in. And now what excites me is after nearly five years later, we are now taking the next step in this project where we are now evaluating the long-term impact of this intervention on driving behavior and road safety. So we are collaborating with Professor Michael Kremer, who is a Nobel laureate and professor at University of Chicago, and his team to study how this technology has influenced driving patterns and accident rates over time. So this focus on closing the loop and moving beyond just deployment in the field to actually measuring the real impact, right, is something that truly excites me and that makes research at Microsoft is very unique. And that is actually one of the reasons why I joined Microsoft Research as a full-time after my internship, and this unique flexibility to work on real-world problems, develop novel research ideas, and actually collaborate with partners both internally and externally to deploy at scale is something that is very unique here.

STETKIEWICZ: So have you actually received any evidence that the project is working? Is driving getting safer?

NAMBI: Yes, these are very early analysis, and there are very positive insights we are getting from that. Soon we will be releasing a white paper on our study on this long-term impact.

STETKIEWICZ: That’s great. I look forward to that one. So you’ve also done some interesting work involving the Internet of Things, with an emphasis on making it more reliable and practical. So for those in our audience who may not know, the Internet of Things, or IoT, is a network that includes billions of devices and sensors in things like smart thermostats and fitness trackers. So talk a little bit about your work in this area.

NAMBI: Right, so IoT, as you know, is already transforming several industries with billions of sensors being deployed in areas like industrial monitoring, manufacturing, agriculture, smart buildings, and also air pollution monitoring. And if you think about it, these sensors provide critical data that businesses rely for decision making. However, a fundamental challenge is ensuring that the data collected from these sensors is actually reliable. If the data is faulty, it can lead to poor decisions and inefficiencies. And the challenge is that these sensor failures are always not obvious. What I mean by that is when a sensor stops working, it always doesn’t stop sending data, but it often continues to send some data which appear to be normal. And that’s one of the biggest problems, right. So detecting these errors is non-trivial because the faulty sensors can mimic real-world working data, and traditional solutions like deploying redundant sensors or even manually inspecting them are very expensive, labor intensive, and also sometimes infeasible, especially for remote deployments. Our goal in this work was to develop a simple and efficient way to remotely monitor the health of the IoT sensors. So what we did was we hypothesized that most sensor failures occurred due to the electronic malfunctions. It could be either due to short circuits or component degradation or due to environmental factors such as heat, humidity, or pollution. Since these failures originate within the sensor hardware itself, we saw an opportunity to leverage some of the basic electronic principles to create a novel solution. The core idea was to develop a way to automatically generate a fingerprint for each sensor. And by fingerprint, I mean the unique electrical characteristic exhibited by a properly working sensor. We built a system that could devise these fingerprints for different types of sensors, allowing us to detect failures purely based on the sensors internal characteristics, that is the fingerprint, and even without looking at the data it produces. Essentially what it means now is that we were able to tag each sensor data with a reliability score, ensuring verifiability.

STETKIEWICZ: So how does that technology get deployed in the real world? Is there an application where it’s being put to work today?

NAMBI: Yes, this technology, we worked together with Azure IoT and open-sourced it where there were several opportunities and several companies took the solution into their systems, including air pollution monitoring, smart buildings, industrial monitoring. The one which I would like to talk about today is about air pollution monitoring. As you know, air pollution is a major challenge in many parts of the world, especially in India. And traditionally, air quality monitoring relies on these expensive fixed sensors, which provide limited coverage. On the other hand, there is a rich body of work on low-cost sensors, which can offer wider deployment. Like, you can put these sensors on a bus or a vehicle and have it move around the entire city, where you can get much more fine-grained, accurate picture on the ground. But these are often unreliable because these are low-cost sensors and have reliability issues. So we collaborated with several startups who were developing these low-cost air pollution sensors who were finding it very challenging to gain trust because one of the main concerns was the accuracy of the data from low-cost sensors. So our solution seamlessly integrated with these sensors, which enabled verification of the data quality coming out from these low-cost air pollution sensors. So this bridged the trust gap, allowing government agencies to initiate large-scale pilots using low-cost sensors for fine-grain air-quality monitoring.

STETKIEWICZ: So as we’re talking about evolving technology, large language models, or LLMs, are also enabling big changes, and they’re not theoretical. They’re happening today. And you’ve been working on LLMs and their applicability to real-world problems. Can you talk about your work there and some of the latest releases?

NAMBI: So when ChatGPT was first released, I, like many people, was very skeptical. However, I was also curious both of how it worked and, more importantly, whether it could accelerate solutions to real-world problems. That led to the exploration of LLMs in education, where we fundamentally asked this question, can AI help improve educational outcomes? And this was one of the key questions which led to the development of Shiksha copilot, which is a genAI-powered assistant designed to support teachers in their daily work, starting from helping them to create personalized learning experience, design assignments, generate hands-on activities, and even more. Teachers today universally face several challenges, from time management to lesson planning. And our goal with Shiksha was to empower them to significantly reduce the time spent on this task. For instance, lesson planning, which traditionally took about 60 minutes, can now be completed in just five minutes using the Shiksha copilot. And what makes Shiksha unique is that it’s completely grounded in the local curriculum and the learning objectives, ensuring that the AI-generated content aligns very well with the pedagogical best practices. The system actually supports multilingual interactions, multimodal capabilities, and also integration with external knowledge base, making it very highly adaptable for different curriculums. Initially, many teachers were skeptical. Some feared this would limit their creativity. However, as they began starting to use Shiksha, they realized that it didn’t replace their expertise, but rather amplified it, enabling them to do work faster and more efficiently.

STETKIEWICZ: So, Akshay, the last time you and I talked about Shiksha copilot, it was very much in the pilot phase and the teachers were just getting their hands on it. So it sounds like, though, you’ve gotten some pretty good feedback from them since then.

NAMBI: Yes, so when we were discussing, we were doing this six-month pilot with 50-plus teachers where we gathered overwhelming positive feedback on how technologies are helping teachers to reduce time in their lesson planning. And in fact, they were using the system so much that they really enjoyed working with Shiksha copilot where they were able to do more things with much less time, right. And with a lot of feedback from teachers, we have improved Shiksha copilot over the past few months. And starting this academic year, we have already deployed Shiksha to 1,000-plus teachers in Karnataka. This is with close collaboration with our partners in … with the Sikshana Foundation and also with the government of Karnataka. And the response has been already incredibly encouraging. And looking ahead, we are actually focusing on again, closing this loop, right, and measuring the impact on the ground, where we are doing a lot of studies with the teachers to understand not just improving efficiency of the teachers but also measuring how AI-generated content enriched by teachers is actually enhancing student learning objectives. So that’s the study we are conducting, which hopefully will close this loop and understand our original question that, can AI actually help improve educational outcomes?

STETKIEWICZ: And is the deployment primarily in rural areas, or does it include urban centers, or what’s the target?

NAMBI: So the current deployment with 1,000 teachers is a combination of both rural and urban public schools. These are covering both English medium and Kannada medium teaching schools with grades from Class 5 to Class 10.

STETKIEWICZ: Great. So Shiksha was focused on helping teachers and making their jobs easier, but I understand you’re also working on some opportunities to use AI to help students succeed. Can you talk about that?

NAMBI: So as you know, LLMs are still evolving and inherently they are fragile, and deploying them in real-world settings, especially in education, presents a lot of challenges. With Shiksha, if you think about it, teachers remain in control throughout the interaction, making the final decision on whether to use the AI-generated content in the classroom or not. However, when it comes to AI tutors for students, the stakes are slightly higher, where we need to ensure the AI doesn’t produce incorrect answers, misrepresent concepts, or even mislead explanations. Currently, we are developing solutions to enhance accuracy and also the reasoning capabilities of these foundational models, particularly solving math problems. This represents a major step towards building AI systems that’s much more holistic personal tutors, which help student understanding and create more engaging, effective learning experience.

STETKIEWICZ: So you’ve talked about working in computer vision and IoT and LLMs. What do those areas have in common? Is there some thread that weaves through the work that you’re doing?

NAMBI: That’s a great question. As a systems researcher, I’m quite interested in this end-to-end systems development, which means that my focus is not just about improving a particular algorithm but also thinking about the end-to-end system, which means that I, kind of, think about computer vision, IoT, and even LLMs as tools, where we would want to improve them for a particular application. It could be agriculture, education, or road safety. And then how do you think this holistically to come up with the best efficient system that can be deployed at population scale, right. I think that’s the connecting story here, that how do you have this systemic thinking which kind of takes the existing tools, improves them, makes it more efficient, and takes it out from the lab to real world.

STETKIEWICZ: So you’re working on some very powerful technology that is creating tangible benefits for society, which is your goal. At the same time, we’re still in the very early stages of the development of AI and machine learning. Have you ever thought about unintended consequences? Are there some things that could go wrong, even if we get the technology right? And does that kind of thinking ever influence the development process?

NAMBI: Absolutely. Unintended consequences are something I think about deeply. Even the most well-designed technology can have these ripple effects that we may not fully anticipate, especially when we are deploying it at population scale. For me, being proactive is one of the key important aspects. This means not only designing the technology at the lab but actually also carefully deploying them in real world, measuring its impact, and working with the stakeholders to minimize the harm. In most of my work, I try to work very closely with the partner team on the ground to monitor, analyze, how the technology is being used and what are some of the risks and how can we eliminate that. At the same time, I also remain very optimistic. It’s also about responsibility. If we are able to embed societal values, ethics, into the design of the system and involve diverse perspectives, especially from people on the ground, we can remain vigilant as the technology evolves and we can create systems that can truly deliver immense societal benefits while addressing many of the potential risks.

STETKIEWICZ: So we’ve heard a lot of great examples today about building technology to solve real-world problems and your motivation to keep doing that. So as you look ahead, where do you see your research going next? How will people be better off because of the technology you develop and the advances that they support?

NAMBI: Yeah, I’m deeply interested in advancing AI systems that can truly assist anyone in their daily tasks, whether it’s providing personalized guidance to a farmer in a rural village, helping a student get instant 24 by 7 support for their learning doubts, or even empowering professionals to work more efficiently. And to achieve this, my research is focusing on tackling some of the fundamental challenges in AI with respect to reasoning and reliability and also making sure that AI is more context aware and responsive to evolving user needs. And looking ahead, I envision AI as not just an assistant but also as an intelligent and equitable copilot seamlessly integrated into our everyday life, empowering individuals across various domains.

STETKIEWICZ: Great. Well, Akshay, thank you for joining us on Ideas. It’s been a pleasure.

[MUSIC]

NAMBI: Yeah, I really enjoyed talking to you, Chris. Thank you.

STETKIEWICZ: Till next time.

[MUSIC FADES]

SHAN LU: Thank you.

HUIZINGA: So I like to start these episodes with what I’ve been calling the “research origin story,” and you have a unique, almost counterintuitive, story about what got you started in the field of systems research. Would you share that story with our listeners?

LU: Sure, sure. Yeah. I grew up fascinating that I will become mathematician. I think I was good at math, and at some point, actually, until, I think, I entered college, I was still, you know, thinking about, should I do math? Should I do computer science? For whatever reason, I think someone told me, you know, doing computer science will help you; it’s easier to get a job. And I reluctantly pick up computer science major. And then there was a few years in my college, I had a really difficult time for programming. And I also remember that there was, like, I spent a lot of time learning one language—we started with Pascal—and I feel like I finally know what to do and then there’s yet another language, C, and another class, Java. And I remember, like, the teacher will ask us to do a programming project, and there are times I don’t even, I just don’t know how to get started. And I remember, at that time, in my class, I think there were … we only had like four girls taking this class that requires programming in Java, and none of us have learned Java before. And when we ask our classmates, when we ask the boys, they just naturally know what to do. It was really, really humiliating. Embarrassing. I had the feeling that, I felt like I’m just not born to be a programmer. And then, I came to graduate school. I was thinking about, you know, what kind of research direction I should do. And I was thinking that, oh, maybe I should do theory research, like, you know, complexity theory or something. You know, after a lot of back and forth, I met my eventual adviser. She was a great, great mentor to me, and she told me that, hey, Shan, you know, my group is doing research about finding bugs in software. And she said her group is doing system research, and she said a lot of current team members are all great programmers, and as a result, they are not really well-motivated [LAUGHS] by finding bugs in software!

HUIZINGA: Interesting.

LU: And then she said, you are really motivated, right, by, you know, getting help to developers, to help developers finding bugs in their software, so maybe that’s the research project for you. So that’s how I got started.

HUIZINGA: Well, let’s go a little bit further on this mentor and mentors in general. As Dr. Seuss might say, every “what” has a “who.” So by that I mean an inspirational person or people behind every successful researcher’s career. And most often, they’re kind of big names and meaningful relationships, but you have another unique story on who has influenced you in your career, so why don’t you tell us about the spectrum of people who’ve been influential in your life and your career?

LU: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, I think I mentioned my adviser, and she’s just so supportive. And I remember, when I started doing research, I just felt like I seemed to be so far behind everyone else. You know, I felt like, how come everybody else knows how to ask, you know, insightful questions? And they, like, they know how to program really fast, bug free. And my adviser really encouraged me, saying, you know, there are background knowledge that you can pick up; you just need to be patient. But then there are also, like, you know how to do research, you know how to think about things, problem solving. And she encouraged me saying, Shan, you’re good at that!

HUIZINGA: Interesting!

LU: Well, I don’t know how she found out, and anyway, so she was super, super helpful.

HUIZINGA: OK, so go a little further on this because I know you have others that have influence you, as well.

LU: Yes. Yes, yes. And I think those, to be honest, I’m a very emotional, sensitive person. I would just, you know, move the timeline to be, kind of, more recent. So I joined Microsoft Research as a manager, and there’s something called Connect that, you know, people write down twice every year talking about what it is they’ve been doing. So I was just checking, you know, my members in my team to see what they have been doing over the years just to just get myself familiar with them. And I remember I read several of them. I felt like I almost have tears in my eyes! Like, I realized, wow, like … And just to give example, for Chris, Chris Hawblitzel, I read his Connect, and I saw that he’s working on something called program verification. It’s a very, very difficult problem, and [as an] outsider, you know, I’ve read many of his papers, but when I read, you know, his own writing, and I realized, wow, you know, it’s almost two decades, right. Like, he just keeps doing these very difficult things. And I read his words about, you know, how his old approach has problems, how he’s thinking about how to address that problem. Oh, I have an idea, right. And then spend multiple years to implement that idea and get improvement; find a new problem and then just find new solutions. And I really feel like, wow, I’m really, really, like, I feel like this is, kind of, like a, you know, there’s, how to say, a hero-ish story behind this, you know, this kind of goal, and you’re willing to spend many years to keep tackling this challenging problem. And I just feel like, wow, I’m so honored, you know, to be in the same group with a group of fighters, you know, determined to tackle difficult research problems.

HUIZINGA: Yeah. And I think when you talk about it, it’s like this is a person that was working for you, a direct report. [LAUGHTER] And often, we think about our heroes as being the ones who mentored us, who taught us, who managed us, but yours is kind of 360! It’s like …

LU: True!

HUIZINGA: … your heroes [are] above, beside and below.

LU: Right. And I would just say that I have many other, you know, direct reports in my group, and I have, you know, for example, say a couple other … my colleagues, my direct reports, Dan Ports and Jacob Nelson. And again, this is something like their story really inspired me. Like, they were, again, spent five or six years on something, and it looks like, oh, it’s close to the success of tech transfer, and then something out of their control happened. It happened because Intel decided to stop manufacturing a chip that their research relied on. And it’s, kind of, like the end of the world to them, …

HUIZINGA: Yeah.

LU: … and then they did not give up. And then, you know, like, one year later, they found a solution, you know, together with their product team collaborators.

HUIZINGA: Wow.

LU: And I still feel like, wow, you know, I feel so … I feel like I’m inspired every day! Like, I’m so happy to be working together with, you know, all these great people, great researchers in my team.

HUIZINGA: Yeah. Wow. So much of your work centers on this idea of concurrent systems and I want you to talk about some specific examples of this work next, but I think it warrants a little explication upfront for those people in the audience who don’t spend all their time working on concurrent systems themselves. So give us a short “101” on concurrent systems and explain why the work you do matters to both the people who make it and the people who use it.

LU: Sure. Yeah. So I think a lot of people may not realize … so actually, the software we’re using every day, almost every software we use these days are concurrent. So the meaning of concurrent is that you have multiple threads of execution going on at the same time, in parallel. And then, when we go to a web browser, right, so it’s not just one rendering that is going on. There are actually multiple concurrent renderings that is going on. So the problem of writing … for software developers to develop this type of concurrent system, a challenge is the timing. So because you have multiple concurrent things going on, it’s very difficult to manage and reason about, you know, what may happen first, what may happen second. And also, it’s, like, there’s an inherent non-determinism in it. What happened first this time may happen second next time. So as a result, a lot of bugs are introduced by this. And it was a very challenging problem because I would say about 20 years ago, there was a shift. Like, in the older days, actually most of our software is written in a sequential way instead of a concurrent way. So, you know, a lot of developers also have a difficult time to shift their mindset from the sequential way of reasoning to this concurrent way of reasoning.

HUIZINGA: Right. Well, and I think, from a user’s perspective, all you experience is what I like to call the spinning beachball of doom. It’s like I’ve asked something, and it doesn’t want to give, so [LAUGHS] … And this is, like, behind the scenes from a reasoning perspective of, how do we keep that from happening to our users? How do we identify the bugs? Which we’ll get to in a second. Umm. Thanks for that. Your research now revolves around what I would call the big idea of learning from mistakes. And in fact, it all seems to have started with a paper that you published way back in 2008 called “Learning from Mistakes: A Comprehensive Study on Real World Concurrency Bug Characteristics,” and you say this strongly influenced your research style and approach. And by the way, I’ll note that this paper received the Most Influential Paper Award in 2022 from ASPLOS, which is the Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems. Huge mouthful. And it also has more than a thousand citations, so I dare say it’s influenced other researchers’ approach to research, as well. Talk about the big idea behind this paper and exactly how it informed your research style and approach today.

LU: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I think this, like, again, went back to the days that I, you know, my PhD days, I started working with my adviser, you know, YY (Yuanyuan Zhou). So at that time, there had been a lot of people working on bug finding, but then now when I think about it, people just magically say, hey, I want to look at this type of bug. Just magically, oh, I want to look at that type of bug. And then, my adviser at that time suggested to me, saying, hey, maybe, you know, actually take a look, right. At that time, as I mentioned, software was kind of shifting from sequential software to concurrent software, and my adviser was saying, hey, just take a look at those real systems bug databases, and see what type of concurrency bugs are actually there. You know, instead of just randomly saying, oh, I want to work on this type of bug.

HUIZINGA: Oh, yeah.

LU: And then also, of course, it’s not just look at it. It’s not just like you read a novel or something, right. [LAUGHTER] And again, my adviser said, hey, Shan, right, you have this, you have a connection, natural connection, you know, with bugs and the developers who commit …

HUIZINGA: Who make them …

LU: Who make them! [LAUGHTER] So she said, you know, try to think about the patterns behind them, right. Try to think about whether you can generalize some …

HUIZINGA: Interesting …

LU: … characteristics, and use that to guide people’s research in this domain. And at that time, we were actually thinking we don’t know whether, you know, we can actually write a paper about it because traditionally you publish a paper, just say, oh, I have a new tool, right, which can do this and that. At that time in system conferences, people rarely have, you know, just say, here’s a study, right. But we studied that, and indeed, you know, I had this thought that, hey, why I make a lot of mistakes. And when I study a lot of bugs, the more and more, I feel, you know, there’s a reason behind it, right. It’s like I’m not the only dumb person in the world, right? [LAUGHTER] There’s a reason that, you know, there’s some part of this language is difficult to use, right, and there’s a certain type of concurrent reasoning, it’s just not natural to many people, right. So because of that, there are patterns behind these bugs. And so at that time, we were surprised that the paper was actually accepted. Because I’m just happy with the learning I get. But after this paper was accepted, in the next, I would say, many years, there are more and more people realize, hey, before we actually, you know, do bug-finding things, let’s first do a study, right, to understand, and then this paper was … yeah … I was very happy that it was cited many, many times.

HUIZINGA: Yeah. And then gets the most influential paper many years later.

LU: Many years later. Yes.

HUIZINGA: Yeah, I feel like there’s a lot of things going through my head right now, one of which is what AI is, is a pattern detector, and you were doing that before AI even came on the scene. Which goes to show you that humans are pretty good at pattern detection also. We might not do as fast as …

LU: True.

HUIZINGA: … as an AI but … so this idea of learning from mistakes is a broad theme. Another theme that I see coming through your papers and your work is persistence. [LAUGHTER] And you mentioned this about your team, right. I was like, these people are people who don’t give up. So we covered this idea in an Abstracts podcast recently talking about a paper which really brings this to light: “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again.” That’s the name of the paper. And we didn’t have time to discuss it in depth at the time because the Abstracts show is so quick. But we do now. So I’d like you to expand a little bit on this big idea of persistence and how large language models are not only changing the way programming and verification happens but also providing insights into detecting retry bugs.

LU: Yes. So I guess maybe I will, since you mentioned this persistence, you know, after that “Learning from Mistakes” paper—so that was in 2008—and in the next 10 years, a little bit more than 10 years, in terms of persistence, right, so we have continued, me and my students, my collaborators, we have continued working on, you know, finding concurrency bugs …

HUIZINGA: Yeah.

LU: … which is related to, kind of related to, why I’m here at Microsoft Research. And we keep doing it, doing it, and then I feel like a high point was that I had a collaboration with my now colleagues here, Madan Musuvathi and Suman Nath. So we built a tool to detect concurrency bugs, and after more than 15 years of effort on this, we were able to find more than 1,000 concurrency bugs. It was built in a tool called Torch that was deployed in the company, and it won the Best Paper Award at the top system conference, SOSP, and it was actually a bittersweet moment. This paper seems to, you know, put an end …

HUIZINGA: Oh, interesting!

LU: … to our research. And also some of the findings from that paper is that we used to do very sophisticated program analysis to reason about the timing. And in that paper, we realized actually, sometimes, if you’re a little bit fuzzy, don’t aim to do perfect analysis, the resulting tool is actually more effective. So after that paper, Madan, Suman, and me, we kind of, you know, shifted our focus to looking at other types of bugs. And at the same time, the three of us realized the traditional, very precise program analysis may not be needed for some of the bug finding. So then, for this paper, this retry bugs, after we shifted our focus away from concurrency bugs, we realized, oh, there are many other types of important bugs, such as, in this case, like retry, right, when your software goes wrong, right. Another thing we learned is that it looks like you can never eliminate all bugs, so something will go wrong, [LAUGHTER] and then so that’s why you need something like retry, right. So like if something goes wrong, at least you won’t give up immediately.

HUIZINGA: Right.

LU: The software will retry. And another thing that started from this earlier effort is we started using large language models because we realized, yeah, you know, traditional program analysis sometimes can give you a very strong guarantee, but in some other cases, like in this retry case, some kind of fuzzy analysis, you know, not so precise, offered by large language models is sometimes even more beneficial. Yeah. So that’s kind of, you know, the story behind this paper.

HUIZINGA: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Shan, we’re hearing a lot about how large language models are writing code nowadays. In fact, NVIDIA’s CEO says, mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be coders because AI’s going to do that. I don’t know if he’s right, but one of the projects you’re most excited about right now is called Verus, and your colleague Jay Lorch recently said that he sees a lot of synergy between AI and verification, where each discipline brings something to the other, and Rafah Hosn has referred to this as “co-innovation” or “bidirectional enrichment.” I don’t know if that’s exactly what is going on here, but it seems like it is. Tell us more about this project, Verus, and how AI and software verification are helping each other out.

LU: Yes, yes, yes, yes. I’m very excited about this project now! So first of all, starting from Verus. So Verus is a tool that helps you verify the correctness of Rust code. So this is a … it’s a relatively new tool, but it’s creating a lot of, you know, excitement in the research community, and it’s created by my colleague Chris Hawblitzel and his collaborators outside Microsoft Research.

HUIZINGA: Interesting.

LU: And as I mentioned, right, this is a part that, you know, really inspired me. So traditionally to verify, right, your program is correct, it requires a lot of expertise. You actually have to write your proof typically in a special language. And, you know, so a lot of people, including me, right, who are so eager to get rid of bugs in my software, but there are people told me, saying just to learn that language—so they were referring to a language called Coq—just to learn that language, they said it takes one or two years. And then once you learn that language, right, then you have to learn about how to write proofs in that special language. So people, particularly in the bug-finding community, people know that, oh, in theory, you can verify it, but in reality, people don’t do that. OK, so now going back to this Verus tool, why it’s exciting … so it actually allows people to write proofs in Rust. So Rust is an increasingly popular language. And there are more and more people picking up Rust. It’s the first time I heard about, oh, you can, you know, write proofs in a popular language. And also, another thing is in the past, you cannot verify an implementation directly. You can only verify something written in a special language. And the proof is proving something that is in a special language. And then finally, that special language is maybe then transformed into an implementation. So it’s just, there’s just too many special languages there.

HUIZINGA: A lot of layers.

LU: A lot of layers. So now this Verus tool allows you to write a proof in Rust to prove an implementation that is in Rust. So it’s very direct. I just feel like I’m just not good at learning a new language.

HUIZINGA: Interesting.

LU: So when I came here, you know, and learned about this Verus tool, you know, by Chris and his collaborators, I feel like, oh, looks like maybe I can give it a try. And surprisingly, I realized, oh, wow! I can actually write proofs using this Verus tool.

HUIZINGA: Right.

LU: And then, of course, you know, I was told, if you really want to, right, write proofs for large systems, it still takes a lot of effort. And then this idea came to me that, hey, maybe, you know, these days, like, large language models can write code, then why not let large language models write proofs, right? And of course, you know, other people actually had this idea, as well, but there’s a doubt that, you know, can large language models really write proofs, right? And also, people have this feeling that, you know, large language models seem not very disciplined, you know, by nature. But, you know, that’s what intrigued me, right. And also, I used to be a doubter for, say, GitHub Copilot. USED to! Because I feel like, yes, it can generate a lot of code, but who knows [LAUGHS] …

HUIZINGA: Whether it’s right …

LU: What, what is … whether it’s right?

HUIZINGA: Yeah.

LU: Right, so I feel like, wow, you know, this could be a game-changer, right? Like, if AI can write not only code but also proofs. Yeah, so that’s what I have been doing. I’ve been working on this for one year, and I gradually get more collaborators both, you know, people in Microsoft Research Asia, and, you know, expertise here, like Chris, and Jay Lorch. They all help me a lot. So we actually have made a lot of progress.

HUIZINGA: Yeah.

LU: Like, now it’s, like, we’ve tried, like, for example, for some small programs, benchmarks, and we see that actually large language models can correctly prove the majority of the benchmarks that we throw to it. Yeah. It’s very, very exciting.

HUIZINGA: Well, and so … and we’re going to talk a little bit more about some of those doubts and some of those interesting concerns in a bit. I do want you to address what I think Jay was getting at, which is that somehow the two help each other. The verification improves the AI. The AI improves the verification.

LU: Yes, yes.

HUIZINGA: How?

LU: Yes. My feeling is that a lot of people, if they’re concerned with using AI, it’s because they feel like there’s no guarantee for the content generated by AI, right. And then we also all heard about, you know, hallucination. And I tried myself. Like, I remember, at some point, if I ask AI, say, you know, which is bigger: is it three times three or eight? And the AI will tell me eight is bigger. And … [LAUGHTER]

HUIZINGA: Like, what?

LU: So I feel like verification can really help AI …

HUIZINGA: Get better …

LU: … because now you can give, you know, kind of, add in mathematical rigors into whatever that is generated by AI, right. And I say it would help AI. It will also help people who use AI, right, so that they know what can be trusted, right.

HUIZINGA: Right.

LU: What is guaranteed by this content generated by AI?

HUIZINGA: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

LU: Yeah, and now of course AI can help verification because, you know, verification, you know, it’s hard. There is a lot of mathematical reasoning behind it. [LAUGHS] And so now with AI, it will enable verification to be picked up by more and more developers so that we can get higher-quality software.

HUIZINGA: Yeah.

LU: Yeah.

HUIZINGA: Yeah. And we’ll get to that, too, about what I would call the democratization of things. But before that, I want to, again, say an observation that I had based on your work and my conversations with you is that you’ve basically dedicated your career to hunting bugs.

LU: Yes.

HUIZINGA: And maybe that’s partly due to a personal story about how a tiny mistake became a bug that haunted you for years. Tell us the story.

LU: Yes.

HUIZINGA: And explain why and how it launched a lifelong quest to understand, detect, and expose bugs of all kinds.

LU: Yes. So before I came here, I already had multiple times, you know, interacting with Microsoft Research. So I was a summer intern at Microsoft Research Redmond almost 20 years ago.

HUIZINGA: Oh, wow!

LU: I think it was in the summer of 2005. And I remember I came here, you know, full of ambition. And I thought, OK, you know, I will implement some smart algorithm. I will deliver some useful tools. So at that time, I had just finished two years of my PhD, so I, kind of, just started my research on bug finding and so on. And I remember I came here, and I was told that I need to program in C#. And, you know, I just naturally have a fear of learning a new language. But anyway, I remember, I thought, oh, the task I was assigned was very straightforward. And I think I went ahead of myself. I was thinking, oh, I want to quickly finish this, and I want to do something more novel, you know, that can be more creative. But then this simple task I was assigned, I ended up spending the whole summer on it. So the tool that I wrote was supposed to process very huge logs. And then the problem is my software is, like, you run it initially … So, like, I can only run it for 10 minutes because my software used so much memory and it will crash. And then, I spent a lot of time … I was thinking, oh, my software is just using too much memory. Let me optimize it, right. And then so, I, you know, I try to make sure to use memory in a very efficient way, but then as a result, instead of crashing every 10 minutes, it will just crash after one hour. And I know there’s a bug at that time. So there’s a type of bug called memory leak. I know there’s a bug in my code, and I spent a lot of time and there was an engineer helping me checking my code. We spent a lot of time. We were just not able to find that bug. And at the end, we … the solution is I was just sitting in front of my computer waiting for my program to crash and restart. [LAUGHTER] And at that time, because there was very little remote working option, so in order to finish processing all those logs, it’s like, you know, after dinner, I …

HUIZINGA: You have to stay all night!

LU: I have to stay all night! And all my intern friends, they were saying, oh, Shan, you work really hard! And I’m just feeling like, you know what I’m doing is just sitting in front of my computer waiting [LAUGHTER] for my program to crash so that I can restart it! And near the end of my internship, I finally find the bug. It turns out that I missed a pair of brackets in one line of code.

HUIZINGA: That’s it.

LU: That’s it.

HUIZINGA: Oh, my goodness.

LU: And it turns out, because I was used to C, and in C, when you want to free, which means deallocate, an array, you just say “free array.” And if I remember correctly, in this language, C#, you have to say, “free this array name” and you put a bracket behind it. Otherwise, it will only free the first element. And I … it was a nightmare. And I also felt like, the most frustrating thing is, if it’s a clever bug, right … [LAUGHS]

HUIZINGA: Sure.

LU: … then you feel like at least I’m defeated by something complicated …

HUIZINGA: Smart.

LU: Something smart. And then it’s like, you know, also all this ambition I had about, you know, doing creative work, right, with all these smart researchers in MSR (Microsoft Research), I feel like I ended up achieving very little in my summer internship.

HUIZINGA: But maybe the humility of making a stupid mistake is the kind of thing that somebody who’s good at hunting bugs … It’s like missing an error in the headline of an article, because the print is so big [LAUGHTER] that you’re looking for the little things in the … I know that’s a journalist’s problem. Actually, I actually love that story. And it, kind of, presents a big picture of you, Shan, as a person who has a realistic, self-awareness of … and humility, which I think is rare at times in the software world. So thanks for sharing that. So moving on. When we talked before, you mentioned the large variety of programming languages and how that can be a barrier to entry or at least a big hurdle to overcome in software programming and verification. But you also talked about, as we just mentioned, how LLMs have been a democratizing force …

LU: Yes.

HUIZINGA: … in this field. So going back to when you first started …

LU: Yes.

HUIZINGA: … and what you see now with the advent of tools like GitHub Copilot, …

LU: Yes.

HUIZINGA: … what … what’s changed?

LU: Oh, so much has changed. Well, I don’t even know how to start. Like, I used to be really scared about programming. You know, when I tell this story, a lot of people say, no, I don’t believe you. And I feel like it’s a trauma, you know.

HUIZINGA: Sure.

LU: I almost feel like it’s like, you know, the college-day me, right, who was scared of starting any programming project. Somehow, I felt humiliated when asking those very, I feel like, stupid questions to my classmates. It almost changed my personality! It’s like … for a long time, whenever someone introduced me to a new software tool, my first reaction is, uh, I probably will not be able to successfully even install it. Like whenever, you know, there’s a new language, my first reaction is, uh, no, I’m not good at it. And then, like, for example, this GitHub Copilot thing, actually, I did not try it until I joined Microsoft. And then I, actually, I haven’t programmed for a long time. And then I started collaborating with people in Microsoft Research Asia, and he writes programs in Python, right. And I have never written a single line of Python code before. And also, this Verus tool. It helps you to verify code in Rust, but I have never learned Rust before. So I thought, OK, maybe let me just try GitHub Copilot. And wow! You know, it’s like I realized, wow! Like … [LAUGHS]

HUIZINGA: I can do this!

LU: I can do this! And, of course, sometimes I feel like my colleagues may sometimes be surprised because on one hand it looks like I’m able to just finish, you know, write a Rust function. But on some other days, I ask very basic questions, [LAUGHTER] and I have those questions because, you know, the GitHub Copilot just helps me finish! [LAUGHS]

HUIZINGA: Right.

LU: You know, I’m just starting something to start it, and then it just helps me finish. And I wish, when I started my college, if at that time there was GitHub Copilot, I feel like, you know, my mindset towards programming and towards computer science might be different. So it does make me feel very positive, you know, about, you know, what future we have, you know, with AI, with computer science.

HUIZINGA: OK, usually, I ask researchers at this time, what could possibly go wrong if you got everything right? And I was thinking about this question in a different way until just this minute. I want to ask you … what do you think that it means to have a tool that can do things for you that you don’t have to struggle with? And maybe, is there anything good about the struggle? Because you’re framing it as it sapped your confidence.

LU: [LAUGHS] Yes.

HUIZINGA: And at the same time, I see a woman who emerged stronger because of this struggle with an amazing career, a huge list of publications, influential papers, citations, leadership role. [LAUGHTER] So in light of that …

LU: Right.

HUIZINGA: … what do you see as the tension between struggling to learn a new language versus having this tool that can just do it that makes you look amazing? And maybe the truth of it is you don’t know!

LU: Yeah. That’s a very good point. I guess you need some kind of balance. And on one hand, yes, I feel like, again, right, this goes back to like my internship. I left with the frustration that I felt like I have so much creativity to contribute, and yet I could not because of this language barrier. You know, I feel positive in the sense that just from GitHub Copilot, right, how it has enabled me to just bravely try something new. I feel like this goes beyond just computer science, right. I can imagine it’ll help people to truly unleash their creativity, not being bothered by some challenges in learning the tool. But on the other hand, you made a very good point. My adviser told me she feels like, you know, I write code slowly, but I tend to make fewer mistakes. And the difficulty of learning, right, and all these nightmares I had definitely made me more … more cautious? I pay more respect to the task that is given to me, so there is definitely the other side of AI, right, which is, you feel like everything is easy and maybe you do not have the experience of those bugs, right, that a software can bring to you and you have overreliance, right, on this tool.

HUIZINGA: Yeah!

LU: So hopefully, you know, some of the things we we’re doing now, right, like for example, say verification, right, like bringing this mathematical rigor to AI, hopefully that can help.

HUIZINGA: Yeah. You know, even as you unpack the nuances there, it strikes me that both are good. Both having to struggle and learning languages and understanding …

LU: Yeah.

HUIZINGA: … the core of it and the idea that in natural language, you could just say, here’s what I want to happen, and the AI does the code, the verification, etc. That said, do we trust it? And this was where I was going with the first “what could possibly go wrong?” question. How do we know that it is really as clever as it appears to be? [LAUGHS]

LU: Yeah, I think I would just use the research problem we are working on now, right. Like, I think on one hand, I can use AI to generate a proof, right, to prove the code generated by AI is correct. But having said that, even if we’re wildly successful, you know, in this thing, human beings’ expertise is still needed because just take this as an example. What do you mean by “correct,” right?

HUIZINGA: Sure.

LU: And so someone first has to define what correctness means. And then so far, the experience shows that you can’t just define it using natural language because our natural language is inherently imprecise.

HUIZINGA: Sure.

LU: So you still need to translate it to a formal specification in a programming language. It could be in a popular language like in Rust, right, which is what Verus is aiming at. And then we are, like, for example, some of the research we do is showing that, yes, you know, I can also use AI to do this translation from natural language to specification. But again, then, who to verify that, right? So at the end of the day, I think we still do need to have humans in the loop. But what we can do is to lower the burden and make the interface not so complicated, right. So that it’ll be easy for human beings to check what AI has been doing.

HUIZINGA: Yeah. You know, everything we’re talking about just reinforces this idea that we’re living in a time where the advances in computer science that seemed unrealistic or impossible, unattainable even a few years ago are now so common that we take it for granted. And they don’t even seem outrageous, but they are. So I’m interested to know what, if anything, you would classify now as “blue sky” research in your field. Maybe something in systems research today that looks like a moonshot. You’ve actually anchored this in the fact that you, kind of, have, you know, blinders on for the work you’re doing—head down in the in the work you’re doing—but even as you peek up from the work that might be outrageous, is there anything else? I just like to get this out there that, you know, what’s going on 10 years down the line?

LU: You know, sometimes I feel like I’m just now so much into my own work, but, you know, occasionally, like, say, when I had a chat with my daughter and I explained to her, you know, oh, I’m working on, you know, not only having AI to generate code but also having AI to prove, right, the code is correct. And she would feel, wow, that sounds amazing! [LAUGHS] So I don’t know whether that is, you know, a moonshot thing, but that’s a thing that I’m super excited about …

HUIZINGA: Yeah.

LU: … about the potential. And then there also have, you know, my colleagues, we spend a lot of time building systems, and it’s not just about correctness, right. Like, the verification thing I’m doing now is related to automatically verify it’s correct. But also, you need to do a lot of performance tuning, right. Just so that your system can react fast, right. It can have good utilization of computer resources. And my colleagues are also working on using AI, right, to automatically do performance tuning. And I know what they are doing, so I don’t particularly feel that’s a moonshot, but I guess …

HUIZINGA: I feel like, because you are so immersed, [LAUGHTER] that you just don’t see how much we think …

LU: Yeah!

HUIZINGA: … it’s amazing. Well, I’m just delighted to talk to you today, Shan. As we close … and you’ve sort of just done a little vision casting, but let’s take your daughter, my daughter, [LAUGHTER] all of our daughters …

LU: Yes!

HUIZINGA: How does what we believe about the future in terms of these things that we could accomplish influence the work we do today as sort of a vision casting for the next “Shan Lu” who’s struggling in undergrad/grad school?

LU: Yes, yes, yes. Oh, thank you for asking that question. Yeah, I have to say, you know, I think we’re in a very interesting time, right, with all this AI thing.

HUIZINGA: Isn’t that a curse in China? “May you live in interesting times!”

LU: And I think there were times, actually, you know, before I myself fully embraced AI, I was … indeed I had my daughter in mind. I was worried when she grows up, what would happen? There will be no job for her because everything will be done by AI!

HUIZINGA: Oh, interesting.

LU: But then now, now that I have, you know, kind of fully embraced AI myself, actually, I see this more and more positive. Like you said, I remember, you know, those older days myself, right. That is really, like, I have this struggle that I feel like I can do better. I feel like I have ideas to contribute, but just for whatever reason, right, it took me forever to learn something which I feel like it’s a very mechanical thing, but it just takes me forever to learn, right. And then now actually, I see this hope, right, with AI, you know, a lot of mechanical things that can actually now be done in a much more automated way by AI, right. So then now truly, you know, my daughter, many girls, many kids out there, right, whatever you know, they are good at, their creativity, it’ll be much easier, right, for them to contribute their creativity to whatever discipline they are passionate about. Hopefully, they don’t have to, you know, go through what I went through, right, to finally be able to contribute. But then, of course, you know, at the same time, I do feel this responsibility of me, my colleagues, MSR, we have the capability and also the responsibility, right, of building AI tools in a responsible way so that it will be used in a positive way by the next generation.

HUIZINGA: Yeah. Shan Lu, thank you so much for coming on the show today. [MUSIC] It’s been absolutely delightful, instructive, informative, wonderful.

LU: Thank you. My pleasure.

[MUSIC FADES] 

I’m your guest host, Lindsay Kalter. Today I’m talking to Microsoft Principal Research Manager Tian Xie and Microsoft Principal Researcher Ziheng Lu. Tian is doing fascinating work with MatterGen, an AI tool for generating new materials guided by specific design requirements. Ziheng is one of the visionaries behind MatterSim, which puts those new materials to the test through advanced simulations. Together, they’re redefining what’s possible in materials science. Tian and Ziheng, welcome to the podcast. 

TIAN XIE: Very excited to be here. 

ZIHENG LU: Thanks, Lindsay, very excited. 

KALTER: Before we dig into the specifics of MatterGen and MatterSim, let’s give our audience a sense of how you, as researchers, arrived at this moment. Materials science, especially at the intersection of computer science, is such a cutting-edge and transformative field. What first drew each of you to this space? And what, if any, moment or experience made you realize this was where you wanted to innovate? Tian, do you want to start? 

XIE: So I started working on AI for materials back in 2015, when I started my PhD. So I come as a chemist and materials scientist, but I was, kind of, figuring out what I want to do during my PhD. So there is actually one moment really drove me into the field. That was AlphaGo. AlphaGo was, kind of, coming out in 2016, where it was able to beat the world champion in go in 2016. I was extremely impressed by that because I, kind of, learned how to do go, like, in my childhood. I know how hard it is and how much effort those professional go players have spent, right, in learning about go. So I, kind of, have the feeling that if AI can surpass the world-leading go players, one day, it will too surpass material scientists, right, in their ability to design novel materials. So that’s why I ended up deciding to focus my entire PhD on working on AI for materials. And I have been working on that since then. So it was actually very interesting because it was a very small field back then. And it’s great to see how much progress has been made, right, in the past 10 years and how much bigger a field it is now compared with 10 years ago. 

LU: That’s very interesting, Tian. So, actually, I think I started, like, two years before you as a PhD student. So I, actually, I was trained as a computational materials scientist solely, not really an AI expert. But at that time, the computational materials science did not really work that well. It works but not working that well. So after, like, two or three years, I went back to experiments for, like, another two or three years because, I mean, the experiment is always the gold standard, right. And I worked on this experiments for a few years, and then about three years ago, I went back to this field of computation, especially because of AI. At that time, I think GPT and these large AI models that currently we’re using is not there, but we already have their prior forms like BERT, so we see the very large potential of AI. We know that these large AIs might work. So one idea is really to use AI to learn the entire space of materials and really grasp the physics there, and that really drove me to this field and that’s why I’m here working on this field, yeah. 

KALTER: We’re going to get into what MatterGen and MatterSim mean for materials science—the potential, the challenges, and open questions. But first, give us an overview of what each of these tools are, how they do what they do, and—as this show is about big ideas—the idea driving the work. Ziheng, let’s have you go first. 

LU: So MatterSim is a tool to do in silico characterizations of materials. If you think about working on materials, you have several steps. You first need to synthesize it, and then you need to characterize this. Basically, you need to know what property, what structures, whatever stuff about these materials. So for MatterSim, what we want to do is to really move the characterization process, a lot of these processes, into using computations. So the idea behind MatterSim is to really learn the fundamentals of physics. So we learn the energies and forces and stresses from these atomic structures and the charge densities, all of these things, and then with these, we can really simulate any sort of materials using our computational machines. And then with these, we can really characterize a lot of these materials’ properties using our computer, that is very fast. It’s much faster than we do experiments so that we can accelerate the materials design. So just in a word, basically, you input your material into your computer, a structure into your computer, and MatterSim will try to simulate these materials like what you do in a furnace or with an XRD (x-ray diffraction) and then you get your properties out of that, and a lot of times it’s much faster than you do experiments. 

KALTER: All right, thank you very much. Tian, why don’t you tell us about MatterGen? 

XIE: Yeah, thank you. So, actually, Ziheng, once you start with explaining MatterSim, it makes it much easier for me to explain MatterGen. So MatterGen actually represents a new way to design materials with generative AI. Material discovery is like finding needles in a haystack. You’re looking for a material with a very specific property for a material application. For example, like finding a room-temperature superconductor or finding a solid that can conduct a lithium ion very well inside a battery. So it’s like finding one very specific material from a million, kind of, candidates. So the conventional way of doing material discovery is via screening, where you, kind of, go over millions of candidates to find the one that you’re looking for, where MatterSim is able to significantly accelerate that process by making the simulation much faster. But it’s still very inefficient because you need to go through this million candidates, right. So with MatterGen, you can, kind of, directly generate materials given the prompts of the design requirements for the application. So this means that you can discover materials—discover useful materials— much more efficiently. And it also allows us to explore a much larger space beyond the set of known materials. 

KALTER: Thank you, Tian. Can you tell us a little bit about how MatterGen and MatterSim work together? 

XIE: So you can really think about MatterSim and MatterGen accelerating different parts of materials discovery process. MatterSim is trying to accelerate the simulation of material properties, while MatterGen is trying to accelerate the search of novel material candidates. It means that they can really work together as a flywheel and you can compound the acceleration from both models. They are also both foundation AI models, meaning they can both be used for a broad range of materials design problems. So we’re really looking forward to see how they can, kind of, working together iteratively as a tool to design novel materials for a broad range of applications. 

LU: I think that’s a very good, like, general introduction of how they work together. I think I can provide an example of how they really fit together. If you want a material with a specific, like, bulk modulus or lithium-ion conductivity or thermal conductivity for your CPU chips, so basically what you want to do is start with a pool of material structures, like some structures from the database, and then you compute or you characterize your wanted property from that stack of materials. And then what you do, you’ve got these properties and structure pairs, and you input these pairs into MatterGen. And MatterGen will be able to give you a lot more of these structures that are highly possible to be real. But the number will be very large. For example, for the bulk modulus, I don’t remember the number we generated in our work … was that like thousands, tens of thousands? 

XIE: Thousands, tens of thousands. 

LU: Yeah, that would be a very large number pool even with MatterGen, so then the next step will be, how would you like to screen that? You cannot really just send all of those structures to a lab to synthesize. It’s too much, right. That’s when MatterSim again comes in. So MatterSim comes in and screen all those structures again and see which ones are the most likely to be synthesized and which ones have the closest property you wanted. And then after screening, you probably get five, 10 top candidates and then you send to a lab. Boom, everything goes down. That’s it. 

KALTER: I’m wondering if there’s any prior research or advancements that you drew from in creating MatterGen and MatterSim. Were there any specific breakthroughs that influenced your approaches at all? 

LU: Thanks, Lindsay. I think I’ll take that question first. So interestingly for MatterSim, a very fundamental idea was drew from Chi Chen, who was a previous lab mate of mine and now also works for Microsoft at Microsoft Quantum. He made this fantastic model named M3GNet, which is a prior form of a lot of these large-scale models for atomistic simulations. That model, M3GNet, actually resolves the near ground state prediction problem. I mean, the near ground state problem sounds like a fancy but not realistic word, but what that actually means is that it can simulate materials at near-zero covalent states. So basically at very low temperatures. So at that time, we were thinking since the models are now able to simulate materials at their near ground states, it’s not a very large space. But if you also look at other larger models, like GPT whatever, those models are large enough to simulate entire human language. So it’s possible to really extend the capability from these such prior models to very large space. Because we believe in the capability of AI, then it really drove us to use MatterSim to learn the entire space of materials. I mean, the entire space really means the entire periodic table, all the temperatures and the pressures people can actually grasp. 

XIE: Yeah, I still remember a lot of the amazing works from Chi Chen whenever we’re, kind of, back working on property-prediction models. So, yeah, so the problem of generating materials from properties is actually a pretty old one. I still remember back in 2018, when I was, kind of, working on CGCNN (crystal graph convolutional neural networks) and giving a talk about property-prediction models, right, one of the first questions people asked is, OK, can you inverse this process? Instead of going from material structure to properties, can you, kind of, inversely generate the materials directly from their property conditions? So in a way, this is, kind of, like a dream for material scientists—some people even call it, like, holy grail—because, like, the end goal is really about finding materials property, right, [that] will satisfy your application. So I’ve been, kind of, thinking about this problem for a while and also there has been a lot of work, right, over the past few years in the community to build a generative model for materials. A lot of people have tried before, like 2020, using ideas like VAEs or GANs. But it’s hard to represent materials in this type of generative model architecture, and many of those models generated relatively poor candidates. So I thought it was a hard problem. I, kind of, know it for a while. But there is no good solutions back then. So I started to focus more on this problem during my postdoc, when I studied that in 2020 and I keep working on that in 2021. At the beginning, I wasn’t really sure exactly what approach to take because it’s, kind of, like open question and really tried a lot of random ideas. So one day actually in my group back then with Tommi Jaakkola and Regina Barzilay at MIT’s CSAIL (Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), we, kind of, get to know this method called diffusion model. It was a very early stage of a diffusion model back then, but it already began to show very promising signs, kind of, achieving state of art in many problems like 3D point cloud generation and the 3D molecular conformer generation. So the work that really inspired me a lot is two works that was for molecular conformer generation. One is ConfGF, and one is GeoDiff. So they, kind of, inspired me to, kind of, focus more on diffusion models. That actually lead to CDVAE (crystal diffusion variational autoencoder). So it’s interesting that we, kind of, spend like a couple of weeks in trying all this diffusion idea, and without that much work, it actually worked quite out of box. And at that time, CDVAE achieves much better performance than any previous models in materials generation, and we’re, kind of, super happy with that. So after CDVAE, I, kind of, joined Microsoft, now working with more people together on this problem of generative model for materials. So we, kind of, know what the limitations of CDVAE are, is that it can do unconditional material generation well means it can generate novel material structures, but it is very hard to use CDVAE to do property-guided generations. So basically, it uses an architecture called a variational autoencoder, where you have a latent space. So the way that you do property-guided generation there was to do a, kind of, a gradient update inside the latent space. But because the latent space wasn’t learned very well, so it actually … you cannot do, kind of, good property-guided generation. We only managed to do energy-guided generation, but it wasn’t successful in going beyond energy. So that comes us to really thinking, right, how can we make the property-guided generation much better? So I remember like one day, actually, my colleague, Daniel Zügner, who actually really showed me this blog which basically explains this idea of classifier-free guidance, which is the powerhouse behind the text-image generative models. And so, yeah, then we began to think about, can we actually make the diffusion model work for classifier-free guidance? That lead us to remove the, kind of, the variational autoencoder component from CDVAE and begin to work on a pure diffusion architecture. But then there was, kind of, a lot of development around that. But it turns out that classifier-free guidance is the key really to make property-guided generation work, and then combined with a lot more effort in, kind of, improving architecture and also generating more data and also trying out all these different downstream tasks that end up leading into MatterGen as we see today. 

KALTER: Yeah, I think you’ve both done a really great job of explaining how MatterGen and MatterSim work together and how MatterGen can offer a lot in terms of reducing the amount of time and work that goes into finding new materials. Tian, how does the process of using MatterGen to generate materials translate into real-world applications? 

XIE: Yeah, that’s a fantastic question. So one way that I think about MatterGen, right, is that you can think about it as like a copilot for materials scientists, right. So they can help you to come up with, kind of, potential good hypothesis for the materials design problems that you’re looking for. So say you’re trying to design a battery, right. So you may have some ideas over, OK, what candidates you want to make, but this is, kind of, based on your own experience, right. Depths of experience as a researcher. But MatterGen is able to, kind of, learn from a very broad set of data, so therefore, it may be able to come up with some good suggestions, even surprising suggestions, for you so that you can, kind of, try this out, right, both with computation or even one day in wet lab and experimentally synthesize it. But I also want to note that this, in a way, this is still an early stage in generative AI for materials means that I don’t expect all the candidates MatterGen generates will be, kind of, suits your needs, right. So you still need to, kind of, look into them with expertise or with some kind of computational screening. But I think in the future, as this model keep improving themselves, they will become a key component, right, in the design process of many of the materials we’re seeing today, like designing new batteries, new solar cells, or even computer chips, right, so that like Ziheng mentioned earlier. 

KALTER: I want to pivot a little bit to the MatterSim side of things. I know identifying new combinations of compounds is key to meeting changing needs for things like sustainable materials. But testing them is equally important to developing materials that can be put to use. Ziheng, how does MatterSim handle the uncertainty of how materials behave under various conditions, and how do you ensure that the predictions remain robust despite the inherent complexity of molecular systems? 

LU: Thanks. That’s a very, very good question. So uncertainty quantification is a key to make sure all these predictions and simulations are trustworthy. And that’s actually one of the questions we got almost every time after a presentation. So people will ask, well—especially those experimentalists—would ask, well, I’ve been using your model; how do I know those predictions are true under the very complex conditions I’m using in my experiments? So to understand how we deal with uncertainty, we need to know how MatterSim really functions in predicting an arbitrary property, especially under the condition you want, like the temperature and pressure. That would be quite complex, right? So in the ideal case, we would hope that by using MatterSim, you can directly simulate the properties you want using molecular dynamics combined with statistical mechanics. So if so, it would be easy to really quantify the uncertainty because there are just two parts: the error from the model and the error from the simulations, the statistical mechanics. So the error from the model will be able to be measured by, what we call, an ensemble. So basically you start with different random seeds when you train the model, and then when you predict your property, you use several models from the ensemble and then you get different numbers. If the variance from the numbers are very large, you’ll say the prediction is not that trustworthy. But a lot of times, we will see the variance is very small. So basically, an ensemble of several different models will give you almost exactly the same number; you’re quite sure that the number is somehow very, like, useful. So that’s one level of the way we want to get our property. But sometimes, it’s very hard to really directly simulate the property you want. For example, for catalytic processes, it’s very hard to imagine how you really get those coefficients. It’s very hard. The process is just too complicated. So for that process, what we do is to really use the, what we call, embeddings learned from the entire material space. So basically that vector we learned for any arbitrary material. And then start from that, we build a very shallow layer of a neural network to predict the property, but that also means you need to bring in some of your experimental or simulation data from your side. And for that way of predicting a property to measure the uncertainty, it’s still like the two levels, right. So we don’t really have the statistical error anymore, but what we have is, like, only the model error. So you can still stick to the ensemble, and then it will work, right. So to be short, so MatterSim can provide you an uncertainty to make sure the prediction tells you whether it’s true or not.

KALTER: So in many ways, MatterSim is the realist in the equation, and it’s there to sort of be a gatekeeper for MatterGen, which is the idea generator. 

XIE: I really like the analogy. 

LU: Yeah. 

KALTER: As is the case with many AI models, the development of MatterGen and MatterSim relies on massive amounts of data. And here you use a simulation to create the needed training data. Can you talk about that process and why you’ve chosen that approach, Tian?

XIE: So one advantage here is that we can really use large-scale simulation to generate data. So we have a lot of compute here at Microsoft on our Azure platform, right. So how we generate the data is that we use a method called density functional theory, DFT, which is a quantum mechanical method. And we use a simulation workflow built on top with DFT to simulate the stability of materials. So what we do is that we curate a huge amount of material structures from multiple different sources of open data, mostly including Materials Project and Alexandria database, and in total, there are around 3 million materials candidates coming from these two databases. But not all of these structures, they are stable. So therefore, we try to use DFT to compute their stability and try to filter down the candidates such that we are making sure that our training data only have the most stable ones. This leads into around 600,000 training data, which was used to train the base model of MatterGen. So I want to note that actually we also use MatterSim as part of the workflow because MatterSim can be used to prescreen unstable candidates so that we don’t need to use DFT to compute all of them. I think at the end, we computed around 1 million DFT calculations where two-thirds of them, they are already filtered out by MatterSim, which saves us a lot of compute in generating our training data.

LU: Tian, you have a very good description of how we really get those ground state structures for the MatterGen model. Actually, we’ve been also using MatterGen for MatterSim to really get the training data. So if you think about the simulation space of materials, it’s extremely large. So we would think it in a way that it has three axis, so basically the elements, the temperature, and the pressure. So if you think about existing databases, they have pretty good coverage of the elements space. Basically, we think about Materials Project, NOMAD, they really have this very good coverage of lithium oxide, lithium sulfide, hydrogen sulfide, whatever, those different ground-state structures. But they don’t really tell you how these materials behave under certain temperature and pressure, especially under those extreme conditions like 1,600 Kelvin, which you really use to synthesize your materials. That’s where we really focused on to generate the data for MatterSim. So it’s really easy to think about how we generate the data, right. You put your wanted material into a pressure cooker, basically, molecular dynamics; it can simulate the materials behavior on the temperature and pressure. So that’s it. Sounds easy, right? But that’s not true because what we want is not one single material. What we want is the entire material space. So that will be making the effort almost impossible because the space is just so large. So that’s where we really develop this active learning pipeline. So basically, what we do is, like, we generate a lot of these structures for different elements and temperatures, pressures. Really, really a lot. And then what we do is, like, we ask the active learning or the uncertainty measurements to really say whether the model knows about this structure already. So if the model thinks, well, I think I know the structure already. So then, we don’t really calculate this structure using density function theory, as Tian just said. So this will really save us like 99% of the effort in generating the data. So in the end, by combining this molecular dynamics, basically pressure cooker, together with active learning, we gathered around 17 million data for MatterSim. So that was used to train the model. And now it can cover the entire periodic table and a lot of temperature and pressures. 

KALTER: Thank you, Ziheng. Now, I’m sure this is not news to either one of you, given that you’re both at the forefront of these efforts, but there are a growing number of tools aimed at advancing materials science. So what is it about MatterGen and MatterSim in their approach or capabilities that distinguish them? 

XIE: Yeah, I think I can start. So I think there is, in the past one year, there is a huge interest in building up generative AI tools for materials. So we have seen lots and lots of innovations from the community published in top conferences like NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, etc. So I think what distinguishes MatterGen, in my point of view, are two things. First is that we are trained with a very big dataset that we curated very, very carefully, and we also spent quite a lot of time to refining our diffusion architecture, which means that our model is capable of generating very, kind of, high-quality, highly stable and novel materials. We have some kind of bar plot in our paper showcasing the advantage of our performance. I think that’s one key aspect. And I think the second aspect, which in my point of view is even more important, is that it has the ability to do property-guided generation. Many of the works that we saw in the community, they are more focused on the problem of crystal structure prediction, which MatterGen can also do, but we focus more on really property-guided generation because we think this is one of the key problems that really materials scientists care about. So the ability to do a very broad range of property-guided generation—and we have, kind of, both computational and now experimental result to validate those—I think that’s the second strong point for MatterGen. 

KALTER: Ziheng, do you want to add to that? 

LU: Yeah, thanks, Lindsay. So on the MatterSim side, I think it’s really the diverse condition it can handle that makes a difference. We’ve been talking about, like, the training data we collected really covers the entire periodic table and also, more importantly, the temperatures from 0 Kelvin to 5,000 Kelvin and the pressures from 0 gigapascal to 1,000 gigapascal. That really covers what humans can control nowadays. I mean, it’s very hard to go beyond that. If you know anyone [who] can go beyond that, let me know. So that really makes MatterSim different. Like, it can handle the realistic conditions. I think beyond that, I would say the combo between MatterSim and MatterGen really makes these set of tools really different. So previously, a lot of people are using this atomistic simulator and this generative models alone. But if you think about it, now that we have these two foundation models together, they really can make things different, right. So we have predictor; we have the generator; you have a very good idea generator. And you have a very good goalkeeper. And you put them together. They form a loop. And now you can use this loop to design materials really quickly. So I would say to me, now, when I think about it, it’s really the combo that makes these set of tools different. 

KALTER: I know that I’ve spoken with both of you recently about how there’s so much excitement around this, and it’s clear that we’re on the precipice of this—as both of you have called it—a paradigm shift. And Microsoft places a very strong emphasis on ensuring that its innovations are grounded in reality and capable of addressing real-world problems. So with that in mind, how do you balance the excitement of scientific exploration with the practical challenges of implementation? Tian, do you want to take this?

XIE: Yeah, I think this is a very, very important point, because … as there are so many hypes around AI that is happening right now, right. We must be very, very careful about the claims that we are making so that people will not have unrealistic expectations, right, over how these models can do. So for MatterGen, we’re pretty careful about that. We’re trying to, basically, we’re trying to say that this is an early stage of generative AI in materials where this model will be improved over time quite significantly, but you should not say, oh, all the materials generated by MatterGen is going to be amazing. That’s not what is happening today. So we try to be very careful to understand how far MatterGen is already capable of designing materials with real-world impact. So therefore, we went all the way to synthesize one material that was generated by MatterGen. So this material we generated is called tantalum chromium oxide[1]. So this is a new material. It has not been discovered before. And it was generated by MatterGen by conditioning a bulk modulus equal to 200 gigapascal. Bulk modulus is, like, the compressiveness of the material. So we end up measuring the experimental synthesized material experimentally, and the measured bulk modulus is 169 gigapascal, which is within 20% of error. So this is a very good proof concept, in our point of view, to show that, oh, you can actually give it a prompt, right, and then MatterGen can generate a material, and the material actually have the property that is very close to your target. But it’s still a proof of concept. And we’re still working to see how MatterGen can design materials that are much more useful with a much broader range of applications. And I’m sure that there will be more challenges we are seeing along the way. But we’re looking forward to further working with our experimental partners to, kind of, push this further. And also working with MatterSim, right, to see how these two tools can be used to design really useful materials and bringing this into real-world impact.

LU: Yeah, Tian, I think that’s very well said. It’s not really only for MatterGen. For MatterSim, we’re also very careful, right. So we really want to make sure that people understand how these models really behave under their instructions and understand, like, what they can do and they cannot do. So I think one thing that we really care about is that in the next few, maybe one or two years, we want to really work with our experimental partners to make this realistic materials, like, in different areas so that we can, even us, can really better understand the limitations and at the same time explore the forefront of materials science to make this excitement become true. 

KALTER: Ziheng, could you give us a concrete example of what exactly MatterSim is capable of doing? 

LU: Now MatterSim can really do, like, whatever you have on a potential energy surface. So what that means is, like, anything that can be simulated with the energy and forces, stresses alone. So to give you an example, we can compute … the first example would be the stability of a material. So basically, you input a structure, and from the energies of the relaxed structures, you can really tell whether the material is likely to be stable, like, the composition, right. So another example would be the thermal conductivity. Thermal conductivity is like a fundamental property of materials that tells you how fast heat can transfer in the material, right. So for MatterSim, it can really simulate how fast this heat can go through your diamond, your graphene, your copper, right. So basically, those are two examples. So these examples are based on energies and forces alone. But there are things MatterSim cannot do—at least for now. For example, you cannot really do anything related to electronic structures. So you cannot really compute the light absorption of a semitransparent material. That would be a no-no for now. 

KALTER: It’s clear from speaking with researchers, both from MatterSim and MatterGen, that despite these very rapid advancements in technology, you take very seriously the responsibility to consider the broader implications of the challenges that are still ahead. How do you think about the ethical considerations of creating entirely new materials and simulating their properties, particularly in terms of things like safety, sustainability, and societal impact? 

XIE: Yeah, that’s a fantastic question. So it’s extremely important that we are making sure that these AI tools, they are not misused. A potential misuse, right, as you just mentioned, is that people begin to use these AI tools—MatterGen, MatterSim—to, kind of, design harmful materials. There was actually extensive discussion over how generative AI tools that was originally purposed for drug design can be then misused to create bioweapons. So at Microsoft, we take this very seriously because we believe that when we create new technologies, you must also ensure that the technology is used responsibly. So we have an extensive process to ensure that all of our models respect those ethical considerations. In the meantime, as you mentioned, maybe sustainability and the societal impact, right, so there’s a huge amount these AI tools—MatterGen, MatterSim—can do for sustainability because a lot of the sustainability challenges, they are really, at the end, materials design challenges, right. So therefore, I think that MatterGen and MatterSim can really help with that in solving, in helping us to alleviate climate change and having positive societal impact for the broader society. 

KALTER: And, Ziheng, how about from a simulation standpoint? 

LU: Yeah, I think Tian gave a very good, like, description. At Microsoft, we are really careful about these ethical, like, considerations. So I would add a little bit on the more, like, the bright side of things. Like, so for MatterSim, like, it really carries out these simulations at atomic scales. So one thing you can think about is really the educational purpose. So back in my bachelor and PhD period, so I would sit, like, at the table and really grab a pen to really deal with those very complex equations and get into those statistics using my pen. It’s really painful. But now with MatterSim, these simulation tools at atomic level, what you can do is to really simulate the reactions, the movement of atoms, at atomic scale in real time. You can really see the chemical reactions and see the statistics. So you can get really the feeling, like very direct feeling, of how the system works instead of just working on those toy systems with your pen. I think it’s going to be a very good educational tool using MatterSim, yeah. Also MatterGen. MatterGen as, like, a generative tool and generating those i.i.d. (independent and identically distributed) distributions, it will be a perfect example to show the students how the Boltzmann distribution works. I think, Tian, you will agree with that, right?

XIE: 100%. Yeah, I really, really like the example that Ziheng mentioned about the educational purposes. I still remember, like, when I was, kind of, learning material simulation class, right. So everything is DFT. You, kind of, need to wait for an hour, right, for getting some simulation. Maybe then you’ll make some animation. Now you can do this in real time. This is, like, a huge step forward, right, for our young researchers to, kind of, gaining a sense, right, about how atoms interact at an atomic level. 

LU: Yeah, and the results are really, I mean, true; not really those toy models. I think it’s going to be very exciting stuff. 

KALTER: And, Tian, I’m directing this question to you, even though, Ziheng, I’m sure you can chime in, as well. But, Tian, I know that you and I have previously discussed this specifically. I know that you said back in, you know, 2017, 2018, that you knew an AI-based approach to materials science was possible but that even you were surprised by how far the technology has come so fast in aiding this area. What is the status of these tools right now? Are they in use? And if so, who are they available to? And, you know, what’s next for them? 

XIE: Yes, this is a fantastic question, right. So I think for AI generative tools like MatterGen, as I said many times earlier, it’s still in its early stages. MatterGen is the first tool that we managed to show that generative AI can enable very broad property-guided generation, and we have managed to have experimental validation to show it’s possible. But it will take more work to show, OK, it can actually design batteries, can design solar cells, right. It can design really useful materials in these broader domains. So this is, kind of, exactly why we are now taking a pretty open approach with MatterGen. We make our code, our training data, and model weights available to the general public. We’re really hoping the community can really use our tools to the problem that they care about and even build on top of that. So in terms of what next, I always like to use what happened with generative AI for drugs, right, to kind of predict how generative AI will impact materials. Three years ago, there is a lot of research around generative model for drugs, first coming from the machine learning community, right. So then all the big drug companies begin to take notice, and then there are, kind of, researchers in these drug companies begin to use these tools in actual drug design processes. From my colleague, Marwin Segler, because he, kind of, works together with Novartis in Microsoft and Novartis collaboration, he has been basically telling me that at the beginning, all the chemists in the drug companies, they’re all very suspicious, right. The molecules generated by these generative models, they all look a bit weird, so they don’t believe this will work. But once these chemists see one or two examples that actually turns out to be performing pretty well from the experimental result, then they begin to build more trust, right, into these generative AI models. And today, these generative AI tools, they are part of the standard drug discovery pipeline that is widely used in all the drug companies. That is today. So I think generative AI for materials is going through a very similar period. People will have doubts; people will have suspicions at the beginning. But I think in three years, right, so it will become a standard tool over how people are going to design new solar cells, design new batteries, and many other different applications.

KALTER: Great. Ziheng, do you have anything to add to that? 

LU: So actually for MatterSim, we released the model, I think, back in last year, December. I mean, both the weights and the models, right. So we’re really grateful how much the community has contributed to the repo. And now, I mean, we really welcome the community to contribute more to both MatterSim and MatterGen via our open-source code bases. So, I mean, the community effort is really important, yeah. 

KALTER: Well, it has been fascinating to pick your brains, and as we close, you know, I know that you’re both capable of quite a bit, which you have demonstrated. I know that asking you to predict the future is a big ask, so I won’t explicitly ask that. But just as a fun thought exercise, let’s fast-forward 20 years and look back. How have MatterGen and MatterSim and the big ideas behind them impacted the world, and how are people better off because of how you and your teams have worked to make them a reality? Tian, you want to start? 

XIE: Yeah, I think one of the biggest challenges our human society is going to face, right, in the next 20 years is going to be climate change, right, and there are so many materials design problems people need to solve in order to properly handle climate change, like finding new materials that can absorb CO₂ from atmosphere to create a carbon capture industry or have a battery materials that is able to do large-scale energy grid storage so that we can fully utilizing all the wind powers and the solar power, etc., right. So if you want me to make one prediction, I really believe that these AI tools, like MatterGen and MatterSim, is going to play a central role in our human’s ability to design these new materials for climate problems. So therefore in 20 years, I would like to see we have already solved climate change, right. We have large-scale energy storage systems that was designed by AI that is … basically that we have removed all the fossil fuels, right, from our energy production, and for the rest of the carbon emissions that is very hard to remove, we will have a carbon capture industry with materials designed by AI that absorbs the CO₂ from the atmosphere. It’s hard to predict exactly what will happen, but I think AI will play a key role, right, into defining how our society will look like in 20 years. 

LU: Tian, very well said. So I think instead of really describing the future, I would really quote a science fiction scene in Iron Man. So basically in 20 years, I will say when we want to really get a new material, we will just sit in an office and say, “Well, J.A.R.V.I.S., can you design us a new material that really fits my newest MK 7 suit?” That will be the end. And it will run automatically, and we get this auto lab running, and all those MatterGen and MatterSim, these AI models, running, and then probably in a few hours, in a few days, we get the material. 

KALTER: Well, I think I speak for many people from several industries when I say that I cannot wait to see what is on the horizon for these projects. Tian and Ziheng, thank you so much for joining us on Ideas. It’s been a pleasure. 

[MUSIC] 

XIE: Thank you so much. 

LU: Thank you. 

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[MUSIC FADES]

I’m your guest host, Ginny Badanes, and I lead Microsoft’s Democracy Forward program, where we’ve spent the past year deeply engaged in supporting democratic elections around the world, including the recent US elections. We have been working on everything from raising awareness of nation-state propaganda efforts to helping campaigns and election officials prepare for deepfakes to protecting political campaigns from cyberattacks. Today, I’m joined by two researchers who have also been diving deep into the impact of generative AI on democracy.

Microsoft senior researchers Madeleine Daepp and Robert Osazuwa Ness are studying generative AI’s influence in the political sphere with the goal of making AI systems more robust against misuse while supporting the development of AI tools that can strengthen democratic processes and systems. They spent time in Taiwan and India earlier this year, where both had big democratic elections. Madeleine and Robert, welcome to the podcast!

MADELEINE DAEPP: Thanks for having us.

ROBERT OSAZUWA NESS: Thanks for having us.

BADANES: So I have so many questions for you all—from how you conducted your research to what you’ve learned—and I’m really interested in what you think comes next. But first, let’s talk about how you got involved in this in the first place. Could you both start by telling me a little bit about your backgrounds and just what got you into AI research in the first place?

DAEPP: Sure. So I’m a senior researcher here at Microsoft Research in the Special Projects team. But I did my PhD at MIT in urban studies and planning. And I think a lot of folks hear that field and think, oh, you know, housing, like upzoning housing and figuring out transportation systems. But it really is a field that’s about little “d” democracy, right. About how people make choices about shared public spaces every single day. You know, I joined Microsoft first off to run this, sort of, technology deployment in the city of Chicago, running a low-cost air-quality-sensor network for the city. And when GPT-4 came out, you know, first ChatGPT, and then we, sort of, had this big recognition of, sort of, how well this technology could do in summarizing and in representing opinions and in making sense of big unstructured datasets, right. I got actually very excited. Like, I thought this could be used for town planning processes. [LAUGHS] Like, I thought we could … I had a whole project with a wonderful intern, Eva Maxfield Brown, looking at, can we summarize planning documents using AI? Can we build out policies from conversations that people have in shared public spaces? And so that was very much the impetus for thinking about how to apply and build things with this amazing new technology in these spaces.

BADANES: Robert, I think your background is a little bit different, yet you guys ended up in a similar place. So how did you get there?

NESS: Yeah, so I’m also on Special Projects, Microsoft Research. My work is focusing on large language models, LLMs. And, you know, so I focus on making these models more reliable and controllable in real-world applications. And my PhD is in statistics. And so I focus a lot on using just basic bread-and-butter statistical methods to try and control and understand LLM behavior. So currently, for example, I’m leading a team of engineers and running experiments designed to find ways to enhance a graphical approach to combining information retrieval in large language models. I work on statistical tests for testing significance of adversarial attacks on these models.

BADANES: Wow.

NESS: So, for example, if you find a way to trick one of these models into doing something it’s not supposed to do, I make sure that it’s not, like, a random fluke; that it’s something that’s reproducible. And I also work at this intersection between generative AI and, you know, Bayesian stuff, causal inference stuff. And so I came at looking at this democracy work through an alignment lens. So alignment is this task in AI of making sure these models align with human values and goals. And what I was seeing was a lot of research in the alignment space was viewing it as a technical problem. And, you know, as a statistician, we’re trained to consult, right. Like, to go to the actual stakeholders and say, hey, what are your goals? What are your values? And so this democracy work was an opportunity to do that in Microsoft Research and connected with Madeleine. So she was planning to go to Taiwan, and kind of from a past life, I wanted to become a trade economist and learned Mandarin. And so I speak fluent Mandarin and seemed like a good matchup of our skill sets …

BADANES: Yeah.

NESS: … and interests. And so that’s, kind of, how we got started.

BADANES: So, Madeleine, you brought the two of you together, but what started it for you? This podcast is all about big ideas. What sparked the big idea to bring this work that you’ve been doing on generative AI into the space of democracy and then to go out and find Robert and match up together?

DAEPP: Yeah, well, Ginny, it was you. [LAUGHS] It was actually your team.

BADANES: I didn’t plant that! [LAUGHS]

DAEPP: So, you know, I think last summer, I was working on all of these like pro-democracy applications, trying to build out, like, a social data collection tool with AI, all this kind of stuff. And I went to the elections workshop that the Democracy Forward team at Microsoft had put on, and Dave Leichtman, who, you know, was the MC of that work, was really talking about how big of a global elections year 2024 was going to be, that this—he was calling it “Votorama.” You know, that term didn’t take off. [LAUGHTER] The term that has taken off is biggest election year in history, right. Over 70 countries around the world. And, you know, we’re coming from Microsoft Research, where we were so excited about this technology. Like, when it started to pass theory of mind tests, right, which is like the ability to think about how other people are thinking, like, we were all like, oh, this is amazing; this opens up so many cool application spaces, right. When it was, like, passing benchmarks for multilingual communication, again, like, we were so excited about the prospect of building out multilingual systems. And then, all of a sudden, I was at the elections workshop, and I thought, oh no, [LAUGHS] this is not good timing.

BADANES: Yeah …

DAEPP: And because so much of my work focuses on, you know, building out computer science systems like, um, data science systems or AI systems but with communities in the loop, I really wanted to go to the folks most affected by this problem. And so I proposed a project to go to Taiwan and to study one of the … it was the second election of 2024. And Taiwan is known to be subject to more external disinformation than any other place in the world. So if you were going to see something anywhere, you would see it there. Also, it has amazing civil society response so really interesting people to talk to. But I do not speak, Chinese, right. Like, I don’t have the context; I don’t speak the language. And so part of my process is to hire a half-local team. We had an amazing interpreter, Vickie Wang, and then a wonderful graduate student, Ti-Chung Cheng, who supported this work. But then also my team, Special Projects, happened to have this person who, like, not only is a leading AI researcher publishing in NeurIPS, like building out these systems, but who also spoke Chinese, had worked in technology security, and had a real understanding of international studies and economics as well as AI. And so for me, like, finding Robert as a collaborator was kind of a unicorn moment.

BADANES: So it sounds like it was a match made in heaven of skill sets and abilities. Before we get into what you all found there, which I do want to get into, I first think it’s helpful—I don’t know, when we’re dealing with these, like, complicated issues, particularly things that are moving and changing really quickly, sometimes I found it’s helpful to agree on definitions and sort of say, this is what we mean when we say this word. And that helps lead to understanding. So while I know that this research is about more than deepfakes—and we’ll talk about some of the things that are more than deepfakes—I am curious how you all define that term and how you think of it. Because this is something that I think is constantly moving and changing. So how have you all been thinking about the definition of that term?

NESS: So I’ve been thinking about it in terms of the intention behind it, right. We say deepfake, and I think colloquially that means kind of all of generative AI. That’s a bit unfortunate because there are things that are … you know, you can use generative AI to generate cartoons …

BADANES: Right.

NESS: … or illustrations for a children’s book. And so in thinking about what are we really talking about in the context of deepfakes in the political context, elections context, it’s deception, right. I’m trying to use this technology to, say, create some kind of false record of events, say, for example, something that a politician says, in order to convince people that something happened that actually did not happen.

BADANES: Right.

NESS: And so that goal of deceiving, of creating a false record, that’s kind of how I have been thinking about deepfakes in contrast to the broader category of generative AI and deepfakes in terms of being a malicious use case. There are other malicious use cases that don’t necessarily have to be deceptive, as well, as well as positive use cases.

BADANES: Well, that really, I mean, that resonates with me because what we found was when you use the term deception—or another term we hear a lot that I think works is fraud—that resonates with other people, too. Like, that helps them distinguish between neutral uses or even positive uses of AI in this space and the malicious use cases, though to your point, I suppose there’s probably even deeper definitions of what malicious use could look like. Are you finding that distinction showing up in your work between fraud and deception in these use cases? Is that something that has been coming through?

DAEPP: You know, we didn’t really think about the term fraud until we started prepping for this interview with you. As Robert said, so much of what we were thinking about in our definition was this representation of people or events, you know, done in order to deceive and with malicious intent. But in fact, in all of our conversations, no matter who we were talking to, no matter what political bent, no matter, you know, national security, fact-checking, et cetera, you know, they all agreed that using AI for the purposes of scamming somebody financially was not OK, right. That’s fraud. Using AI for the purposes of nudifying, like removing somebody’s clothes and then sextorting them, right, extorting them for money out of fear that this would be shared, like, that was not OK. And those are such clear lines. And it was clear that there’s a set of uses of generative AI also in the political space, you know, of saying this person said something that they didn’t, …

BADANES: Mm-hmm.

DAEPP: … of voter suppression, that in general, there’s a very clear line that when it gets into that fraudulent place, when it gets into that simultaneously deceptive and malicious space, that’s very clearly a no-go zone.

NESS: Oftentimes during this research, I found myself thinking about this dichotomy in cybersecurity of state actors, or broadly speaking, kind of, political actors, versus criminals.

BADANES: Right.

NESS: And it’s important to understand the distinction because criminals are typically trying to target targets of opportunity and make money, while state-sponsored agents are willing to spend a lot more money and have very specific targets and have a very specific definition of success. And so, like, this fraud versus deception kind of feels like that a little bit in the sense that fraud is typically associated with criminal behavior, while, say, I might put out deceptive political messaging, but it might fall within the bounds of free speech within my country.

BADANES: Right, yeah.

NESS: And so this is not to say I disagree with that, but it just, actually, that it could be a useful contrast in terms of thinking about the criminal versus the political uses, both legitimate and illegitimate.

BADANES: Well, I also think those of us who work in the AI space are dealing in very complicated issues that the majority of the world is still trying to understand. And so any time you can find a word that people understand immediately in order to do the, sort of, storytelling: the reason that we are worried about deepfakes in elections is because we do not want voters to be defrauded. And that, we find really breaks through because people understand that term already. That’s a thing that they already know that they don’t want to be; they do not want to be defrauded in their personal life or in how they vote. And so that really, I found, breaks through. But as much as I have talked about deepfakes, I know that you—and I know there’s a lot of interest in talking about deepfakes when we talk about this subject—but I know your research goes beyond that. So what other forms of generative AI did you include in your research or did you encounter in the effort that you were doing both in Taiwan and India?

DAEPP: Yeah. So let me tell you just, kind of, a big overview of, like, our taxonomy. Because as you said, like, so much of this is just about finding a word, right. Like, so much of it is about building a shared vocabulary so that we can start to have these conversations. And so when we looked at the political space, right, elections, so much of what it means to win an election is kind of two things. It’s building an image of a candidate, right, or changing the image of your opposition and telling a story, right.

BADANES: Mm-hmm.

DAEPP: And so if you think about image creation, of course, there are deepfakes. Like, of course, there are malicious representations of a person. But we also saw a lot of what we’re calling auth fakes, like authorized fakes, right. Candidates who would actually go to a consultancy and, like, get their bodies scanned so that videos could be made of them. They’d get their voices, a bunch of snippets of their voices, recorded so that then there could be personalized phone calls, right. So these are authorized uses of their image and likeness. Then we saw a term I’ve heard in, sort of, the ether is soft fakes. So again, likenesses of a candidate, this time not necessarily authorized but promotional. They weren’t … people on Twitter—I guess, X—on Instagram, they were sharing images of the candidate that they supported that were really flattering or silly or, you know, just really sort of in support of that person. So not with malicious intent, right, with promotional intent. And then the last one, and this, I think, was Robert’s term, but in this image creation category, you know, one thing we talked about was just the way that people were also making fun of candidates. And in this case, this is a bit malicious, right. Like, they’re making fun of people; they’re satirizing them. But it’s not deceptive because, …

BADANES: Right …

DAEPP: … you know, often it has that hyper-saturated meme aesthetic. It’s very clearly AI or just, you know, per like, sort of, US standards for satire, like, a reasonable person would know that it was silly. And so Robert said, you know, oh, these influencers, they’re not trying to deceive people; like, they’re not trying to lie about candidates. They’re trying to roast them. [LAUGHTER] And so we called it a deep roast. So that’s, kind of, the images of candidates. I will say we also looked at narrative building, and there, one really important set of things that we saw was what we call text to b-roll. So, you know, a lot of folks think that you can’t really make AI videos because, like, Sora isn’t out yet[1]. But in fact, what there is a lot of is tooling to, sort of, use AI to pull from stock imagery and b-roll footage and put together a 90-second video. You know, it doesn’t look like AI; it’s a real video. So text to b- roll, AI pasta? So if you know the threat intelligence space, there’s this thing called copy pasta, where people just …

BADANES: Sure.

DAEPP: … it’s just a fun word for copy-paste. People just copy-paste terms in order to get a hashtag trending. And we talked to an ex-influencer who said, you know, we’re using AI to do this. And I asked him why. And he said, well, you know, if you just do copy-paste, the fact-checkers catch it. But if you use AI, they don’t. And so AI pasta. And there’s also some research showing that this is potentially more persuasive than copy-paste …

BADANES: Interesting.

DAEPP:  … because people think there’s a social consensus. And then the last one, this is my last of the big taxonomy, and, Robert, of course, jump in on anything you want to go deeper on, but Fake News 2.0. You know, I’m sure you’ve seen this, as well. Just this, like, creation of news websites, like entire new newspapers that nobody’s ever heard of. AI avatars that are newscasters. And this is something that was happening before. Like, there’s a long tradition of pretending to be a real news pamphlet or pretending to be a real outlet. But there’s some interesting work out of … Patrick Warren at Clemson has looked at some of these and shown the quality and quantity of articles on these things has gotten a lot better and, you know, improves as a step function of, sort of, when new models come out.

NESS: And then on the flip side, you have people using the same technologies but stated clearly that it’s AI generated, right. So we mentioned the AI avatars. In India, there’s this … there’s Bhoomi, which is a AI news anchor for agricultural news, and it states there in clear terms that she’s not real. But of course, somebody who wanted to be deceptive could use the same technology to portray something that looks like a real news broadcast that isn’t. You know, and, kind of, going back, Madeleine mentioned deep roasts, right, so, kind of, using this technology to create satirical depictions of, say, a political opponent. Somebody, a colleague, sent something across my desk. It was a Douyin account—so Douyin is the version of TikTok that’s used inside China; …

BADANES: OK.

NESS: … same company, but it’s the internal version of TikTok—that was posting AI-generated videos of politicians in Taiwan. And these were excellent, real good-quality AI-generated deepfakes of these politicians. But some of them were, first off, on the bottom of all of them, it said, this is AI-generated content.

BADANES: Oh.

NESS: And some of them were, kind of, obviously meant to be funny and were clearly fake, like still images that were animated to make somebody singing a funny song, for example. A very serious politician singing a very silly song. And it’s a still image. It’s not even, it’s not even …

BADANES: a video.

NESS: …like video.

BADANES: Right, right.

NESS: And so I messaged Puma Shen, who is one of the legislators in Taiwan who was targeted by these attacks, and I said, what do you think about this? And, you know, he said, yeah, they got me. [LAUGHTER] And I said, you know, do you think people believe this? I mean, there are people who are trying to debunk it. And he said, no, our supporters don’t believe it, but, you know, people who support the other side or people who are apolitical, they might believe it, or even if it says it’s fake—they know it’s fake—but they might still say that, yeah, but this is something they would do, right. This is …

BADANES: Yeah, it fits the narrative. Yeah.

NESS: … it fits the narrative, right. And that, kind of, that really, you know, I had thought of this myself, but just hearing somebody, you know, who’s, you know, a politician who’s targeted by these attacks just saying that it’s, like, even if they believe it’s … even if they know it’s fake, they still believe it because it’s something that they would do.

BADANES: Sure.

NESS: That’s, you know, as a form of propaganda, even relative to the canonical idea of deepfake that we have, this could be more effective, right. Like, just say it’s AI and then use it to, kind of, paint the picture of the opponent in any way you like.

BADANES: Sure, and this gets into that, sort of, challenging space I think we find ourselves in right now, which is people don’t know necessarily how to tell what’s real or not. And the case you’re describing, it has labeling, so that should tell you. But a lot of the content we come across online does not have labeling. And you cannot tell just based on your eyes whether images were generated by AI or whether they’re real. One of the things that I get asked a lot is, why can’t we just build good AI to detect bad AI, right? Why don’t we have a solution where I just take a picture and I throw it into a machine and it tells me thumbs-up or thumbs-down if this is AI generated or not? And the question around detection is a really tricky one. I’m curious what you all think about, sort of, the question of, can detection solve this problem or not?

NESS: So I’ll mention one thing. So Madeleine mentioned an application of this technology called text to b-roll. And so what this is, technically speaking, what this is doing is you’re taking real footage, you stick it in a database, it’s quote, unquote “vectorized” into these representations that the AI can understand, and then you say, hey, generate a video that illustrates this narrative for me. And you provide it the text narrative, and then it goes and pulls out a whole bunch of real video from a database and curates them into a short video that you could put on TikTok, for example. So this was a fully AI-generated product, but none of the actual content is synthetic.

BADANES: Ah, right.

NESS: So in that case, your quote, unquote “AI detection tool” is not going to work.

DAEPP: Yeah, I mean, something that I find really fascinating any time that you’re dealing with a sociotechnical system, right—a technical system embedded in social context—is folks, you know, think that things are easy that are hard and things are hard that are easy, right. And so with a lot of the detections work, right, like if you put a deepfake detector out, you make that available to anyone, then what they can do is they can run a bunch of stuff by it, …

BADANES: Yeah.

DAEPP: … add a little bit of random noise, and then the deepfake detector doesn’t work anymore. And so that detection, actually, technically becomes an arms race, you know. And we’re seeing now some detectors that, like, you know, work when you’re not looking at a specific image or a specific piece of text but you’re looking at a lot all at once. That seems more promising. But, just, this is a very, very technically difficult problem, and that puts us as researchers in a really tricky place because, you know, you’re talking to folks who say, why can’t you just solve this? If you put this out, then you have to put the detector out. And we’re like, that’s actually not, that’s not a technically feasible long-term solution in this space. And the solutions are going to be social and regulatory and, you know, changes in norms as well as technical solutions that maybe are about everything outside of AI, right.

BADANES: Yeah.

DAEPP: Not about fixing the AI system but fixing the context within which it’s used.

BADANES: It’s not just a technological solution. There’s more to it. Robert?

NESS: So if somebody were to push back there, they could say, well, great; in the long term, maybe it’s an arms race, but in the short term, right, we can have solutions out there that, you know, at least in the next election cycle, we could maybe prevent some of these things from happening. And, again, kind of harkening back to cybersecurity, maybe if you make it hard enough, only the really dedicated, really high-funded people are going to be doing it rather than, you know, everybody who wants to throw a bunch of deepfakes on the internet. But the problem still there is that it focuses really on video and images, right.

BADANES: Yeah. What about audio?

NESS: What about audio? And what about text? So …

BADANES: Yeah. Those are hard. I feel like we’ve talked a lot about definitions and theoretical, but I want to make sure we talk more about what you guys saw and researched and understood on the ground, in particular, your trips to India and Taiwan and even if you want to reflect on how those compare to the US environment. What did you actually uncover? What surprised you? What was different between those countries?

DAEPP: Yeah, I mean, right, so Taiwan … both of these places are young democracies. And that’s really interesting, right. So like in Taiwan, for example, when people vote, they vote on paper. And anybody can go watch. That’s part of their, like, security strategies. Like, anyone around the world can just come and watch. People come from far. They fly in from Canada and Japan and elsewhere just to watch Taiwanese people vote. And then similarly in India, there’s this rule where you have to be walking distance from your polling place, and so the election takes two months. And, like, your polling places move from place to place, and sometimes, it arrives on an elephant. And so these were really interesting places to, like, I as an American, just, like, found it very, very fascinating to and important to be outside of the American context. You know, we just take for granted that how we do democracy is how other people do it. But Taiwan was very much a joint, like, civil society–government everyday response to this challenge of having a lot of efforts to manipulate public opinion happening with, you know, real-world speeches, with AI, with anything that you can imagine. You know, and I think the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center released a report documenting some of the, sort of, video stuff[2]. There’s a use of AI to create videos the night before the election, things like this. But then India is really thinking of … so India, right, it’s the world’s biggest democracy, right. Like, nearly a billion people were eligible to vote.

BADANES: Yeah.

NESS: And arguably the most diverse, right?

DAEPP: Yeah, arguably the most diverse in terms of languages, contexts. And it’s also positioning itself as the AI laboratory for the Global South. And so folks, including folks at the MSR (Microsoft Research) Bangalore lab, are leaders in thinking about representing low-resource languages, right, thinking about cultural representation in AI models. And so there you have all of these technologists who are really trying to innovate and really trying to think about what’s the next clever application, what’s the next clever use. And so that, sort of, that taxonomy that we talked about, like, I think just every week, every interview, we, sort of, had new things to add because folks there were just constantly trying all different kinds of ways of engaging with the public.

NESS: Yeah, I think for me, in India in particular, you know, India is an engineering culture, right. In terms of, like, the professional culture there, they’re very, kind of, engineering skewed. And so I think one of the bigger surprises for me was seeing people who were very experienced and effective campaign operatives, right, people who would go and, you know, hit the pavement; do door knocking; kind of, segment neighborhoods by demographics and voter block, these people were also, you know, graduated in engineering from an IIT (Indian Institute of Technology), …

BADANES: Sure.

NESS: … right, and so … [LAUGHS]  so they were happy to pick up these tools and leverage them to support their expertise in this work, and so some of the, you know, I think a lot of the narrative that we tell ourselves in AI is how it’s going to be, kind of, replacing people in doing their work. But what I saw in India was that people who were very effective had a lot of domain expertise that you couldn’t really automate away and they were the ones who are the early adopters of these tools and were applying it in ways that I think we’re behind on in terms of, you know, ideas in the US.

BADANES: Yeah, I mean, there’s, sort of, this sentiment that AI only augments existing problems and can enhance existing solutions, right. So we’re not great at translation tools, but AI will make us much better at that. But that also can then be weaponized and used as a tool to deceive people, which propaganda is not new, right? We’re only scaling or making existing problems harder, or adversaries are trying to weaponize AI to build on things they’ve already been doing, whether that’s cyberattacks or influence operations. And while the three of us are in different roles, we do work for the same company. And it’s a large technology company that is helping bring AI to the world. At the same time, I think there are some responsibilities when we look at, you know, bad actors who are looking to manipulate our products to create and spread this kind of deceptive media, whether it’s in elections or in other cases like financial fraud or other ways that we see this being leveraged. I’m curious what you all heard from others when you’ve been doing your research and also what you think our responsibilities are as a big tech company when it comes to keeping actors from using our products in those ways.

DAEPP: You know, when I started using GPT-4, one of the things I did was I called my parents, and I said, if you hear me on a phone call, …

BADANES: Yeah.

DAEPP: … like, please double check. Ask me things that only I would know. And when I walk around Building 99, which is, kind of, a storied building in which a lot of Microsoft researchers work, everybody did that call. We all called our parents.

BADANES: Interesting.

DAEPP: Or, you know, we all checked in. So just as, like, we have a responsibility to the folks that we care about, I think as a company, that same, sort of, like, raising literacy around the types of fraud to expect and how to protect yourself from them—I think that gets back to that fraud space that we talked about—and, you know, supporting law enforcement, sharing what needs to be shared, I think that without question is a space that we need to work in. I will say a lot of the folks we talked with, they were using Llama on a local GPU, right.

BADANES: OK.

DAEPP: They were using open-source models. They were sometimes … they were testing out Phi. They would use Phi, Grok, Llama, like anything like that. And so that raises an interesting question about our guardrails and our safety practices. And I think there, we have an, like, our obligation and our opportunity actually is to set the standard, right. To say, OK, like, you know, if you use local Llama and it spouts a bunch of stuff about voter suppression, like, you can get in trouble for that. And so what does it mean to have a safe AI that wins in the marketplace, right? That’s an AI that people can feel confident and comfortable about using and one that’s societally safe but also personally safe. And I think that’s both a challenge and a real opportunity for us.

BADANES: Yeah … oh, go ahead, Robert, yeah …

NESS: Going back to the point about fraud. It was this year, in January, when that British engineering firm Arup, when somebody used a deepfake to defraud that company of about $25 million, …

BADANES: Yeah.

NESS: … their Hong Kong office. And after that happened, some business managers in Microsoft reached out to me regarding a major client who wanted to start red teaming. And by red teaming, I mean intentionally targeting your executives and employees with these types of attacks in order to figure out where your vulnerabilities as an organization are. And I think, yeah, it got me thinking like, wow, I would, you know, can we do this for my dad? [LAUGHS] Because I think that was actually a theme that came out from a lot of this work, which was, like, how can we empower the people who are really on the frontlines of defending democracy in some of these places in terms of the tooling there? So we talked about, say, AI detection tools, but the people who are actually doing fact-checking, they’re looking more than at just the video or the images; they’re actually looking at a, kind of, holistic … taking a holistic view of the news story and doing some proper investigative journalism to see if something is fake or not.

BADANES: Yeah.

NESS: And so I think as a company who creates products, can we take a more of a product mindset to building tools that support that entire workflow in terms of fact-checking or investigative journalism in the context of democratic outcomes …

BADANES: Yeah.

NESS: … where maybe looking at individual deepfake content is just a piece of that.

BADANES: Yeah, you know, I think there’s a lot of parallels here to cybersecurity. That’s also what we’ve found, is this idea that, first of all, the “no silver bullet,” as we were talking about earlier with the detection piece. Like, you can’t expect your system to be secure just because you have a firewall, right. You have to have this, like, defense in-depth approach where you have lots of different layers. And one of those layers has been on the literacy side, right. Training and teaching people not to click on a phishing link, understanding that they should scroll over the URL. Like, these are efforts that have been taken up, sort of, in a broad societal sense. Employers do it. Big tech companies do it. Governments do it through PSAs and other things. So there’s been a concerted effort to get a population who might not have been aware of the fact that they were about to be scammed to now know not to click on that link. I think, you know, you raised the point about literacy. And I think there’s something to be said about media literacy in this space. It’s both AI literacy—understanding what it is—but also understanding that people may try to defraud you. And whether that is in the political sense or in the financial sense, once you have that, sort of, skill set in place, you’re going to be protected. One thing that I’ve heard, though, as I have conversations about this challenge … I’ve heard a couple things back from people specifically in civil society. One is not to put the impetus too much on the end consumer, which I think I’m hearing that we also recognize there’s things that we as technology companies should be focusing on. But the other thing is the concern that in, sort of, the long run, we’re going to all lose trust in everything we see anyway. And I’ve heard some people refer to that as the trust deficit. Have you all seen anything promising in the space to give you a sense around, can we ever trust what we’re looking at again, or are we actually just training everyone to not believe anything they see? Which I hope is not the case. I am an optimist. But I’d love to hear what you all came across. Are there signs of hope here where we might actually have a place where we can trust what we see again? 

DAEPP: Yeah. So two things. There is this phenomenon called the liar’s dividend, right, … 

BADANES: Sure, yeah.

DAEPP: … which is where that if you educate folks about how AI can be used to create fake clips, fake audio clips, fake videos, then if somebody has a real audio clip, a real video, they can claim that it’s AI. And I think we talk, you know, again, this is, like, in a US-centric space, we talk about this with politicians, but the space in which this is really concerning, I think, is war crimes, right …

BADANES: Oh, yeah.

DAEPP: … I think are these real human rights infractions where you can prevent evidence from getting out or being taken seriously. And we do see that right after invasions, for example, these days. But this is actually a space … like, I just told you, like, oh, like, detection is so hard and not technically, like, that’ll be an arms race! But actually, there is this wonderful project, Project Providence, that is a Microsoft collaboration with a company called Truepic that … it’s, like, an app, right. And what happens is when you take a photo using this app, it encrypts the, you know, hashes the GPS coordinates where the photo was taken, the time, the day, and uploads that with the pixels, with the image, to Azure. And then later, when a journalist goes to use that image, they can see that the pixels are exactly the same, and then they can check the location and they can confirm the GPS. And this actually meets evidentiary standards for the UN human rights tribunal, right.

BADANES: Right.

DAEPP: So this is being used in Ukraine to document war crimes. And so, you know, what if everybody had that app on their phone? That means you don’t … you know, most photos you take, you can use an AI tool and immediately play with. But in that particular situation where you need to confirm provenance and you need to confirm that this was a real event that happened, that is a technology that exists, and I think folks like the C2PA coalition (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) can make that happen across hardware providers.

NESS: And I think the challenge for me is, we can’t separate this problem from some of the other, kind of, fundamental problems that we have in our media environment now, right. So, for example, if I go on to my favorite social media app and I see videos from some conflicts around the world, and these videos could be not AI generated and I still could be, you know, the target of some PR campaign to promote certain content and suppress other ones. The videos could be authentic videos, but not actually be accurate depictions of what they claim to be. And so I think that this is a … the AI presents a complicating factor in an already difficult problem space. And I think, you know, trying to isolate these different variables and targeting them individually is pretty tricky. I do think that despite the liar’s dividend that media literacy is a very positive area to, kind of, focus energy …

BADANES: Yeah.

NESS: … in the sense that, you know, you mentioned earlier, like, using this term fraud, again, going back to this analogy with cybersecurity and cybercrime, that it tends to resonate with people. We saw that, as well, especially in Taiwan, didn’t we, Madeleine? Well, in India, too, with the sextortion fears. But in Taiwan, a lot of just cybercrime in terms of defrauding people of money. And one of the things that we had observed there was that talking about generative AI in the context of elections was difficult to talk to people about it because people, kind of, immediately went into their political camps, right.

BADANES: Yeah.

NESS: And so you had to, kind of, penetrate … you know, people were trying to, kind of, suss out which side you were on when you’re trying to educate them about this topic.

BADANES: Sure.

NESS: But if you talk to—but everybody’s, like, fraud itself is a lot less partisan.

BADANES: Yeah, it’s a neutral term.

NESS: Exactly. And so it becomes a very useful way to, kind of, get these ideas out there.

BADANES: That’s really interesting. And I love the provenance example because it really gets to the question about authenticity. Like, where did something come from? What is the origin of that media? Where has it traveled over time? And if AI is a component of it, then that’s a noted fact. But it doesn’t put us into the space of AI or not AI, which I think is where a lot of the, sort of, labeling has gone so far. And I understand the instinct to do that. But I like the idea of moving more towards how do you know more about an image of which whether there was AI involved or not is a component but does not have judgment. That does not make the picture good or bad. It doesn’t make it true or false. It’s just more information for you to consume. And then, of course, the media literacy piece, people need to know to look for those indicators and want them and ask for them from the technology company. So I think that’s a good, that’s a good silver lining. You gave me the light at the end of the tunnel I think I was looking for on the post-truth world. So, look, here’s the big question. You guys have been spending this time focusing on AI and democracy in this big, massive global election year. There was a lot of hype. [LAUGHS] There was a lot of hype. Lots of articles written about how this was going to be the AI election apocalypse. What say you? Was it? Was it not?

NESS: I think it was, well, we definitely have documented cases where this happened. And I’m wary of this question, particularly again from the cybersecurity standpoint, which is if you were not the victim of a terrible hack that brought down your entire company, would you say, like, well, it didn’t happen, so it’s not going to happen, right. You would never …

BADANES: Yeah.

NESS: That would be a silly attitude to have, right. And also, you don’t know what you don’t know, right. So, like, a lot of the, you know, we mentioned sextortion; we mentioned these cybercrimes. A lot of these are small-dollar crimes, which means they don’t get reported or they don’t get reported for reasons of shame. And so we don’t even have numbers on a lot of that. And we know that the political techniques are going to mirror the criminal techniques.

BADANES: Yeah.

NESS: And also, I worry about, say, down-ballot elections. Like, so much of, kind of, our election this year, a lot of the focus was on the national candidates, but, you know, if local poll workers are being targeted, if disinformation campaigns are being put out about local candidates, it’s not going get the kind of play in the national media such that you and I might hear about it. And so I’m, you know, so I’ll hand it off to Madeleine, but yeah.

DAEPP: So absolutely agree with Robert’s point, right. If your child was affected by sextortion, if you are a country that had an audio clip go viral, this was the deepfake deluge for you, right. That said, something that happened, you know, in India as in the United States, there were major prosecutions very early on, right.

BADANES: Yeah.

DAEPP: So in India, there was a video. It turned out not to be a deepfake. It turned out to be a “cheap fake,” to your point about, you know, the question isn’t whether there’s AI involved; the question is whether this is an attempt to defraud. And five people were charged for this video.

BADANES: Yeah.

DAEPP: And in the United States, right, those Biden robocalls using Biden’s voice to tell folks not to vote, like, that led to a million-dollar fine, I think, for the telecoms and $6 million for the consultant who created that. And when we talk to people in India, you know, people who work in this space, they said, well, I’m not going to do that; like, I’m going to focus on other things. So internal actors pay attention to these things. That really changes what people do and how they do it. And so that, I do think the work that your team did, right, to educate candidates about looking out for the stuff, the work that the MTAC (Microsoft Threat Analysis Center) did to track usage and report it, all of that, I think, was, actually, those interventions, I think, worked. I think they were really important, and I do think that what we are … this absence of a deluge is actually a huge number of people making a very concerted effort to prevent it from happening.

BADANES: That’s encouraging.

NESS: Madeleine, you made a really important point that this deterrence from prosecution, it’s effective for internal actors, …

BADANES: Yeah.

DAEPP: Yeah, that’s right.

NESS: … right. So for foreign states who are trying to interfere with other people’s elections, the fear of prosecution is not going to be as much of a deterrent.

BADANES: That is true. I will say what we saw in this election cycle, in particular in the US, was a concerted effort by the intelligence community to call out and name nation-state actors who were either doing cyberattacks or influence operations, specific videos that they identified, whether there was AI involved or not. I think that level of communication with the public while maybe doesn’t lead to those actors going to jail—maybe someday—but does in fact lead to a more aware public and therefore hopefully a less effective campaign. If people on the other end … and it’s a little bit into the literacy space, and it’s something that we’ve seen government again in this last cycle do very effectively, to name and shame essentially when they see these things in part, though, to make sure voters are aware of what’s happening. We’re not quite through this big global election year; we have a couple more elections before we really hit the end of the year, but it’s winding down. What is next for you all? Are you all going to continue this work? Are you going build on it? What comes next?

DAEPP: So our research in India actually wasn’t focused specifically on elections. It was about AI and digital communications.

BADANES: Ahh.

DAEPP: Because, you know, again, like India is this laboratory.

BADANES: Sure.

DAEPP: And I think what we learned from that work is that, you know, this is going to be a part of our digital communications and our information system going forward without question. And the question is just, like, what are the viable business models, right? What are the applications that work? And again, that comes back to making sure that whatever AI … you know, people when they build AI into their entire, you know, newsletter-writing system, when they build it into their content production, that they can feel confident that it’s safe and that it meets their needs and that they’re protected when they use it. And similarly, like, what are those applications that really work, and how do you empower those lead users while mitigating those harms and supporting civil society and mitigating those harms? I think that’s an incredible, like, that’s—as a researcher—that’s, you know, that’s a career, right.

BADANES: Yeah.

DAEPP: That’s a wonderful research space. And so I think understanding how to support AI that is safe, that enables people globally to have self-determination in how models represent them, and that is usable and powerful, I think that’s broadly …

BADANES: Where this goes.

DAEPP: … what I want to drive.

BADANES: Robert, how about you?

NESS: You know, so I mentioned earlier on these AI alignment issues.

BADANES: Yeah.

NESS: And I was really fascinated by how local and contextual those issues really are. So to give an example from Taiwan, we train these models on training data that we find from the internet. Well, when it comes to, say, Mandarin Chinese, you can imagine the proportion of content, of just the quantity of content, on the internet that comes from China is a lot more than the quantity that comes from Taiwan. And of course, what’s politically correct in China is different from what’s politically correct in Taiwan. And so when we were talking to Taiwanese, a lot of people had these concerns about, you know, having these large language models that reflected Taiwanese values. We heard the same thing in India about just people on different sides of the political spectrum and, kind of, looking at … a YouTuber in India had walked us through this … how, for example, a founding father of India, there was a disparate literature in favor of this person and some more critical of this person, and he had spent time trying to suss out whether GPT-4 was on one side or the other.

BADANES: Oh. Whose side are you on? [LAUGHS]

NESS: Right, and so I think for our alignment research at Microsoft Research, this becomes the beginning of, kind of, a very fruitful way of engaging with local stakeholders and making sure that we can reflect these concerns in the models that we develop and deploy.

BADANES: Yeah. Well, first, I just want to thank you guys for all the work you’ve done. This is amazing. We’ve really enjoyed partnering with you. I’ve loved learning about the research and the efforts, and I’m excited to see what you do next. I always want to end these kinds of conversations on a more positive note, because we’ve talked a lot about the weaponization of AI and, you know, how … ethical areas that are confusing and … but I am sure at some point in your work, you came across really positive use cases of AI when it comes to democracy, or at least I hope you have. [LAUGHS] Do you have any examples or can you leave us with something about where you see either it going or actively being used in a way to really strengthen democratic processes or systems?

DAEPP: Yeah, I mean, there is just a big paper in Science, right, which, as researchers, when something comes out in Science, you know your field is about to change, right, …

BADANES: Yeah.

DAEPP: … showing that an AI model in, like, political deliberations, small groups of UK residents talking about difficult topics like Brexit, you know, climate crisis, difficult topics, that in these conversations, an AI moderator created, like, consensus statements that represented the majority opinion, still showed the minority opinion, but that participants preferred to a human-written statement and in fact preferred to their original opinion.

BADANES: Wow.

DAEPP: And that this, you know, not only works in these randomized controlled trials but actually works in a real citizens deliberation. And so that potential of, like, carefully fine-tuned, like, carefully aligned AI to actually help people find points of agreement, that’s a really exciting space.

BADANES: So next time my kids are in a fight, I’m going to point them to Copilot and say, work with Copilot to mediate. [LAUGHS] No, that’s really, really interesting. Robert, how about you?

NESS: She, kind of, stole my example. [LAUGHTER] But I’ll take it from a different perspective. So, yes, like how these technologies can enable people to collaborate and ideally, I think, from a democratic standpoint, at a local level, right. So, I mean, I think so much of our politics were, kind of, focused at the national-level campaign, but our opportunity to collaborate is much more … we’re much more easily … we can collaborate much more easily with people who are in our local constituencies. And I think to myself about, kind of, like, the decline particularly of local newspapers, local media.

BADANES: Right.

NESS: And so I wonder, you know, can these technologies help address that problem in terms of just, kind of, information about, say, your local community, as well as local politicians. And, yeah, and to Madeleine’s point, so Madeleine started the conversation talking about her background in urban planning and some of the work she did, you know, working on a local level with local officials to bring technology to the level of cities. And I think, like, well, you know, politics are local, right. So, you know, I think that that’s where there’s a lot of opportunity for improvement.

BADANES: Well, Robert, you just queued up a topic for a whole other podcast because our team also does a lot of work around journalism, and I will say we have seen that AI at the local level with local news is really a powerful tool that we’re starting to see a lot of appetite and interest for in order to overcome some of the hurdles they face right now in that industry when it comes to capacity, financing, you know, not able to be in all of the places they want to be at once to make sure that they’re reporting equally across the community. This is, like, a perfect use case for AI, and we’re starting to see folks who are really using it. So maybe we’ll come back and do this again another time on that topic. But I just want to thank you both, Madeleine and Robert, for joining us today and sharing your insights. This was really a fascinating conversation. I know I learned a lot. I hope that our listeners learned a lot, as well.

[MUSIC]

And, listeners, I hope that you tune in for more episodes of Ideas, where we continue to explore the technologies shaping our future and the big ideas behind them. Thank you, guys, so much.

DAEPP: Thank you.

NESS: Thank you.

[MUSIC FADES]

[1] The video generation model Sora was released publicly earlier this month (opens in new tab).

[2] For a summary of and link to the report, see the Microsoft On the Issues blog post China tests US voter fault lines and ramps AI content to boost its geopolitical interests (opens in new tab).

NICOLE IMMORLICA: Thank you. 

HUIZINGA: So before we get into specifics on the big ideas behind your work, let’s find out a little bit about how and why you started doing it. Tell us your research origin story and, if there was one, what big idea or animating “what if” inspired young Nicole and launched a career in theoretical economics and computation research? 

IMMORLICA: So I took a rather circuitous route to my current research path. In high school, I thought I actually wanted to study physics, specifically cosmology, because I was super curious about the origins and evolution of the universe. In college, I realized on a day-to-day basis, what I really enjoyed was the math underlying physics, in particular proving theorems. So I changed my major to computer science, which was the closest thing to math that seemed to have a promising career path. [LAUGHTER] But when graduation came, I just wasn’t ready to be a grownup and enter the workforce! So I defaulted to graduate school thinking I’d continue my studies in theoretical computer science. It was in graduate school where I found my passion for the intersection of CS theory and micro-economics. I was just really enthralled with this idea that I could use the math that I so love to understand society and to help shape it in ways that improve the world for everyone in it. 

HUIZINGA: I’ve yet to meet an accomplished researcher who didn’t have at least one inspirational “who” behind the “what.” So tell us about the influential people in your life. Who are your heroes, economic or otherwise, and how did their ideas inspire yours and even inform your career? 

IMMORLICA: Yeah, of course. So when I was a graduate student at MIT, you know, I was happily enjoying my math, and just on a whim, I decided to take a course, along with a bunch of my other MIT graduate students, at Harvard from Professor Al Roth. And this was a market design course. We didn’t even really know what market design was, but in the context of that course, Al himself and the course content just demonstrated to me the transformative power of algorithms and economics. So, I mean, you might have heard of Al. He eventually won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work using a famous matching algorithm to optimize markets for doctors and separately for kidney exchange programs. And I thought to myself, wow, this is such meaningful work. This is something that I want to do, something I can contribute to the world, you know, something that my skill set is well adapted to. And so I just decided to move on with that, and I’ve never really looked back. It’s so satisfying to do something that’s both … I like both the means and I care very deeply about the ends. 

HUIZINGA: So, Nicole, you mentioned you took a course from Al Roth. Did he become anything more to you than that one sort of inspirational teacher? Did you have any interaction with him? And were there any other professors, authors, or people that inspired you in the coursework and graduate studies side of things? 

IMMORLICA: Yeah, I mean, Al has been transformative for my whole career. Like, I first met him in the context of that course, but I, and many of the graduate students in my area, have continued to work with him, speak to him at conferences, be influenced by him, so he’s been there throughout my career for me. 

HUIZINGA: Right, right, right … 

IMMORLICA: In terms of other inspirations, I’ve really admired throughout my career … this is maybe more structurally how different individuals operate their careers. So, for example, Jennifer Chayes, who was the leader of the Microsoft Research lab that I joined … 

HUIZINGA: Yeah! 

IMMORLICA: … and nowadays Sue Dumais. Various other classic figures like Éva Tardos. Like, all of these are incredibly strong, driven women that have a vision of research, which has been transformative in their individual fields but also care very deeply about the community and the larger context than just themselves and creating spaces for people to really flourish. And I really admire that, as well. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah, I’ve had both Sue and Jennifer on the show before, and they are amazing. Absolutely. Well, listen, Nicole, as an English major, I was thrilled—and a little surprised—to hear that literature has influenced your work in economics. I did not have that on my bingo card. Tell us about your interactions with literature and how they broadened your vision of optimization and economic models.

IMMORLICA: Oh, I read a lot, especially fiction. And I care very deeply about being a broad human being, like, with a lot of different facets. And so I seek inspiration not just from my fellow economists and computer scientists but also from artists and writers. One specific example would be Walt Whitman. So I took up this poetry class as an MIT alumni, Walt Whitman, and we, in the context of that course, of course, read his famous poem “Song of Myself.” And I remember one specific verse just really struck me, where he writes, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” And this just was so powerful because, you know, in traditional economic models, we assume that individuals seek to optimize a single objective function, which we call their utility, but what Whitman is pointing out is that we actually have many different objective functions, which can even conflict with one another, and some at times are more salient than others, and they arise from my many identities as a member of my family, as an American, as you know, a computer scientist, as an economist, and maybe we should actually try to think a little bit more seriously about these multiple identities in the context of our modeling. 

HUIZINGA: That just warms my English major heart … [LAUGHS] 

IMMORLICA: I’m glad! [LAUGHS] 

HUIZINGA: Oh my gosh. And it’s so interesting because, yeah, we always think of, sort of, singular optimization. And so it’s like, how do we expand our horizon on that sort of optimization vision? So I love that. Well, you’ve received what I can only call a flurry of honors and awards last year. Most recently, you were named an ACM Fellow—ACM being Association for Computing Machinery, for those who don’t know—which acknowledges people who bring, and I quote, “transformative contributions to computing science and technology.” Now your citation is for, and I quote again, “contributions to economics and computation, including market design, auctions, and social networks.” That’s a mouthful, but if we’re talking about transformative contributions, how were things different before you brought your ideas to this field, and how were your contributions transformative or groundbreaking? 

IMMORLICA: Yeah, so it’s actually a relatively new thing for computer scientists to study economics, and I was among the first cohort to do so seriously. So before our time, economists mostly focused on finding optimal solutions to the problems they posed without regard for the computational or informational requirements therein. But computer scientists have an extensive toolkit to manage such complexities. So, for example, in a paper on pricing, which is a classic economic problem—how do we set up prices for goods in a store?—my coauthors and I used the computer science notion of approximation to show that a very simple menu of prices generates almost optimal revenue for the seller. And prior to this work, economists only knew how to characterize optimal but infinitely large and thereby impractical menus of prices. So this is an example of the kind of work that I and other computer scientists do that can really transform economics. 

HUIZINGA: Right. Well, in addition to the ACM fellowship, another honor you received from ACM in 2023 was the Test of Time Award, where the Special Interest Group on Economics and Computation, or SIGecom, recognizes influential papers published between 10 and 25 years ago that significantly impacted research or applications in economics and computation. Now you got this award for a paper you cowrote in 2005 called “Marriage, Honesty, and Stability.” Clearly, I’m not an economist because I thought this was about how to avoid getting a divorce, but actually, it’s about a well-known and very difficult problem called the stable marriage problem. Tell us about this problem and the paper and why, as the award states, it’s stood the test of time. 

IMMORLICA: Sure. You’re not the only one to have misinterpreted the title. [LAUGHTER] I remember I gave a talk once and someone came and when they left the talk, they said, I did not think that this was about math! But, you know, math, as I learned, is about life, and the stable marriage problem has, you know, interpretation about marriage and divorce. In particular, the problem asks, how can we match market participants to one another such that no pair prefer each other to their assigned match? So to relate this to the somewhat outdated application of marriage markets, the market participants could be men and women, and the stable marriage problem asks if there is a set of marriages such that no pair of couples seeks a divorce in order to marry each other. And so, you know, that’s not really a problem we solve in real life, but there’s a lot of modern applications of this problem. For example, assigning medical students to hospitals for their residencies, or if you have children, many cities in the United States and around the world use this stable marriage problem to think about the assignment of K-to-12 students to public schools. And so in these applications, the stability property has been shown to contribute to the longevity of the market. And in the 1960s, David Gale and Lloyd Shapley proved, via an algorithm, interestingly, that stable matches exist! Well, in fact, there can be exponentially many stable matches. And so this leads to a very important question for people that want to apply this theory to practice, which is, which stable match should they select among the many ones that exist, and what algorithm should they use to select it? So our work shows that under very natural conditions, namely that preference lists are short and sufficiently random, it doesn’t matter. Most participants have a unique stable match. And so, you know, you can just design your market without worrying too much about what algorithm you use or which match you select because for most people it doesn’t matter. And since our paper, many researchers have followed up on our work studying conditions under which matchings are essentially unique and thereby influencing policy recommendations. 

HUIZINGA: Hmm. So this work was clearly focused on the economics side of things like markets. So this seems to have wide application outside of economics. Is that accurate? 

IMMORLICA: Well, it depends how you define economics, so I would … 

HUIZINGA: I suppose! [LAUGHTER] 

IMMORLICA: I define economics as the problem … I mean, Al Roth, for example, wrote a book whose title was Who Gets What—and Why. 

HUIZINGA: Ooh.

IMMORLICA: So economics is all about, how do we allocate stuff? How do we allocate scarce resources? And many economic problems are not about spending money. It’s about how do we create outcomes in the world. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah. 

IMMORLICA: And so I would say all of these problem domains are economics. 

HUIZINGA: Well, finally, as regards the “flurry” of honors, besides being named an ACM Fellow and also this Test of Time Award, you were also named an Economic Theory Fellow by the Society for [the] Advancement of Economic Theory, or SAET. And the primary qualification here was to have “substantially or creatively advanced theoretical economics.” So what were the big challenges you tackled, and what big ideas did you contribute to advance economic theory? 

IMMORLICA: So as we’ve discussed, I and others with my background have done a lot to advance economic theory through the lens of computational thinking. 

HUIZINGA: Mmm … 

IMMORLICA: We’ve introduced ideas such as approximation, which we discussed earlier, or machine learning to economic models and proposing them as solution concepts. We’ve also used computer science tools to solve problems within these models. So two examples from my own work include randomized algorithm analysis and stochastic gradient descent. And importantly, we’ve introduced very relevant new settings to the field of economics. So, you know, I’ve worked hard on large-scale auction design and associated auto-bidding algorithms, for instance, which are a primary source of revenue for tech companies these days. I’ve thought a lot about how data enters into markets and how we should think about data in the context of market design. And lately, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about generative AI and its impact in the economy at both the micro and macro levels. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah. Let’s take a detour for a minute and get into the philosophical weeds on this idea of theory. And I want to cite an article that was written way back in 2008 by the editor of Wired magazine at the time, Chris Anderson. He wrote an article titled “The End of Theory,” which was provocative in itself. And he began by quoting the British statistician George Box, who famously said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” And then he argued that in an era of massively abundant data, companies didn’t have to settle for wrong models. And then he went even further and attacked the very idea of theory and, citing Google, he said, “Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity.” So, Nicole, from your perch, 15 years later, in the age of generative AI, what did Chris Anderson get right, and what did he get wrong? 

IMMORLICA: So, honestly, when generative AI came out, I had a bit of a moment, a like crisis of confidence, so to speak, in the value of theory in my own work. 

HUIZINGA: Really! 

IMMORLICA: And I decided to dive into a data-driven project, which was not my background at all. As a complete newbie, I was quite shocked by what I found, which is probably common knowledge among experts: data is very messy and very noisy, and it’s very hard to get any signal out of it. Theory is an essential counterpart to any data-driven research. It provides a guiding light. But even more importantly, theory allows us to illuminate things that have not even happened. So with models, we can hypothesize about possible futures and use that to shape what direction we take. Relatedly, what I think that article got most wrong was the statement that correlation supersedes causation, which is actually how the article closes, this idea that causation is dead or dying. I think causation will never become irrelevant. Causation is what allows us to reason about counterfactuals. It’s fundamentally irreplaceable. It’s like, you know, data, you can only see data about things that happened. You can’t see data about things that could happen but haven’t or, you know, about alternative futures. 

HUIZINGA: Interesting. 

IMMORLICA: And that’s what theory gives you. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah. Well, let’s continue on that a little bit because this show is yet another part of our short “series within a series” featuring some of the work going on in the AI, Cognition, and the Economy initiative at Microsoft Research. And I just did an episode with Brendan Lucier and Mert Demirer on the micro- and macro-economic impact of generative AI. And you were part of that project, but another fascinating project you’re involved in right now looks at the impact of generative AI on what you call the “content ecosystem.” So what’s the problem behind this research, and what unique incentive challenges are content creators facing in light of large language and multimodal AI models? 

IMMORLICA: Yeah, so this is a project with Brendan, as well, whom you interviewed previously, and also Nageeb Ali, an economist and AICE Fellow at Penn State, and Meena Jagadeesan, who was my intern from Microsoft Research from UC Berkeley. So when you think about content or really any consumption good, there’s often a whole supply chain that produces it. For music, for example, there’s the composition of the song, the recording, the mixing, and finally the delivery to the consumer. And all of these steps involve multiple humans producing things, generating things, getting paid along the way. One way to think about generative AI is that it allows the consumer to bypass this supply chain and just generate the content directly. 

HUIZINGA: Right … 

IMMORLICA: So, for example, like, I could ask a model, an AI model, to compose and play a song about my cat named Whiskey. [LAUGHTER] And it would do a decent job of it, and it would tailor the song to my specific situation. But there are drawbacks, as well. One thing many researchers fear is that AI needs human-generated content to train. And so if people start bypassing the supply chain and just using AI-generated content, there won’t be any content for AI to train on and AI will cease to improve.

HUIZINGA: Right. 

IMMORLICA: Another thing that could be troubling is that there are economies of scale. So there is a nontrivial cost to producing music, even for AI, and if we share that cost among many listeners, it becomes more affordable. But if we each access the content ourselves, it’s going to impose a large per-song cost. And then finally, and this is, I think, most salient to most people, there’s some kind of social benefit to having songs that everyone listens to. It provides a common ground for understanding. It’s a pillar of our culture, right. And so if we bypass that, aren’t we losing something? So for all of these reasons, it becomes very important to understand the market conditions under which people will choose to bypass supply chains and the associated costs and benefits of this. What we show in this work, which is very much work in progress, is that when AI is very costly, neither producers nor consumers will use it, but as it gets cheaper, at first, it actually helps content producers that can leverage it to augment their own ability, creating higher-quality content, more personalized content more cheaply. But then, as the AI gets super cheap, this bypassing behavior starts to emerge, and the content creators are driven out of the market. 

HUIZINGA: Right. So what do we do about that? 

IMMORLICA: Well, you know, you have to take a stance on whether that’s even a good thing or a bad thing, … 

HUIZINGA: Right! 

IMMORLICA: … so it could be that we do nothing about it. We could also impose a sort of minimum wage on AI, if you like, to artificially inflate its costs. We could try to amplify the parts of the system that lead towards more human-generated content, like this sociability, the fact that we all are listening to the same stuff. We could try to make that more salient for people. But, you know, generally speaking, I’m not really in a place to take a stance on whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. I think this is for policymakers. 

HUIZINGA: It feels like we’re at an inflection point. I’m really interested to see what your research in this arena, the content ecosystem, brings. You know, I’ll mention, too, recently I read a blog written by Yoshua Bengio and Vincent Conitzer, and they acknowledged that the image that they used at the top had been created by an AI bot. And then they said they made a donation to an art museum to say, we’re giving something back to the artistic community that we may have used. Where do you see this, you know, #NoLLM situation coming in this content ecosystem market? 

IMMORLICA: Yeah, that’s a very interesting move on their part. I know Vince quite well, actually. I’m not sure that artists of the sort of “art museum nature” suffer, so … 

HUIZINGA: Right? [LAUGHS] 

IMMORLICA: One of my favorite artists is Laurie Anderson. I don’t know if you’ve seen her work at all … 

HUIZINGA: Yeah, I have, yeah. 

IMMORLICA: … but she has a piece in the MASS MoCA right now, which is just brilliant, where she actually uses generative AI to create a sequence of images that creates an alternate story about her family history. And it’s just really, really cool. I’m more worried about people who are doing art vocationally, and I think, and maybe you heard some of this from Mert and Brendan, like what’s going to happen is that careers are going to shift and different vocations will become more salient, and we’ve seen this through every technological revolution. People shift their work towards the things that are uniquely human that we can provide and if generating an image at the top of a blog is not one of them, you know, so be it. People will do something else. 

HUIZINGA: Right, right, right. Yeah, I just … we’re on the cusp, and there’s a lot of things that are going to happen in the next couple of years, maybe a couple of months, who knows? [LAUGHTER] Well, we hear a lot of dystopian fears—some of them we’ve just referred to—around AI and its impact on humanity, but those fears are often dismissed by tech optimists as what I might call “unwishful thinking.” So your research interests involve the design and use of sociotechnical systems to quote, “explain, predict, and shape behavioral patterns in various online and offline systems, markets, and games.” Now I’m with you on the “explain and predict” but when we get to shaping behavioral patterns, I wonder how we tease out the bad from the good. So, in light of the power of these sociotechnical systems, what could possibly go wrong, Nicole, if in fact you got everything right? 

IMMORLICA: Yeah, first I should clarify something. When I say I’m interested in shaping behavioral patterns, I don’t mean that I want to impose particular behaviors on people but rather that I want to design systems that expose to people relevant information and possible actions so that they have the power to shape their own behavior to achieve their own goals. And if we’re able to do that, and do it really well, then things can only really go wrong if you believe people aren’t good at making themselves happy. I mean, there’s certainly evidence of this, like the field of behavioral economics, to which I have contributed some, tries to understand how and when people make mistakes in their behavioral choices. And it proposes ways to help people mitigate these mistakes. But I caution us from going too far in this direction because at the end of the day, I believe people know things about themselves that no external authority can know. And you don’t want to impose constraints that prevent people from acting on that information. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah. 

IMMORLICA: Another issue here is, of course, externalities. It could be that my behavior makes me happy but makes you unhappy. [LAUGHTER] So another thing that can go wrong is that we, as designers of technology, fail to capture these underlying externalities. I mean, ideally, like an economist would say, well, you should pay with your own happiness for any negative externality you impose on others. And the fields of market and mechanism design have identified very beautiful ways of making this happen automatically in simple settings, such as the famous Vickrey auction. But getting this right in the complex sociotechnical systems of our day is quite a challenge. 

HUIZINGA: OK, go back to that auction. What did you call it? The Vickrey auction? 

IMMORLICA: Yeah, so Vickrey was an economist, and he proposed an auction format that … so an auction is trying to find a way to allocate goods, let’s say, to bidders such that the bidders that value the goods the most are the ones that win them. 

HUIZINGA: Hm. 

IMMORLICA: But of course, these bidders are imposing a negative externality on the people who lose, right? [LAUGHTER] And so what Vickrey showed is that a well-designed system of prices can compensate the losers exactly for the externality that is imposed on them. A very simple example of a Vickrey auction is if you’re selling just one good, like a painting, then what you should do, according to Vickrey, is solicit bids, give it to the highest bidder, and charge them the second-highest price. 

HUIZINGA: Interesting … 

IMMORLICA: And so … that’s going to have good outcomes for society. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah, yeah. I want to expand on a couple of thoughts here. One is as you started out to answer this question, you said, well, I’m not interested in shaping behaviors in terms of making you do what I want you to do. But maybe someone else is. What happens if it falls into the wrong hands? 

IMMORLICA: Yeah, I mean, there’s definitely competing interests. Everybody has their own objectives, and … 

HUIZINGA: Sure, sure. 

IMMORLICA: … I might be very fundamentally opposed to some of them, but everybody’s trying to optimize something, and there are competing optimization objectives. And so what’s going to happen if people are leveraging this technology to optimize for themselves and thereby harming me a lot? 

HUIZINGA: Right? 

IMMORLICA: Ideally, we’ll have regulation to kind of cover that. I think what I’m more worried about is the idea that the technology itself might not be aligned with me, right. Like at the end of the day, there are companies that are producing this technology that I’m then using to achieve my objectives, but the company’s objectives, the creators of the technology, might not be completely aligned with the person’s objectives. And so I’ve looked a little bit in my research about how this potential misalignment might result in outcomes that are not all that great for either party. 

HUIZINGA: Wow. Is that stuff that’s in the works? 

IMMORLICA: We have a few published papers on the area. I don’t know if you want me to get into them. 

HUIZINGA: No, actually, what we’ll probably do is put some in the show notes. We’ll link people to those papers because I think that’s an interesting topic. Listen, most research is incremental in nature, where the ideas are basically iterative steps on existing work. But sometimes there are out-of-the-box ideas that feel like bigger swings or even outrageous, and Microsoft is well known for making room for these. Have you had an idea that felt outrageous, any idea that felt outrageous, or is there anything that you might even consider outrageous now that you’re currently working on or even thinking about? 

IMMORLICA: Yeah, well, I mean, this whole moment in history feels outrageous, honestly! [LAUGHTER] It’s like I’m kind of living in the sci-fi novels of my youth. 

HUIZINGA: Right? 

IMMORLICA: So together with my economics and social science colleagues at Microsoft Research, one thing that we’re really trying to think through is this outrageous idea of agentic AI. 

HUIZINGA: Mmm … 

IMMORLICA: That is, every single individual and business can have their own AI that acts like their own personal butler that knows them intimately and can take actions on their behalf. In such a world, what will become of the internet, social media, platforms like Amazon, Spotify, Uber? On the one hand, you know, maybe this is good because these individual agentic AIs can just bypass all of these kinds of intermediaries. For example, if I have a busy day of back-to-back meetings at work, my personal AI can notice that I have no time for lunch, contact the AI of some restaurant to order a sandwich for me, make sure that sandwich is tailored to my dietary needs and preferences, and then contact the AI of a delivery service to make sure that sandwich is sitting on my desk when I walk into my noon meeting, right. 

HUIZINGA: Right … 

IMMORLICA: And this is a huge disruption to how things currently work. It’s shifting the power away from centralized platforms, back to individuals and giving them the agency over their data and the power to leverage it to fulfill their needs. So the, sort of, big questions that we’re thinking about right now is, how will such decentralized markets work? How will they be monetized? Will it be a better world than the one we live in now, or are we losing something? And if it is a better world, how can we get from here to there? And if it’s a worse world, how can we steer the ship in the other direction, you know? 

HUIZINGA: Right. 

IMMORLICA: These are all very important questions in this time. 

HUIZINGA: Does this feel like it’s imminent? 

IMMORLICA: I do think it’s imminent. And I think, you know, in life, you can, kind of, decide whether to embrace the good or embrace the bad, see the glass as half-full or half-empty, and … 

HUIZINGA: Yeah. 

IMMORLICA: … I am hoping that society will see the half-full side of these amazing technologies and leverage them to do really great things in the world. 

HUIZINGA: Man, I would love to talk to you for another hour, but we have to close things up. To close this show, I want to do something new with you, a sort of lightning round of short questions with short answers that give us a little window into your life. So are you ready? 

IMMORLICA: Yup! 

HUIZINGA: OK. First one, what are you reading right now for work? 

IMMORLICA: Lots of papers of my students that are on the job market to help prepare recommendation letters. It’s actually very inspiring to see the creativity of the younger generation. In terms of books, I’m reading the Idea Factory, which is about the creation of Bell Labs. 

HUIZINGA: Ooh! Interesting! 

IMMORLICA: You might be interested in it actually. It talks about the value of theory and understanding the fundamentals of a problem space and the sort of business value of that, so it’s very intriguing. 

HUIZINGA: OK, second question. What are you reading for pleasure? 

IMMORLICA: The book on my nightstand right now is the Epic of Gilgamesh, the graphic novel version. I’m actually quite enthralled by graphic novels ever since I first encountered Maus by Art Spiegelman in the ’90s. But my favorite reading leans towards magic realism, so like Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino, Isabel Allende, and the like. I try to read nonfiction for pleasure, too, but I generally find life is a bit too short for that genre! [LAUGHTER] 

HUIZINGA: Well, and I made an assumption that what you were reading for work wasn’t pleasurable, but um, moving on, question number three, what app doesn’t exist but should? 

IMMORLICA: Teleportation. 

HUIZINGA: Ooh, fascinating. What app exists but shouldn’t? 

IMMORLICA: That’s much harder for me. I think all apps within legal bounds should be allowed to exist and the free market should decide which ones survive. Should there be more regulation of apps? Perhaps. But more at the level of giving people tools to manage their consumption at their own discretion and not outlawing specific apps; that just feels too paternalistic to me. 

HUIZINGA: Interesting. OK, next question. What’s one thing that used to be very important to you but isn’t so much anymore? 

IMMORLICA: Freedom. So by that I mean the freedom to do whatever I want, whenever I want, with whomever I want. This feeling that I could go anywhere at any time without any preparation, that I could be the Paul Erdős of the 21st century, traveling from city to city, living out of a suitcase, doing beautiful math just for the art of it. This feeling that I have no responsibilities. Like, I really bought into that in my 20s. 

HUIZINGA: And not so much now? 

IMMORLICA: No. 

HUIZINGA: OK, so what’s one thing that wasn’t very important to you but is now? 

IMMORLICA: Now, as Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.” [LAUGHTER] And so now it’s important to me to have things to lose—roots, family, friends, pets. I think this is really what gives my life meaning. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah, having Janis Joplin cited in this podcast wasn’t on my bingo card either, but that’s great. Well, finally, Nicole, I want to ask you this question based on something we talked about before. Our audience doesn’t know it, but I think it’s funny. What do Norah Jones and oatmeal have in common for you? 

IMMORLICA: Yeah, so I use these in conversation as examples of comfort and nostalgia in the categories of music and food because I think they’re well-known examples. But for me personally, comfort is the Brahms Cello Sonata in E Minor, which was in fact my high school cello performance piece, and nostalgia is spaghetti with homemade marinara sauce, either my boyfriend’s version or, in my childhood, my Italian grandma’s version. 

HUIZINGA: Man! Poetry, art, cooking, music … who would have expected all of these to come into an economist/computer scientist podcast on the Microsoft Research Podcast. Nicole Immorlica, how fun to have you on the show! Thanks for joining us today on Ideas! 

IMMORLICA: Thank you for having me. 

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GUEST HOST KARIN STRAUSS: I’m your guest host Karin Strauss, a senior principal research manager at Microsoft. For nearly a decade, my colleagues and I—along with a fantastic and talented group of collaborators from academia and industry—have been working together to help close the data creation–data storage gap. We’re producing far more digital information than we can possibly store. One solution we’ve explored uses synthetic DNA as a medium, and over the years, we’ve contributed to steady and promising progress in the area. We’ve helped push the boundaries of how much DNA writer can simultaneously store, shown that full automation is possible, and helped create an ecosystem for the commercial success of DNA data storage. And just this week, we’ve made one of our most advanced tools for encoding and decoding data in DNA open source. Joining me today to discuss the state of DNA data storage and some of our contributions are several members of the DNA Data Storage Project at Microsoft Research: Principal Researcher Bichlien Nguyen, Senior Researcher Jake Smith, and Partner Research Manager Sergey Yekhanin. Bichlien, Jake, and Sergey, welcome to the podcast.

BICHLIEN NGUYEN: Thanks for having us, Karin.

SERGEY YEKHANIN: Thank you so much.

JAKE SMITH: Yes, thank you.

STRAUSS: So before getting into the details of DNA data storage and our work, I’d like to talk about the big idea behind the work and how we all got here. I’ve often described the DNA Data Storage Project as turning science fiction into reality. When we started the project in 2015, though, the idea of using DNA for archival storage was already out there and had been for over five decades. Still, when I talked about the work in the area, people were pretty skeptical in the beginning, and I heard things like, “Wow, why are you thinking about that? It’s so far off.” So, first, please share a bit of your research backgrounds and then how you came to work on this project. Where did you first encounter this idea, what do you remember about your initial impressions—or the impressions of others—and what made you want to get involved? Sergey, why don’t you start.

YEKHANIN: Thanks so much. So I’m a coding theorist by training, so, like, my core areas of research have been error-correcting codes and also computational complexity theory. So I joined the project probably, like, within half a year of the time that it was born, and thanks, Karin, for inviting me to join. So, like, that was roughly the time when I moved from a different lab, from the Silicon Valley lab in California to the Redmond lab, and actually, it just so happened that at that moment, I was thinking about what to do next. Like, in California, I was mostly working on coding for distributed storage, and when I joined here, that effort kept going. But I had some free cycles, and that was the moment when Karin came just to my office and told me about the project. So, indeed, initially, it did feel a lot like science fiction. Because, I mean, we are used to coding for digital storage media, like for magnetic storage media, and here, like, this is biology, and, like, why exactly these kind of molecules? There are so many different molecules. Like, why that? But honestly, like, I didn’t try to pretend to be a biologist and make conclusions about whether this is the right medium or the wrong medium. So I tried to look into these kinds of questions from a technical standpoint, and there was a lot of, kind of, deep, interesting coding questions, and that was the main attraction for me. At the same time, I wasn’t convinced that we will get as far as we actually got, and I wasn’t immediately convinced about the future of the field, but, kind of, just the depth and the richness of the, what I’ll call, technical problems, that’s what made it appealing for me, and I, kind of, enthusiastically joined. And also, I guess, the culture of the team. So, like, it did feel like a startup. Like, we all work for Microsoft; we’re all Microsoft researchers. Microsoft isn’t a startup. But that team, the team that drove the DNA Data Storage Project, it did feel like a startup, and it was something unusual and exciting for me.

NGUYEN: Oh, I love that, Sergey. So my background is in organic chemistry, and Karin had reached out to me, and I interviewed not knowing what Karin wanted. Actually … so I took the job kind of blind because I was like, “Hmm, Microsoft Research? … DNA biotech? …” I was very, very curious, and then when she told me that this project was about DNA data storage, I was like, this is a crazy, crazy idea. I definitely was not sold on it, but I was like, well, look, I get to meet and work with so many interesting people from different backgrounds that, one, even if it doesn’t work out, I’m going to learn something, and, two, I think it could work, like it could work. And so I think that’s really what motivated me to join.

SMITH: The first thing that you think when you hear about we’re going to take what is our hard drive and we’re going to turn that into DNA is that this is nuts. But, you know, it didn’t take very long after that. I come from a chemistry, biotech-type background where I’ve been working on designing drugs, and there, DNA is this thing off in the nethers, you know. You look at it every now and then to see what information it can tell you about, you know, what maybe your drug might be hitting on the target side, and it’s, you know, that connection—that the DNA contains the information in the living systems, the DNA contains the information in our assays, and why could the DNA not contain the information that we, you know, think more about every day, that information that lives in our computers—as an extremely cool idea.

STRAUSS: Through our work, we’ve had years to wrap our heads around DNA data storage. But, Jake, could you tell us a little bit about how DNA data storage works and why we’re interested in looking into the technology?

SMITH: So you mentioned it earlier, Karin, that this really starts from the fundamental data production–data storage gap, where we produce way more data nowadays than we could ever have imagined years ago. And it’s more than we can practically store in magnetic media. This is a problem because, you know, we have data; we have recognized the value of data with the rise of large language models and these other big generative models. The data that we do produce, our video has gone from, you know, substantially small, down at 480 resolution, all the way up to things at 8K resolution that now take orders of magnitude more storage. And so we really need a denser medium on the other side to contain that. DNA is extremely dense. It holds far, far more information per unit volume, per unit mass than any storage media that we have available today. This, along with the fact that DNA is itself a relatively rugged molecule—it lives in our body; it lives outside our body for thousands and thousands of years if we, you know, leave it alone to do its thing—makes it a very attractive media, particularly compared to the traditional magnetic media, which has lower density and a much shorter lifetime on the, you know, scale of decades at most.

So how does DNA data storage actually work? Well, at a very high level, we start out in the digital domain, where we have our information represented as ones and zeros, and we need to convert that into a series of A’s, C’s, T’s, and G’s that we could then actually produce, and this is really the domain of Sergey. He’ll tell us much more about how this works later on. For now, let’s just assume we’ve done this. And now our information, you know, lives in the DNA base domain. It’s still in the digital world. It’s just represented as A’s, C’s, T’s, and G’s, and we now need to make this physical so that we can store it. This is accomplished through large-scale DNA synthesis. Once the DNA has been synthesized with the sequences that we specified, we need to store it. There’s a lot of ways we can think about storing it. Bichlien’s done great work looking at DNA encapsulation, as well as, you know, other more raw just DNA-on-glass-type techniques. And we’ve done some work looking at the susceptibility of DNA stored in this unencapsulated form to things like atmospheric humidity, to temperature changes and, most excitingly, to things like neutron radiation. So we’ve stored our data in this physical form, we’ve archived it, and coming back to it, likely many years in the future because the properties of DNA match up very well with archival storage, we need to convert it back into the digital domain. And this is done through a technique called DNA sequencing. What this does is it puts the molecules through some sort of machine, and on the other side of the machine, we get out, you know, a noisy representation of what the actual sequence of bases in the molecules were. We have one final step. We need to take this series of noisy sequences and convert it back into ones and zeros. Once we do this, we return to our original data and we’ve completed, let’s call it, one DNA data storage cycle.

STRAUSS: We’ll get into this in more detail later, but maybe, Sergey, we dig a little bit on encoding-decoding end of things and how DNA is different as a medium from other types of media.

YEKHANIN: Sure. So, like, I mean, coding is an important aspect of this whole idea of DNA data storage because we have to deal with errors—it’s a new medium—but talking about error-correcting codes in the context of DNA data storage, so, I mean, usually, like … what are error-correcting codes about? Like, on the very high level, right, I mean, you have some data—think of it as a binary string—you want to store it, but there are errors. So usually, like, in most, kind of, forms of media, the errors are bit flips. Like, you store a 0; you get a 1. Or you store a 1; you get a 0. So these are called substitution errors. The field of error-correcting codes, it started, like, in the 1950s, so, like, it’s 70 years old at least. So we, kind of, we understand how to deal with this kind of error reasonably well, so with substitution errors. In DNA data storage, the way you store your data is that given, like, some large amount of digital data, you have the freedom of choosing which short DNA molecules to generate. So in a DNA molecule, it’s a sequence of the bases A, G, C, and T, and you have the freedom to decide, like, which of the short molecules you need to generate, and then those molecules get stored, and then during the storage, some of them are lost; some of them can be damaged. There can be insertions and deletions of bases on every molecule. Like, we call them strands. So you need redundancy, and there are two forms of redundancy. There’s redundancy that goes across strands, and there is redundancy on the strand. And so, yeah, so, kind of, from the error-correcting side of things, like, we get to decide what kind of redundancy we want to introduce—across strands, on the strand—and then, like, we want to make sure that our encoding and decoding algorithms are efficient. So that’s the coding theory angle on the field.

NGUYEN: Yeah, and then, you know, from there, once you have that data encoded into DNA, the question is how do you make that data on a scale that’s compatible with digital data storage? And so that’s where a lot of the work came in for really automating the synthesis process and also the reading process, as well. So synthesis is what we consider the writing process of DNA data storage. And so, you know, we came up with some unique ideas there. We made a chip that enabled us to get to the densities that we needed. And then on the reading side, we used different sequencing technologies. And it was great to see that we could actually just, kind of, pull sequencing technologies off the shelf because people are so interested in reading biological DNA. So we explored the Illumina technologies and also Oxford Nanopore, which is a new technology coming in the horizon. And then preservation, too, because we have to make sure that the data that’s stored in the DNA doesn’t get damaged and that we can recover it using the error-correcting codes.

STRAUSS: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s clear that—and it’s also been our experience that—DNA data storage and projects like this require more than just a team of computer scientists. Bichlien, you’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with many people in all different disciplines. So do you want to talk a little bit about that? What kind of expertise, you know, other disciplines that are relevant to bringing DNA data storage to reality?

NGUYEN: Yeah, well, it’s such a futuristic technology, right? When you begin to work on the tech, you realize how many disciplines and domains you actually have to reach in and leverage. One concrete example is that in order to fabricate an electronic chip to synthesize DNA, we really had to pull in a lot of material science research because there’s different capabilities that are needed when trying to use liquid on a chip. We, you know, have to think about DNA data storage itself. And that’s a very different beast than, you know, the traditional storage mediums. And so we worked with teams who literally create, you know, these little tiny micro- or nanocapsules in glass and being able to store that there. It’s really interesting, this multidisciplinarity, because we’re, in a way, bridging software with wetware with hardware. And so you, kind of, need all the different disciplines to actually get you to where you need to go.

STRAUSS: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, building on, you know, collaborators, I think one area that was super interesting, as well, and was pretty early on in the project was building that first end-to-end system that we collaborated with University of Washington, the Molecular Information Systems Lab there, to build. And really, at that point, you know, there had been work suggesting that DNA data storage was viable, but nobody had really shown an end-to-end system, from beginning to end, and in fact, my manager at the time, Doug Carmean, used to call it the “bubble gum and shoestring” system. But it was a crucial first step because it shows it was possible to really fully automate the process. And there have been several interesting challenges there in the system, but we noticed that one particularly challenging one was synthesis. That first system that we built was capable of storing the word “hello,” and that was all we could store. So it wasn’t a very high-capacity system. But in order to be able to store a lot more volumes of data instead of a simple word, we really needed much more advanced synthesis systems. And this is what both Bichlien and Jake ended up working on, so do you want to talk a little bit about that and the importance of that particular work?

SMITH: Yeah, absolutely. As you said, Karin, the amount of DNA that is required to store the massive amount of data we spoke about earlier is far beyond the amount of DNA that’s needed for any, air quotes, traditional applications of synthetic DNA, whether it’s your gene construction or it’s your primer synthesis or such. And so we really had to rethink how you make DNA at scale and think about how could this actually scale to meet the demand. And so Bichlien started out looking at a thing called a microelectrode array, where you have this big checkerboard of small individual reaction sites, and in each reaction site, we used electrochemistry in order to control base by base—A, C, T, or G by A, C, T, or G—the sequence that was growing at that particular reaction site. We got this down to the nanoscale. And so what this means practically is that on one of these chips, we could synthesize at any given time on the order of hundreds of millions of individual strands. So once we had the synthesis working with the traditional chemistry where you’re doing chemical synthesis—each base is added in using a mixture of chemicals that are added to the individual spots—they’re activated. But each coupling happens due to some energy you prestored in the synthesis of your reagents. And this makes the synthesis of those reagents costly and themselves a bottleneck. And so taking, you know, a look forward at what else was happening in the synthetic biology world, the, you know, next big word in DNA synthesis was and still is enzymatic synthesis, where rather than having to, you know, spend a lot of energy to chemically pre-activate reagents that will go in to make your actual DNA strands, we capitalize on nature’s synthetic robots—enzymes—to start with less-activated, less-expensive-to-get-to, cheaply-produced-through-natural-processes substrates, and we use the enzymes themselves, toggling their activity over each of the individual chips, or each of the individual spots on our checkerboard, to construct DNA strands. And so we got a little bit into this project. You know, we successfully showed that we could put down selectively one base at a given time. We hope that others will, kind of, take up the work that we’ve put out there, you know, particularly our wonderful collaborators at Ansa who helped us design the enzymatic system. And one day we will see, you know, a truly parallelized, in this fashion, enzymatic DNA system that can achieve the scales necessary.

NGUYEN: It’s interesting to note that even though it’s DNA and we’re still storing data in these DNA strands, chemical synthesis and enzymatic synthesis provide different errors that you see in the actual files, right, in the DNA files. And so I know that we talked to Sergey about how do we deal with these new types of errors and also the new capabilities that you can have, for example, if you don’t control base by base the DNA synthesis.

YEKHANIN: This whole field of DNA data storage, like, the technologies on the biology side are advancing rapidly, right. And there are different approaches to synthesis. There are different approaches to sequencing. And, presumably, the way the storage is actually done, like, is also progressing, right, and we had works on that. So there is, kind of, this very general, kind of, high-level error profile that you can say that these are the type of errors that you encounter in DNA data storage. Like, in DNA molecules—just the sequence of these bases, A, G, C, T, in maybe a length of, like, 200 or so and you store a very, very large number of them—the errors that you see is that some of these strands, kind of, will disappear. Some of these strings can be torn apart like, let’s say, in two pieces, maybe even more. And then on every strand, you also encounter these errors—insertions, deletions, substitutions—with different rates. Like, the likelihood of all kinds of these errors may differ very significantly across different technologies that you use on the biology side. And also there can be error bursts somehow. Maybe you can get an insertion of, I don’t know, 10 A’s, like, in a row, or you can lose, like, you know, 10 bases in a row. So if you don’t, kind of, quantify, like, what are the likelihoods of all these bad events happening, then I think this still, kind of, fits at least the majority of approaches to DNA data storage, maybe not exactly all of them, but it fits the majority. So when we design coding schemes, we are trying also, kind of, to look ahead in the sense that, like, we don’t know, like, in five years, like, how will these error profiles, how will it look like. So the technologies that we develop on the error-correction side, we try to keep them very flexible, so whether it’s enzymatic synthesis, whether it’s Nanopore technology, whether it’s Illumina technology that is being used, the error-correction algorithms would be able to adapt and would still be useful. But, I mean, this makes also coding aspect harder because, [LAUGHTER] kind of, you want to keep all this flexibility in mind.

STRAUSS: So, Sergey, we are at an interesting moment now because you’re open sourcing the Trellis BMA piece of code, right, that you published a few years ago. Can you talk a little bit about that specific problem of trace reconstruction and then the paper specifically and how it solves it?

YEKHANIN: Absolutely, yeah, so this Trellis BMA paper for that we are releasing the source code right now, this is, kind of, this is the latest in our sequence of publications on error-correction for DNA data storage. And I should say that, like, we already discussed that the project is, kind of, very interdisciplinary. So, like, we have experts from all kinds of fields. But really even within, like, within this coding theory, like, within computer science/information theory, coding theory, in our algorithms, we use ideas from very different branches. I mean, there are some core ideas from, like, core algorithm space, and I won’t go into these, but let me just focus, kind of, on two aspects. So when we just faced this problem of coding for DNA data storage and we were thinking about, OK, so how to exactly design the coding scheme and what are the algorithms that we’ll be using for error correction, so, I mean, we’re always studying the literature, and we came up on this problem called trace reconstruction that was pretty popular—I mean, somewhat popular, I would say—in computer science and in statistics. It didn’t have much motivation, but very strong mathematicians had been looking at it. And the problem is as follows. So, like, there is a long binary string picked at random, and then it’s transmitted over a deletion channel, so some bits—some zeros and some ones—at certain coordinates get deleted and you get to see, kind of, the shortened version of the string. But you get to see it multiple times. And the question is, like, how many times do you need to see it so that you can get a reasonably accurate estimate of the original string that was transmitted? So that was called trace reconstruction, and we took a lot of motivation—we took a lot of inspiration—from the problem, I would say, because really, in DNA data storage, if we think about a single strand, like, a single strand which is being stored, after we read it, we usually get multiple reads of this string. And, well, the errors there are not just deletions. There are insertions, substitutions, and, like, inversive errors, but still we could rely on this literature in computer science that already had some ideas. So there was an algorithm called BMA, Bitwise Majority Alignment. We extended it—we adopted it, kind of, for the needs of DNA data storage—and it became, kind of, one of the tools in our toolbox for error correction.

So we also started to use ideas from literature on electrical engineering, what are called convolutional error-correcting codes and a certain, kind of, class of algorithms for decoding errors in these convolutional error-correcting codes called, like, I mean, Trellis is the main data structure, like, Trellis-based algorithms for decoding convolutional codes, like, Viterbi algorithm or BCJR algorithm. Convolutional codes allow you to introduce redundancy on the string. So, like, with algorithms kind of similar to BMA, like, they were good for doing error correction when there was no redundancy on the strand itself. Like, when there is redundancy on the strand, kind of, we could do some things, but really it was very limited. With Trellis-based approaches, like, again inspired by the literature in electrical engineering, we had an approach to introduce redundancy on the strand, so that allowed us to have more powerful error-correction algorithms. And then in the end, we have this algorithm, which we call Trellis BMA, which, kind of, combines ideas from both fields. So it’s based on Trellis, but it’s also more efficient than standard Trellis-based algorithms because it uses ideas from BMA from computer science literature. So this is, kind of, this is a mix of these two approaches. And, yeah, that’s the paper that we wrote about three years ago. And now we’re open sourcing it. So it is the most powerful algorithm for DNA error correction that we developed in the group. We’re really happy that now we are making it publicly available so that anybody can experiment with the source code. Because, again, the field has expanded a lot, and now there are multiple groups around the globe that work just specifically on error correction apart from all other aspects, so, yeah, so we are really happy that it’s become publicly available to hopefully further advance the field.

STRAUSS: Yeah, absolutely, and I’m always amazed by, you know, how, it is really about building on other people’s work. Jake and Bichlien, you recently published a paper in Nature Communications. Can you tell us a little bit about what it was, what you exposed the DNA to, and what it was specifically about?

NGUYEN: Yeah. So that paper was on the effects of neutron radiation on DNA data storage. So, you know, when we started the DNA Data Storage Project, it was really a comparison, right, between the different storage medias that exist today. And one of the issues that have come up through the years of development of those technologies was, you know, hard errors and soft errors that were induced by radiation. So we wanted to know, does that maybe happen in DNA? We know that DNA, in humans at least, is affected by radiation from cosmic rays. And so that was really the motivation for this type of experiment. So what we did was we essentially took our DNA files and dried them and threw them in a neutron accelerator, which was fantastic. It was so exciting. That’s, kind of, the merge of, you know, sci fi with sci fi at the same time. [LAUGHS] It was fantastic. And we irradiated for over 80 million years—

STRAUSS: The equivalent of …

NGUYEN: The equivalent of 80 million years.

STRAUSS: Yes, because it’s a lot of radiation all at the same time, …

NGUYEN: It’s a lot of radiation …

STRAUSS: … and it’s accelerated radiation exposure?

NGUYEN: Yeah, I would say it’s accelerated aging with radiation. It’s an insane amount of radiation. And it was surprising that even though we irradiated our DNA files with that much radiation, there wasn’t that much damage. And that’s surprising because, you know, we know that humans, if we were to be irradiated like that, it would be disastrous. But in, you know, DNA, our files were able to be recovered with zero bit errors.

STRAUSS: And why that difference?

NGUYEN: Well, we think there’s a few reasons. One is that when you look at the interaction between a neutron and the actual elemental composition of DNA—which is basically carbons, oxygens, and hydrogens, maybe a phosphorus—the neutrons don’t interact with the DNA much. And if it did interact, we would have, for example, a strand break, which based on the error-correcting codes, we can recover from. So essentially, there’s not much … one, there’s not much interaction between neutrons and DNA, and second, we have error-correcting codes that would prevent any data loss.

STRAUSS: Awesome, so yeah, this is another milestone that contributes towards the technology becoming a reality. There are also other conditions that are needed for technology to be brought to the market. And one thing I’ve worked on is to, you know, create the DNA Data Storage Alliance; this is something Microsoft co-founded with Illumina, Twist Bioscience, and Western Digital. And the goal there was to essentially provide the right conditions for the technology to thrive commercially. We did bring together multiple universities and companies that were interested in the technology. And one thing that we’ve seen with storage technologies that’s been pretty important is standardization and making sure that the technology’s interoperable. And, you know, we’ve seen stalemate situations like Blu-ray and high-definition DVD, where, you know, really we couldn’t decide on a standard, and the technology, it took a while for the technology to be picked up, and the intent of the DNA Data Storage [Alliance] is to provide an ecosystem of companies, universities, groups interested in making sure that this time, it’s an interoperable technology from the get-go, and that increases the chances of commercial adoption. As a group, we often talk about how amazing it is to work for a company that empowers us to do this kind of research. And for me, one of Microsoft Research’s unique strengths, particularly in this project, is the opportunity to work with such a diverse set of collaborators on such a multidisciplinary project like we have. How do you all think where you’ve done this work has impacted how you’ve gone about it and the contributions you’ve been able to make?

NGUYEN: I’m going to start with if we look around this table and we see who’s sitting at it, which is two chemists, a computer architect, and a coding theorist, and we come together and we’re like, what can we make that would be super, super impactful? I think that’s the answer right there, is that being at Microsoft and being in a culture that really fosters this type of interdisciplinary collaboration is the key to getting a project like this off the ground.

SMITH: Yeah, absolutely. And we should acknowledge the gigantic contributions made by our collaborators at the University of Washington. Many of them would fall in not any of these three categories. They’re electrical engineers, they’re mechanical engineers, they’re pure biologists that we worked with. And each of them brought their own perspective, and particularly when you talk about going to a true end-to-end system, those perspectives were invaluable as we were trying to fit all the puzzle pieces together.

STRAUSS: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve had great collaborations over time—University of Washington, ETH Zürich, Los Alamos National Lab, ChipIr, Twist Bioscience, Ansa Biotechnologies. Yeah, it’s been really great and a great set of different disciplines, all the way from coding theorists to the molecular biology and chemistry, electrical and mechanical engineering. One of the great things about research is there’s never a shortage of interesting questions to pursue, and for us, this particular work has opened the door to research in adjacent domains, including sustainability fields. DNA data storage requires small amounts of materials to accommodate the large amounts of data, and early on, we wanted to understand if DNA data storage was, as it seemed, a more sustainable way to store information. And we learned a lot. Bichlien and Jake, you had experience in green chemistry when you came to Microsoft. What new findings did we make, and what sustainability benefits do we get with DNA data storage? And, finally, what new sustainability work has the project led to?

NGUYEN: As a part of this project, if we’re going to bring new technologies to the forefront, you know, to the world, we should make sure that they have a lower carbon footprint, for example, than previous technologies. And so we ran a life cycle assessment—which is a way to systematically evaluate the environmental impacts of anything of interest—and we did this on DNA data storage and compared it to electronic storage medium[1], and we noticed that if we were able to store all of our digital information in DNA, that we would have benefits associated with carbon emissions. We would be able to reduce that because we don’t need as much infrastructure compared to the traditional storage methods. And there would be an energy reduction, as well, because this is a passive way of archival data storage. So that was, you know, the main takeaways that we had. But that also, kind of, led us to think about other technologies that would be beneficial beyond data storage and how we could use the same kind of life cycle thinking towards that.

SMITH: This design approach that you’ve, you know, talked about us stumbling on, not inventing but seeing other people doing in the literature and trying to implement ourselves on the DNA Data Storage Project, you know, is something that can be much bigger than any single material. And where we think there’s a, you know, chance for folks like ourselves at Microsoft Research to make a real impact on this sustainability-focused design is through the application of machine learning, artificial intelligence—the new tools that will allow us to look at much bigger design spaces than we could previously to evaluate sustainability metrics that were not possible when everything was done manually and to ultimately, you know, at the end of the day, take a sustainability-first look at what a material should be composed of. And so we’ve tried to prototype this with a few projects. We had another wonderful collaboration with the University of Washington where we looked at recyclable circuit boards and a novel material called a vitrimer that it could possibly be made out of[2]. We’ve had another great collaboration with the University of Michigan, where we’ve looked at the design of charge-carrying molecules in these things called flow batteries that have good potential for energy smoothing in, you know, renewables production, trying to get us out of that day-night, boom-bust cycle[3]. And we had one more project, you know, this time with collaborators at the University of Berkeley, where we looked at, you know, design of a class of materials called a metal organic framework, which have great promise in low-energy-cost gas separation, such as pulling CO₂ out of the, you know, plume of a smokestack or, you know, ideally out of the air itself[4].

STRAUSS: For me, the DNA work has made me much more open to projects outside my own research area—as Bichlien mentioned, my core research area is computer architecture, but we’ve ventured in quite a bit of other areas here—and going way beyond my own comfort zone and really made me love interdisciplinary projects like this and try, really try, to do the most important work I can. And this is what attracted me to these other areas of environmental sustainability that Bichlien and Jake covered, where there’s absolutely no lack of problems. Like them, I’m super interested in using AI to solve many of them. So how do each of you think working on the DNA Data Storage Project has influenced your research approach more generally and how you think about research questions to pursue next?

YEKHANIN: It definitely expanded the horizons a lot, like, just, kind of, just having this interactions with people, kind of, whose core areas of research are so different from my own and also a lot of learning even within my own field that we had to do to, kind of, carry this project out. So, I mean, it was a great and rewarding experience.

NGUYEN: Yeah, for me, it’s kind of the opposite of Karin, right. I started as an organic chemist and then now really, one, appreciate the breadth and depth of going from a concept to a real end-to-end prototype and all the requirements that you need to get there. And then also, really the importance of having, you know, a background in computer science and really being able to understand the lingo that is used in multidisciplinary projects because you might say something and someone else interprets it very differently, and it’s because you’re not speaking the same language. And so that understanding that you have to really be … you have to learn a little bit of vocabulary from each person and understand how they contribute and then how your ideas can contribute to their ideas has been really impactful in my career here.

SMITH: Yeah, I think the key change in approach that I took away—and I think many of us took away from the DNA Data Storage Project—was rather than starting with an academic question, we started with a vision of what we wanted to happen, and then we derived the research questions from analyzing what would need to happen in the world—what are the bottlenecks that need to be solved in order for us to achieve, you know, that goal? And this is something that we’ve taken with us into the sustainability-focused research and, you know, something that I think will affect all the research I do going forward.

STRAUSS: Awesome. As we close, let’s reflect a bit on what a world in which DNA data storage is widely used might look like. If everything goes as planned, what do you hope the lasting impact of this work will be? Sergey, why don’t you lead us off.

YEKHANIN: Sure, I remember that, like, when … in the early days when I started working on this project actually, you, Karin, told me that you were taking an Uber ride somewhere and you were talking to the taxi driver, and the taxi driver—I don’t know if you remember that—but the taxi driver mentioned that he has a camera which is recording everything that’s happening in the car. And then you had a discussion with him about, like, how long does he keep the data, how long does he keep the videos. And he told you that he keeps it for about a couple of days because it’s too expensive. But otherwise, like, if it weren’t that expensive, he would keep it for much, much longer because, like, he wants to have these recordings if later somebody is upset about the ride and, I don’t know, he is getting sued or something. So this is, like, this is one small narrow application area where DNA data storage would clearly, kind of, if it happens, then it will solve it. Because then, kind of, this long-term archival storage will become very cheap, available to everybody; it would become a commodity basically. There are many things that will be enabled, like this helping the Uber drivers, for instance. But also one has to think of, of course, like, about, kind of, the broader implications so that we don’t get into something negative because again this power of recording everything and storing everything, it can also lead to some use cases that might be, kind of, morally wrong. So, again, hopefully by the time that we get to, like, really wide deployments of this technology, the regulation will also be catching up and the, like, we will have great use cases and we won’t have bad ones. I mean, that’s how I think of it. But definitely there are lots of, kind of, great scenarios that this can enable.

SMITH: Yeah. I’ll grab onto the word you use there, which is making DNA a commodity. And one of the things that I hope comes out of this project, you know, besides all the great benefits of DNA data storage itself is spillover benefits into the field of health—where if we make DNA synthesis at large scale truly a commodity thing, which I hope some of the work that we’ve done to really accelerate the throughput of synthesis will do—then this will open new doors in what we can do in terms of gene synthesis, in terms of, like, fundamental biotech research that will lead to that next set of drugs and, you know, give us medications or treatments that we could not have thought possible if we were not able to synthesize DNA and related molecules at that scale.

NGUYEN: So much information gets lost because of just time. And so I think being able to recover really ancient history that humans wrote in the future, I think, is something that I really hope could be achieved because we’re so information rich, but in the course of time, we become information poor, and so I would like for our future generations to be able to understand the life of, you know, an everyday 21st-century person.

STRAUSS: Well, Bichlien, Jake, Sergey, it’s been fun having this conversation with you today and collaborating with you in all of this amazing project [MUSIC] and all the research we’ve done together. Thank you so much.

YEKHANIN: Thank you, Karin.

SMITH: Thank you.

NGUYEN: Thanks.

[MUSIC FADES]

BEHNAZ ARZANI: Thank you. And I’m also excited to be here.

HUIZINGA: So since the show is about ideas and leans more philosophical, I like to start with a little personal story and try to tease out anything that might have been an inflection point in your life, a sort of aha moment, or a pivotal event, or an animating “what if,” we could call it. What captured your imagination and got you inspired to do what you’re doing today?

ARZANI: I think that it was a little bit of an accident and a little bit of just chance, I guess, but for me, this happened because I don’t like being told what to do! [LAUGHTER] I really hate being told what to do. And so, I got into research by accident, mostly because it felt like a job where that wouldn’t happen. I could pick what I wanted to do. So, you know, a lot of people come talking about how they were the most curious kids and they all—I wasn’t that. I was a nerd, but I wasn’t the most curious kid. But then I found that I’m attracted to puzzles and hard puzzles and things that I don’t know how to answer, and so that gravitated me more towards what I’m doing today. Things that are basically difficult to solve … I think are difficult to solve.

HUIZINGA: So that’s your inspiring moment? “I’m a bit of a rebel, and …”

ARZANI: Yup!

HUIZINGA: … I like puzzles … ”?

ARZANI: Yup! [LAUGHTER] Which is not really a moment. Yeah, I can’t point to a moment. It’s just been a journey, and it’s just, like, been something that has gradually happened to me, and I love where I am …

HUIZINGA: Yeah …

ARZANI: … but I can’t really pinpoint to like this, like this inspiring awe-drop—no.

HUIZINGA: OK. So let me ask you this: is there nobody in this building that tells you what to do? [LAUGHS]

ARZANI: There are people who have tried, [LAUGHS] but …

HUIZINGA: Oh my gosh!

ARZANI: No, it doesn’t work. And I think if you ask them, they will tell you it hasn’t worked.

HUIZINGA: OK. The other side question is, have you encountered a puzzle that has confounded you?

ARZANI: Have I encountered a puzzle? Yes. Incident management. [LAUGHTER]

HUIZINGA: And we’ll get there in the next couple of questions. Before we do, though, I want to know about who might have influenced you earlier. I mean, it’s interesting. Usually if you don’t have a what, there might not be a who attached to it …

ARZANI: No. But I have a who. I have multiple “whos” actually.

HUIZINGA: OK! Wonderful. So tell us a little bit about the influential people in your life.

ARZANI: I think the first and foremost is my mom. I have a necklace I’m holding right now. This is something my dad gave my mom on their wedding day. On one side of it is a picture of my mom and dad; on the other side is both their names on it. And I have it on every day. To my mom’s chagrin. [LAUGHTER] She is like, why? But it’s, like, it helps me stay grounded. And my mom is a person that … she had me while she was an undergrad. She got her master’s. She got into three different PhD programs in her lifetime. Every time, she gave it up for my sake and for my brother’s sake. But she’s a woman that taught me you can do anything you set your mind to and that you should always be eager to learn. She was a chemistry teacher, and even though she was a chemistry teacher, she kept reading new books. She came to the US to visit me in 2017, went to a Philadelphia high school, and asked, can I see your chemistry books? I want to see what you’re teaching your kids. [LAUGHTER] So that’s how dedicated she is to what she does. She loves what she does. And I could see it on her face on a daily basis. And at some point in my life a couple of years ago, I was talking to my mom about something, and she said, tell yourself, “I’m stronger than my mom.”

HUIZINGA: Oh my gosh.

ARZANI: And that has been, like, the most amazing thing to have in the back of my head because I view my mom as one of the strongest people I’ve ever met, and she’s my inspiration for everything I do.

HUIZINGA: Tell yourself you’re stronger than your mom. … Did you?

ARZANI: I’m not stronger than my mom, I don’t think … [LAUGHS]

HUIZINGA: [LAUGHS] You got to change that narrative!

ARZANI: But, yes, I think it’s just this thing of, like, “What would Mom do?” is a great thing to ask yourself, I think.

HUIZINGA: I love that. Well, and so I would imagine, though, that post-, you know, getting out of the house, you’ve had instructors, you’ve had professors, you’ve had other researchers. I mean, anyone else that’s … ?

ARZANI: Many! And in different stages of your life, different people step into that role, I feel like. One of the first people for me was Jen Rexford, and she is just an amazing human being. She’s an amazing researcher, hands down. Her work is awesome, but also, she’s an amazing human being, as well. And that just makes it better.

HUIZINGA: Yeah.

ARZANI: And then another person is Mohammad Alizadeh, who’s at MIT. And actually, let’s see, I’m going to keep going …

HUIZINGA: Good.

ARZANI: … a little with people—Mark Handley. When I was a PhD student, I would read their papers, and I’d be like, wow! And, I want to be like you!

HUIZINGA: So linking that back to your love of puzzles, were these people that you admired good problem solvers or … ?

ARZANI: Oh, yeah! I think Jen is one of those who … a lot of her work is also practical, like, you know, straddles a line between both solving the puzzle and being practical and being creative and working with theorists and working with PL people. So she’s also collaborative, which is, kind of, my style of work, as well. Mohammad is more of a theorist, and I love … like more the theoretical aspect of problems that I solve. And so, like, just the fact that he was able to look at those problems and thinks about those problems in those ways. And then Mark Handley’s intuition about problems—yeah, I can’t even speak to that!

HUIZINGA: That’s so fascinating because you’ve identified three really key things for a researcher. And each one is embodied in a person. I love that. And because I know who you are, I know we’re going to get to each of those things probably in the course of all these questions that I’ll ask you. [LAUGHTER] So we just spent a little time talking about what got you here and who influenced you along the way. But your life isn’t static. And at each stage of accomplishment, you get a chance to reflect and, sort of, think about what you got right, what you got wrong, and where you want to go next. So I wonder if you could take a minute to talk about the evolution of your values as a researcher, collaborator, and colleague and then a sort of “how it started/how it’s going” thing.

ARZANI: Hmm … For me, I think what I’ve learned is to be more mindful—about all of it. But I think if I talk about the evolution, when you’re a PhD student, especially if you’re a PhD student from a place that’s not MIT, that’s not Berkeley, which is where I was from,[1] my main focus was proving myself. I mean, for women, always, we have to prove ourselves. But, like, I think if you’re not from one of those schools, it’s even more so. At least that’s how I felt. That might not be the reality, but that’s how you feel. And so you’re always running to show this about yourself. And so you don’t stop to think how you’re showing up as a person, as a researcher, as a collaborator. You’re not even, like, necessarily reflecting on, are these the problems that I enjoy solving? It’s more of, will solving this problem help me establish myself in this world that requires proving yourself and is so critical and all of that stuff? I think now I stop more. I think more, is this a problem that I would enjoy solving? I think that’s the most important thing. Would other people find it useful? Is it solving a hard technical question? And then, in collaborations, I’m being more mindful that I show up in a way that basically allows me to be a good person the way I want to be in my collaboration. So as researchers, we have to be critical because that’s how science evolves. Not all work is perfect. Not all ideas are the best ideas. That’s just fundamental truth. Because we iterate on each other’s ideas until we find the perfect solution to something. But you can do all of these things in a way that’s kind, in a way that’s mindful, in a way that respects other people and what they bring to the table. And I think what I’ve learned is to be more mindful about those things.

HUIZINGA: How would you define mindful? That’s an interesting word. It has a lot of baggage around it, you know, in terms of how people do mindfulness training. Is that what you’re talking about, or is it more, sort of, intentional?

ARZANI: I think it’s both. So I think one of the things I said—I think when I got into this booth even—was, I’m going to take a breath before I answer each question. And I think that’s part of it, is just taking a breath to make sure you’re present is part of it. But I think there is more to it than that, which is I don’t think we even think about it. I think if I … when you asked me about the evolution of how I evolved, I never thought about it.

HUIZINGA: No.

ARZANI: I was just, like, running to get things done, running to solve the question, running to, you know, find the next big thing, and then you’re not paying attention to how you’re impacting the world in the process.

HUIZINGA: Right.

ARZANI: And once you start paying attention, then you’re like, oh, I could do this better. I can do that better. If I say this to this person in that way, that allows them to do so much more, that encourages them to do so much more.

HUIZINGA: Yeah, yeah.

ARZANI: So …

HUIZINGA: You know, when you started out, you said, is this a problem I would enjoy solving? And then you said, is this a problem that somebody else needs to have solved? Which is sort of like “do I like it?”—it goes back to Behnaz at the beginning: don’t tell me what to do; I want to do what I want to do. Versus—or and is this useful to the world? And I feel like those two threads are really key to you.

ARZANI: Yes. Basically, I feel like that defines me as a researcher, pretty much. [LAUGHS] Which is, you know, I was one of the, you know, early people … I wouldn’t say first. I’m not the first, I don’t think, but I was one of the early people who was talking about using machine learning in networking. And after a while, I stopped because I wasn’t finding it fun anymore, even though there was so much hype about, you know, let’s do machine learning in networking. And it’s not because there’s not a lot of technical stuff left to do. You can do a lot of other things there. There’s room to innovate. It’s just that I got bored.

HUIZINGA: I was just going to say, it’s still cool, but Behnaz is bored! [LAUGHTER] OK, well, let’s start to talk a little bit about some of the things that you’re doing. And I like this idea of a researcher, even a person, having a North Star goal. It sounds like you’ve got them in a lot of areas of your life, and you’ve said your North Star goal, your research goal, is to make the life of a network operator as painless as possible. So I want to know who this person is. Walk us through a day in the life of a network operator and tell us what prompted you to want to help them.

ARZANI: OK, so it’s been years since I actually, like, sat right next to one of them for a long extended period of time because now we’re in different buildings, but back when I was an intern, I was actually, like, kind of, like right in the middle of a bunch of, you know, actual network operators. And what I observed … and see, this was not, like, I’ve never lived that experience, so I’m talking about somebody else’s experience, so bear that in mind …

HUIZINGA: Sure, but at least you saw it …

ARZANI: Yeah. What they do is, there’s a lot of, “OK, we design the network, configure it.” A lot of it goes into building new systems to manage it. Building new systems to basically make it better, more efficient, all of that. And then they also have to be on call so that when any of those things break, they’re the ones who have to look at their monitoring systems and figure out what happened and try to fix it. So they do all of this in their day-to-day lives.

HUIZINGA: That’s tough …

ARZANI: Yeah.

HUIZINGA: OK. So I know you have a story about what prompted you, at the very beginning, to want to help this person. And it had some personal implications. [LAUGHS]

ARZANI: Yeah! So my internship mentor, who’s an amazing person, I thought—and this is, again, my perception as an intern—the day after he was on call, he was so tired, I felt. And so grumpy … grumpier than normal! [LAUGHTER] And, like, my main motivation initially for working in this space was just, like, make his life better!

HUIZINGA: Make him not grumpy.

ARZANI: Yeah. Pretty much. [LAUGHS]

HUIZINGA: Did you have success at that point in your life? Or was this just, like, setting a North Star goal that I’m going to go for that?

ARZANI: I mean, I had done a lot of work in monitoring space, but back then—again, going back to the talk we were having about how to be mindful about problems you pick—back then it was just like, oh, this was a problem to solve, and we’ll go solve it, and then what’s the next thing? So there was not an overarching vision, if you will. It was just, like, going after the next, after the next. I think that’s a point where, like, it all came together of like, oh, all of the stuff that I’m doing can help me achieve this bigger thing.

HUIZINGA: Right. OK, Behnaz, I want to drop anchor, to use a seafaring analogy, for a second and contextualize the language that these operators use. Give us a “networking for neophytes” overview of the tools they rely on and the terminology they use in their day-to-day work so we’re not lost when we start to unpack the problems, projects, and papers that are central to your work.

ARZANI: OK. So I’m going to focus on my pieces of this just because of the context of this question. But a lot of operators … just because a lot of the problems that we work on these days to be able to manage our network, the optimal form of these problems tend to be really, really hard. So a lot of the times, we use algorithms and solutions that are approximate forms of those optimal solutions in order to just solve those problems faster. And a lot of these heuristics, some of them focus on our wide area network, which we call a WAN. Our WANs, basically what they do is they move traffic between datacenters in a way that basically fits the capacity of our network. And, yeah, I think for my work, my current work, to understand it, that’s, I think, enough networking terminology.

HUIZINGA: OK. Well, so you’ve used the term heuristic and optimal. Not with an “s” on the end of it. Or you do say “optimals,” but it’s a noun …

ARZANI: Well, so for each problem definition, usually, there’s one way to formulate an optimal solution. There might be multiple optima that you find, but the algorithm that finds the optimum usually is one. But there might be many, I guess. The ones that I’ve worked on generally have been one.

HUIZINGA: Yeah, yeah. And so in terms of how things work on a network, can you give us just a little picture of how something moves from A to B that might be a problem?

ARZANI: So, for example, we have these datacenters that generate terabytes of traffic and—terabytes per second of traffic—that wants to move from point A to point B, right. And we only have finite network capacity, and these, what we call, “demands” between these datacenters—and you didn’t see me do the air quotes, but I did the air quotes—so they go from point A to point B, and so in order to fit this demand in the pipes that we have—and these pipes are basically links in our network—we have to figure out how to send them. And there’s variations in them. So, like, it might be the case that at a certain time of the day, East US would want to send more traffic to West US, and then suddenly, it flips. And that’s why we solve this problem every five minutes! Now assume one of these links suddenly goes down. What do I do? I have to resolve this problem because maybe the path that I initially picked for traffic to go through goes exactly through that failed link. And now that it’s disappeared, all of that traffic is going to fall on the floor. So I have to re-solve that problem really quickly to be able to re-move my traffic and move it to somewhere else so that I can still route it and my customers aren’t impacted. What we’re talking about here is a controller, essentially, that the network operators built. And this controller solves this optimization problem that figures out how traffic should move. When it’s failed, then the same controller kicks in and reroutes traffic. The people who built that controller are the network operators.

HUIZINGA: And so who does the problem-solving or the troubleshooting on the fly?

ARZANI: So hopefully—and this, most of the times, is the case—is we have monitoring systems in place that the operators have built that, like, kind of, signal to this controller that, oh, OK, this link is down; you need to do something.

[MUSIC BREAK]

HUIZINGA: Much of your recent work represents an effort to reify the idea of automated network management and to try to understand the performance of deployed algorithms. So talk about the main topics of interest here in this space and how your work has evolved in an era of generative AI and large language models.

ARZANI: So if you think about it, what generative AI is going to enable, and I’m using the term “going to enable” a little bit deliberately because I don’t think it has yet. We still have to build on top of what we have to get that to work. And maybe I’ll reconsider my stance on ML now that, you know, we have these tools. Haven’t yet but might. But essentially, what they enable us to do is take automated action on our networks. But if we’re allowing AI to do this, we need to be mindful of the risks because AI in my, at least in my head of how I view it, is a probabilistic machine, which, what that means is that there is some probability, maybe a teeny tiny probability, it might get things wrong. And the thing that you don’t want is when it gets things wrong, it gets things catastrophically wrong. And so you need to put guardrails in place, ensure safety, figure out, like, for each action be able to evaluate that action and the risks it imposes long term on your network and whether you’re able to tolerate that risk. And I think there is a whole room of innovation there to basically just figure out the interaction between the AI and the network and where … and actually strategic places to put AI, even.

HUIZINGA: Right.

ARZANI: The thing that for me has evolved is I used to think we just want to take the human out of the equation of network management. The way I think about it now is there is a place for the human in the network management operation because sometimes human has context and that context matters. And so I think what the, like, for example, we have this paper in HotNets 2023 where we talk about how to put an LLM in the incident management loop, and then there, we carefully talk about, OK, these are the places a human needs to be involved, at least given where LLMs are right now, to be able to ensure that everything happens in a safe way.

HUIZINGA: So go back to this “automated network management” thing. This sounds to me like you’re in a space where it could be, but it isn’t ready yet …

ARZANI: Yeah.

HUIZINGA: … and without, sort of, asking you to read a crystal ball about it, do you feel like this is something that could be eventually?

ARZANI: I hope so. This is the best thing about research. You get to be like, yeah!

HUIZINGA: Yeah, why not?

ARZANI: Why not? And, you know, maybe somebody will prove me wrong, but until they do, that’s what I’m working towards!

HUIZINGA: Well, right now it’s an animating “what if?”

ARZANI: Yeah.

HUIZINGA: Right?

ARZANI: Yeah.

HUIZINGA: This is a problem Behnaz is interested in right now. Let’s go!

ARZANI: Yeah. Pretty much. [LAUGHTER]

HUIZINGA: OK. Behnaz, the systems and networks that we’ve come to depend on are actually incredibly complex. But for most of us, most of the time, they just work. There’s only drama when they don’t work, right? But there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. So I want you to talk a little bit about how the cycle of configuring, managing, reconfiguring, etc., helps keep the drama at bay.

ARZANI: Well … you reminded me of something! So when I was preparing my job … I’m going to tell this story really, really quickly. But when I was preparing my job talk, somebody showed me a tweet. In 2014, I think, people started calling 911 when Facebook was down! Because of a networking problem! [LAUGHS] Yeah. So that’s a thing. But, yeah, so network availability matters, and we don’t notice it until it’s actually down. But that aside, back to your question. So I think what operators do is they build systems in a way that tries to avoid that drama as much as possible. So, for example, they try to build systems that these systems configure the network. And one of my dear friends, Ryan Beckett, works on intent-driven networking that essentially tries to ensure that what the operators intend with their configurations matches what they actually push into the network. They also monitor the network to ensure that as soon as something bad happens, automation gets notified. And there’s automation also that tries to fix these problems when they happen as much as possible. There’s a couple of problems that happen in the middle of this. One of them is our networks continuously change, and what we use in our networks changes. And there’s so many different pieces and components of this, and sometimes what happens is, for example, a team decides to switch from one protocol to a different protocol, and by doing that, it impacts another team’s systems and monitoring and what expectations they had for their systems, and then suddenly it causes things to go bad …

HUIZINGA: Right.

ARZANI: And they have to develop new solutions taking into account the changes that happened. And so one of the things that we need to account for in this whole process is how evolution is happening. And like evolution-friendly, I guess, systems, maybe, is how you should be calling it.

HUIZINGA: Right.

ARZANI: But that’s one. The other part of it that goes into play is, most of the time you expect a particular traffic characteristic, and then suddenly, you have one fluke event that, kind of, throws all of your assumptions out the window, so …

HUIZINGA: Right. So it’s a never-ending job …

ARZANI: Pretty much.

HUIZINGA: It’s about now that I ask all my guests what could possibly go wrong if, in fact, you got everything right. And so for you, I’d like to earth this question in the broader context of automation and the concerns inherent in designing machines to do our work for us. So at an earlier point in your career—we talked about this already—you said you believed you could automate everything. Cool. Now you’re not so much on that. Talk about what changed your thinking and how you’re thinking now.

ARZANI: OK, so the shallow answer to that question—there’s a shallow answer, and there’s a deeper answer—the shallow answer to that question is I watched way too many movies where robots took over the world. And honestly speaking, there’s a scenario that you can imagine where automation starts to get things wrong and then keeps getting things wrong, and wrong, not by the definition of automation. Maybe they’re doing things perfectly by the objectives and metrics that you used to design them …

HUIZINGA: Sure.

ARZANI: … but they’re screwing things up in terms of what you actually want them to do.

HUIZINGA: Interesting.

ARZANI: And if everything is automated and you don’t leave yourself an intervention plan, how are you going to take control back?

HUIZINGA: Right. So this goes back to the humans-in-the-loop/humans-out-of-the-loop. And if I remember in our last podcast, we were talking about humans out of the loop.

ARZANI: Yeah.

HUIZINGA: And you’ve already talked a bit about what the optimal place for a human to be is. Is the human always going to have to be in the loop, in your opinion?

ARZANI: I think it’s a scenario where you always give yourself a way to interrupt. Like, always put a back door somewhere. When we notice things go bad, we have a way that’s foolproof that allows us to shut everything down and take control back to ourselves. Maybe that’s where we go.

HUIZINGA: How do you approach the idea of corner cases?

ARZANI: That’s essentially what my research right now is, actually! And I love it, which is essentially figuring out, in a foolproof way, all the corner cases.

HUIZINGA: Yeah?

ARZANI: Can you build a tool that will tell you what the corner cases are? Now, granted, what we focus on is performance corner cases. Nikolaj Bjørner, in RiSE—so RiSE is Research in Software Engineering—is working on, how do you do verification corner cases? But all of them, kind of, have a hand-in-hand type of, you know, Holy Grail goal, which is …

HUIZINGA: Sure.

ARZANI: … how do you find all the corner cases?

HUIZINGA: Right. And that, kind of, is the essence of this “What could possibly go wrong?” question, is looking in every corner …

ARZANI: Correct.

HUIZINGA: … for anything that could go wrong. So many people in the research community have observed that the speed of innovation in generative AI has shrunk the traditional research-to-product timeline, and some people have even said everyone’s an applied researcher now. Or everyone’s a PM. [LAUGHS] Depends on who you are! But you have an interesting take on this Behnaz, and it reminds me of a line from the movie Nanny McPhee: “When you need me but do not want me, then I will stay. When you want me but no longer need me, I have to go.” So let’s talk a little bit about your perspective on this idea-to-ideation pipeline. How and where are researchers in your orbit operating these days, and how does that impact what we might call “planned obsolescence” in research?

ARZANI: I guess the thing I’m seeing is that we are freed up to dream more—in a way. Maybe that’s me being too … I’m a little bit of a romantic, so this is that coming out a little bit, but it’s, like, because of all this, we have the time to think bigger, to dream bigger, to look at problems where maybe five years ago, we wouldn’t even dare to think about. We have amazingly, amazingly smart, competent people in our product teams. Some of them are actually researchers. So there’s, for example, the Azure systems research group that has a lot of people that are focused on problems in our production systems. And then you have equivalents of those spread out in the networking sphere, as well. And so a lot of complex problems that maybe like 10 years ago Microsoft Research would look at nowadays they can handle themselves. They don’t need us. And that’s part of what has allowed us to now go and be like, OK, I’m going to think about other things. Maybe things that, you know, aren’t relevant to you today, but maybe in five years, you’ll come in and thank me for thinking about this!

HUIZINGA: OK. Shifting gears here! In a recent conversation, I heard a colleague refer to you as an “idea machine.” To me, that’s one of the greatest compliments you could get. But it got me wondering, so I’ll ask you: how does your brain work, Behnaz, and how do you get ideas?

ARZANI: Well, this has been, to my chagrin, one of the realities of life about my brain apparently. So I never thought of this as a strength. I always thought about it as a weakness. But nowadays, I’m like, oh, OK, I’m just going to embrace this now! So I have a random brain. It’s completely ran—so, like, it actually happens, like, you’re talking, and then suddenly, I say something that seems to other people like it came out of left field. I know how I got there. It’s essentially kind of like a Markov chain. [LAUGHTER] So a Markov chain is essentially a number of states, and there’s a certain probability you can go from one state to the other state. And, actually, one of the things I found out about myself is I think through talking for this exact reason. Because people see this random Markov chain by what they say, and it suddenly goes into different places, and that’s how ideas come about. Most of my ideas have actually come through when I’ve been talking to someone.

HUIZINGA: Really?

ARZANI: Yeah.

HUIZINGA: Them talking or you talking?

ARZANI: Both.

HUIZINGA: Really?

ARZANI: So it’s, like, basically, I think the thing that has recently … like, I’ve just noticed more—again, being more mindful does that to you—it’s like I’m talking to someone. I’m like, I have an idea. And it’s usually they said something, or I was saying something that triggered that thought coming up. Which doesn’t happen when … I’m not one of those people that you can put in a room for three days—somebody actually once told me this— [LAUGHTER] like, I’m not one of those people you can put in a room for three days and I come out with these brilliant ideas. It’s like you put me in a room with five other people, then I come out with interesting ideas.

HUIZINGA: Right. … It’s the interaction.

ARZANI: Yeah.

HUIZINGA: I want to link this idea of the ideas that you get to the conversations you have and maybe go back to linking it to the work you’ve recently done. Talk about some of the projects, how they came from idea to paper to product even …

ARZANI: Mm-hm. So like one of the works that we were doing was this work on, like, max-min fair resource allocation that recently got published in NSDI and is actually in production. So the way that came out is I was working with a bunch of other researchers on risk estimation, actually, for incident management of all things, which was, how do you figure out if you want to mitigate a particular problem in a certain way, how much risk it induces as a problem. And so one of the people who was originally … one of the original researchers who built our wide-area traffic engineering controller, which we were talking about earlier, he said, “You’re solving the max-min fair problem.” We’re like, really? And then this caused a whole, like, one-year collaboration where we all sat and evolved this initial algorithm we had into a … So initially it was not a multipath problem. It had a lot of things that didn’t fully solve the problem of max-min fair resource allocation, but it evolved into that. Then we deployed it, and it improved the SWAN solver by a factor of three in terms of how fast it solved the problem and didn’t have any performance impact, or at least very little. And so, yeah, that’s how it got born.

HUIZINGA: OK. So for those of us who don’t know, what is max-min fair resource allocation, and why is it such a problem?

ARZANI: Well, so remember I said that in our wide area network, we route traffic from one place to the other in a way that meets capacity. So one of the objectives we try to meet is we try to be fair in a very specific metric. So max-min is just the metric of fairness we use. And that basically means you cannot improve what you allocated to one piece of traffic in a way that would hurt anybody who has gotten less. So there’s a little bit of a, like, … it’s a mind bend to wrap your head a little bit around the max-min fair definition. But the reason making it faster is important is if something fails, we need to quickly recompute what the paths are and how we route traffic. So the faster we can solve this problem, the better we can adapt to failures.

HUIZINGA: So talk a little bit about some of the work that started as an idea and you didn’t even maybe know that it was going to end up in production.

ARZANI: There was this person from Azure Networking came and gave a talk in our group. And he’s a person I’ve known for years, so I was like, hey, do you want to jump on a meeting and talk? So he came into that meeting, and I was like, OK, what are some of the things you’re curious about these days? You want to answer these days? And it was like, yeah, we have this heuristic we’re using in our traffic engineering solution, and essentially what it does is to make the optimization problem we solve smaller. If a piece of traffic is smaller than a particular, like, arbitrary threshold, we just send it on a shortest path and don’t worry about it. And then we optimize everything else. And I just want to know, like, what is the optimality gap of this heuristic? How bad can this heuristic be? And then I had worked on Stackelberg games before, in my PhD. It never went anywhere, but it was an idea I played around with, and it just immediately clicked in my head that this is the same problem. So Stackelberg games are a leader-follower game where in this scenario a leader has an objective function that they’re trying to maximize, and they control one or multiple of the inputs that their followers get to operate over. The followers, on the other hand, don’t get to control anything about this input. They have their own objective that they’re trying to maximize or minimize, but they have other variables in their control, as well. And what their objective is, is going to control the leader’s payoff. And so this game is happening where the leader has more control in this game because it’s, kind of, like the followers are operating in subject to whatever the leader says, right. But the leader is impacted by what the followers do. And so this dynamic is what they call a Stackelberg game. And the way we map the MetaOpt problem to this is the leader in our problem wants to maximize the difference between the optimal and the heuristic. It controls the inputs to both the optimal and the heuristic. And now this optimal and heuristic algorithms are the followers in that game. They don’t get to control the inputs, but they have other variables they control, and they have objectives that they want to maximize or minimize.

HUIZINGA: Right.

ARZANI: And so that’s how the Stackelberg-game dynamic comes about. And then we got other researchers in the team involved, and then we started talking, and then it just evolved into this beast right now that is a tool, MetaOpt, that we released, I think, a couple of months ago. And another piece that was really cool was people from ETH Zürich came to us and were like, oh, you guys analyzed our heuristic! We have a better one! Can you analyze this one? And that was a whole fun thing we did where we analyzed their heuristics for them. And, then, yeah …

HUIZINGA: Yeah. So all these things that you’re mentioning, are they findable as papers? Were they presented …

ARZANI: Yes.

HUIZINGA: … at conferences, and where are they in anybody’s usability scenario?

ARZANI: So the MetaOpt tool that I just mentioned, that one is in … it’s an open-source tool. You can go online and search for MetaOpt. You’ll find the tool. We’re here to support anything you need; if you run into issues, we’ll help you fix it.

HUIZINGA: Great. You can probably find all of these papers under publications …

ARZANI: Yes.

HUIZINGA: … on your bio page on the website, Microsoft Research website.

ARZANI: Correct.

HUIZINGA: Cool. If anyone wants to do that. So, Behnaz, the idea of having ideas is cool to me, but of course, part of the research problem is identifying which ones you should go after [LAUGHS] and which ones you shouldn’t. So, ironically, you’ve said you’re not that good at that part of it, but you’re working at getting better.

ARZANI: Yes.

HUIZINGA: So first of all, why do you say that you’re not very good at it? And second of all, what are you doing about it?

ARZANI: So I, as I said, get attracted to puzzles, to hard problems. So most of the problems that I go after are problems I have no idea how to solve. And that tends to be a risk.

HUIZINGA: Yeah.

ARZANI: Where I think people who are better at selecting problems are those who actually have an idea of whether they’ll be able to solve this problem or not. And I never actually asked myself that question before this year. [LAUGHTER] So now I’m trying to get a better sense of, how do I figure out if a problem is solvable or not before I try to solve it? And also, just what makes a good research problem? So what I’m doing is, I’m going back to the era that I thought had the best networking papers, and I’m just trying to dissect what makes those papers good, just to understand better for myself, to be like, OK, what do I want to replicate? Replicate, not in terms of techniques, but in terms of philosophy.

HUIZINGA: So what you’re looking at is how people solve problems through the work that they did in this arena. So what are you finding? Have you gotten any nuggets of …

ARZANI: So a couple. So one of my favorite papers is Van Jacobson’s TCP paper. The intuition is amazing to me. It’s almost like he has a vision of what’s happening, is the best I can describe it. And another example of this is also early-on papers by people like Ratul Mahajan, Srikanth Kandula, those guys, where you see that they start with a smaller example that, kind of, shows how this problem is going to happen and how they’re going to solve it. I mean, I did this in my work all the time, too, but it was never conscious. It’s more of like that goes to that mindfulness thing that I said before, too. It’s like you might be doing some of these already, but you don’t notice what you’re doing. It more of is, kind of, like putting of like, oh, this is what they did. And I do this, too. And this might be a good habit to keep but cultivate into a habit as opposed to an unconscious thing that you’re just doing.

HUIZINGA: Right. You know, this whole idea of going back to what’s been done before, I think that’s a lesson about looking at history, as well, and to say, you know, what can we learn from that? What are we trying to reinvent …

ARZANI: Yeah.

HUIZINGA: … that maybe doesn’t need to be reinvented? Has it helped you to get more targeted on the kinds of problems that you say, “I’m not going to work on that. I am going to work on that”?

ARZANI: To be very, very, very fair, I haven’t done this for a long time yet! This has been …

HUIZINGA: A new thing.

ARZANI: I started this this month, yeah.

HUIZINGA: Oh my goodness!

ARZANI: So we’ll see how far I get and how useful it ends up being! [LAUGHS]

[MUSIC BREAK]

HUIZINGA: One of my favorite things to talk about on this show is what my colleague Kristina calls “outrageous” lines of research. And so I’ve been asking all my guests about their most outrageous ideas and how they turned out. So sometimes these ideas never got off the ground. Sometimes they turned out great. And other times, they’ve failed spectacularly. Do you have a story for the “Microsoft Research Outrageous Ideas” file?

ARZANI: I had this question of, if language has grammar, and grammar is what LLMs are learning, which, to my understanding of what people who are experts in this field say, this maybe isn’t that, but if it is the case that grammar is what allows these LLMs to learn how language works, then in networking, we have the equivalent of that, and the equivalent of that is essentially network protocols. And everything that happens in a network, you can define it as an event that happens in a network. You can think of those, like, the events are words in a language. And so, is it going to be the case, and this is a question which is, if you take an event abstraction and encode everything that happens in a network in that event abstraction, can you build an equivalent of an LLM for networks? Now what you would use it for—this is another reason I’ve never worked on this problem—I have no idea! [LAUGHTER] But what this would allow you to do is build the equivalent of an LLM for networking, where actually you just translate that network’s events into, like, this event abstraction, and then the two understand each other. So like a universal language of networking, maybe. It could be cool. Never tried it. Probably a dumb idea! But it’s an idea.

HUIZINGA: What would it take to try it?

ARZANI: Um … I feel like bravery is, I think, one because with any risky idea, there’s a probability that you will fail.

HUIZINGA: As a researcher here at Microsoft Research, when you have this idea, um … and you say, well, I’m not brave enough … even if you were brave enough, who would you have to convince that they should let you do it?

ARZANI: I don’t think anybody!

HUIZINGA: Really?

ARZANI: That’s the whole … that’s the whole point of me being here! I don’t like being told what to do! [LAUGHS]

HUIZINGA: Back to the beginning!

ARZANI: Yeah. The only thing is that, maybe, like, people would be like, what have you been doing in the past six months? And I wouldn’t have … that’s the risk. That’s where bravery comes in.

HUIZINGA: Sure.

ARZANI: The bravery is more of there is a possibility that I have to devote three years of my life into this, to figuring out how to make that work, and I might not be able to.

HUIZINGA: Yes …

ARZANI: And there’s other things. So it’s a tradeoff also of where you put your time.

HUIZINGA: Sure.

ARZANI: So there. Yeah.

HUIZINGA: And if, but … part of it would be explaining it in a way to convince people: if it worked, it would be amazing!

ARZANI: And that’s the other problem with this idea. I don’t know what you would use it for. If I knew what you would use it for, maybe then it would make it worth it.

HUIZINGA: All right. Sounds like you need to spend some more time …

ARZANI: Yeah.

HUIZINGA: …ruminating on it. Um, yeah. The whole cliché of the solution in search of a problem.

ARZANI: Yeah.

HUIZINGA: [LAUGHS] As we close, I want to talk a little bit about some fun things. And so, aside from your research life, I was intrigued by the fact, on your bio page, that you have a rich artistic life, as well, and that includes painting, music, writing, along with some big ideas about the value of storytelling. So I’ll take a second to plug the bio page. People, go look at it because she’s got paintings and cool things that you can link to. As we close, I wonder if you could use this time to share your thoughts on this particular creative pursuit of storytelling and how it can enhance our relationships with our colleagues and ultimately make us better researchers and better people?

ARZANI: I think it’s not an understatement to say I had a life-changing experience through storytelling. The first time I encountered it, it was the most horrific thing I had ever seen! I had gone on Meetup—this was during COVID—to just, like, find places to meet people, build connections and all that, and I saw this event called “Storytelling Workshop,” and I was like, good! I’m good at making up stories, and, you know, that’s what I thought it was. Turns out it’s, you go and tell personal stories about your life that only involve you, that make you deeply vulnerable. And, by the way, I’m Iranian. We don’t do vulnerability. It’s just not a thing. So it was the most scary thing I’ve ever done in my life. But you go on stage and basically talk about your life. And the thing it taught me by both telling my own stories and listening to other people’s stories is that it showed me that you can connect to people through stories, first of all. The best ideas come when you’re actually in it together. Like one of the things that now I say that I didn’t used to say, we, we’re all human. And being human essentially means we have good things about ourselves and bad things about ourselves. And as researchers, we have our strengths as researchers, and we have our weaknesses as researchers. And so when we collaborate with other people, we bring all of that. And collaboration is a sacred thing that we do where we’re basically trusting each other with bringing all of that to the table and being that vulnerable. And so our job as collaborators is essentially to protect that, in a way, and make it safe for everybody to come as they are. And so I think that’s what it taught me, which is, like, basically holding space for that.

HUIZINGA: Yeah. How’s that working?

ARZANI: First of all, I stumbled into it, but there are people who are already “that” in this building …

HUIZINGA: Really?

ARZANI: … that have been for years. It’s just that now I can see them for what they bring, as opposed to before, I didn’t have the vocabulary for it.

HUIZINGA: Gotcha …

ARZANI: But people who don’t, it’s like what I’ve seen is almost like they initially look at you with skepticism, and then they think it’s a gimmick, and then they are like, what is that? And then they become curious, and then they, too, kind of join you, which is very, very interesting to see. But, like, again, it’s something that already existed. It’s just me not being privileged enough to know about it or, kind of, recognize it before.

HUIZINGA: Yeah. Can that become part of a culture, or do you feel like it is part of the culture here at Microsoft Research, or … ?

ARZANI: I think this depends on how people individually choose to show up. And I think we’re all, at the end of the day, individuals. And a lot of people are that way without knowing they are that way. So maybe it is already part of the culture. I haven’t necessarily sat down and thought about it deeply, so I can’t say.

HUIZINGA: Yeah, yeah. But it would be a dream to have the ability to be that vulnerable through storytelling as part of the research process?

ARZANI: I think so. We had a storytelling coach that would say, “Tell your story, change the world.” And as researchers, we are attempting to change the world, and part of that is our stories. And so maybe, yeah! And basically, what we’re doing here is, I’m telling my story. So …

HUIZINGA: Yeah.

ARZANI: … maybe you’re changing the world!

HUIZINGA: You know, I’m all in! I’m here for it, as they say. Behnaz Arzani. It is such a pleasure—always a pleasure—to talk to you. Thanks for sharing your story with us today on Ideas.

ARZANI: Thank you.

[MUSIC]

[MUSIC FADES] 

My guest on this episode is Abigail Sellen, known by her friends and colleagues as Abi. A social scientist by training and an expert in human-computer interaction, Abi has a long list of accomplishments and honors, and she’s a fellow of many technical academies and societies. But today I’m talking to her in her role as distinguished scientist and lab director of Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK, where she oversees a diverse portfolio of research, some of which supports a new initiative centered around the big idea of AI, Cognition, and the Economy, also known as AICE. Abi Sellen. I’m so excited to talk to you today. Welcome to Ideas! 

ABIGAIL SELLEN: Thanks! Me, too. 

HUIZINGA: So before we get into an overview of the ideas behind AICE research, let’s talk about the big ideas behind you. Tell us your own research origin story, as it were, and if there was one, what big idea or animating “what if?” captured your imagination and inspired you to do what you’re doing today? 

SELLEN: OK, well, you’re asking me to go back in the mists of time a little bit, but let me try. [LAUGHTER] So I would say, going … this goes back to my time when I started doing my PhD at UC San Diego. So I had just graduated as a psychologist from the University of Toronto, and I was going to go off and do a PhD in psychology with a guy called Don Norman. So back then, I really had very little interest in computers. And in fact, computers weren’t really a thing that normal people used. [LAUGHTER] They were things that you might, like, put punch cards into. Or, in fact, in my undergrad days, I actually programmed in hexadecimal, and it was horrible. But at UCSD, they were using computers everywhere, and it was, kind of, central to how everyone worked. And we even had email back then. So computers weren’t really for personal use, and it was clear that they were designed for engineers by engineers. And so they were horrible to use, people grappling with them, people were making mistakes. You could easily remove all your files just by doing rm*. So the big idea that was going around the lab at the time—and this was by a bunch of psychologists, not just Don, but other ones—was that we could design computers for people, for people to use, and take into account, you know, how people act and interact with things and what they want. And that was a radical idea at the time. And that was the start of this field called human-computer interaction, which is … you know, now we talk about designing computers for people and “user-friendly” and that’s a, kind of, like, normal thing, but back then … 

HUIZINGA: Yeah … 

SELLEN: … it was a radical idea. And so, to me, that changed everything for me to think about how we could design technology for people. And then, if I can, I’ll talk about one other thing that happened … 

HUIZINGA: Yeah, please.

SELLEN: … during that time. So at that time, there was another gang of psychologists, people like Dave Rumelhart, Geoff Hinton, Jay McClelland, people like that, who were thinking about, how do we model human intelligence—learning, memory, cognition—using computers? And so these were psychologists thinking about, how do people represent ideas and knowledge, and how can we do that with computers?  

HUIZINGA: Yeah … 

SELLEN: And this was radical at the time because cognitive psychologists back then were thinking about … they did lots of, kind of, flow chart models of human cognition. And people like Dave Rumelhart did networks, neural networks, … 

HUIZINGA: Ooh … 

SELLEN: … and they were using what were then called spreading activation models of memory and things, which came from psychology. And that’s interesting because not only were they modeling human cognition in this, kind of, what they called parallel distributed processing, but they operationalized it. And that’s where Hinton and others came up with the back-propagation algorithm, and that was a huge leap forward in AI. So psychologists were actually directly responsible for the wave of AI we see today. A lot of computer scientists don’t know that. A lot of machine learning people don’t know that. But so, for me, long story short, that time in my life and doing my PhD at UC San Diego led to me understanding that social science, psychology in particular, and computing should be seen as things which mutually support one another and that can lead to huge breakthroughs in how we design computers and computer algorithms and how we do computing. So that, kind of, set the path for the rest of my career. And that was 40 years ago! 

HUIZINGA: Did you have what we’ll call metacognition of that being an aha moment for you, and like, I’m going to embrace this, and this is my path forward? Or was it just, sort of, more iterative: these things interest you, you take the next step, these things interest you more, you take that step? 

SELLEN: I think it was an aha moment at certain points. Like, for example, the day that Francis Crick walked into our seminar and started talking about biologically inspired models of computing, I thought, “Ooh, there’s something big going on here!” 

HUIZINGA: Wow, yeah. 

SELLEN: Because even then I knew that he was a big deal. So I knew there was something happening that was really, really interesting. I didn’t think so much about it from the point of view of, you know, I would have a career of helping to design human-centric computing, but more, wow, there’s a breakthrough in psychology and how we understand the human mind. And I didn’t realize at that time that that was going to lead to what’s happening in AI today. 

HUIZINGA: Well, let’s talk about some of these people that were influential for you as a follow-up to the animating “big idea.” If I’m honest, Abi, my jaw dropped a little when I read your bio because it’s like a who’s who of human-centered computing and UX design. And now these people are famous. Maybe they weren’t so much at the time. But tell us about the influential people in your life, and how their ideas inspired you?

SELLEN: Yeah, sure, happy to. In fact, I’ll start with one person who is not a, sort of, HCI person, but my stepfather, John Senders, was this remarkable human being. He died three years ago at the age of 98. He worked almost to his dying day. Just an amazing man. He entered my life when I was about 13. He joined the family. And he went to Harvard. He trained with people like Skinner. He was taught by these, kind of, famous psychologists of the 20th century, and they were his friends and his colleagues, and he introduced me to a lot of them. You know, people like Danny Kahneman and, you know, Amos Tversky and Alan Baddeley, and all these people that, you know, I had learned about as an undergrad. But the main thing that John did for me was to open my eyes to how you could think about modeling humans as machines. And he really believed that. He was not only a psychologist, but he was an engineer. And he, sort of, kicked off or he was one of the founders of the field of human factors engineering. And that’s what human factors engineers do. They look at people, and they think, how can we mathematically model them? So, you know, we’d be sitting by a pool, and he’d say, “You can use information sampling to model the frequency with which somebody has to watch a baby as they go towards the pool. And it depends on their velocity and then their trajectory… !” [LAUGHTER] Or we go into a bank, and he’d say, “Abi, how would you use queuing theory to, you know, estimate the mean wait time?” Like, you know, so he got me thinking like that, and he recognized in me that I had this curiosity about the world and about people, but also, that I loved mathematics. So he was the first guy. Don Norman, I’ve already mentioned as my PhD supervisor, and I’ve said something about already how he, sort of, had this radical idea about designing computers for people. And I was fortunate to be there when the field of human-computer interaction was being born, and that was mainly down to him. And he’s just [an] incredible guy. He’s still going. He’s still working, consulting, and he wrote this famous book called The Psychology of Everyday Things, which now is, I think it’s been renamed The Design of Everyday Things, and he was really influential and been a huge supporter of mine. And then the third person I’ll mention is Bill Buxton. And … 

HUIZINGA: Yeah …  

SELLEN: Bill, Bill … 

HUIZINGA: Bill, Bill, Bill! [LAUGHTER] 

SELLEN: Yeah. I met Bill at, first, well, actually first at University of Toronto; when I was a grad student, I went up and told him his … the experiment he was describing was badly designed. And instead of, you know, brushing me off, he said, “Oh really, OK, I want to talk to you about that.” And then I met him at Apple later when I was an intern, and we just started working together. And he is, he’s just … amazing designer. Everything he does is based on, kind of, theory and deep thought. And he’s just so much fun. So I would say those three people have been big influences on me. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah. What about Marilyn Tremaine? Was she a factor in what you did? 

SELLEN: Yes, yeah, she was great. And Ron Baecker. So… 

HUIZINGA: Yeah … 

SELLEN: … after I did my PhD, I did a postdoc at Toronto in the Dynamic Graphics Project Lab. And they were building a media space, and they asked me to join them. And Marilyn and Ron and Bill were building this video telepresence media space, which was way ahead of its time.

HUIZINGA: Yeah. 

SELLEN: So I worked with all three of them, and they were great fun. 

HUIZINGA: Well, let’s talk about the research initiative AI, Cognition, and the Economy. For context, this is a global, interdisciplinary effort to explore the impact of generative AI on human cognition and thinking, work dynamics and practices, and labor markets and the economy. Now, we’ve already lined up some AICE researchers to come on the podcast and talk about specific projects, including pilot studies, workshops, and extended collaborations, but I’d like you to act as a, sort of, docent or tour guide for the initiative, writ large, and tell us why, particularly now, you think it’s important to bring this group of scientists together and what you hope to accomplish. 

SELLEN: I think it’s important now because I think there are so many extreme views out there about how AI is going to impact people. A lot of hyperbole, right. So there’s a lot of fear about, you know, jobs going away, people being replaced, robots taking over the world. And there’s a lot of enthusiasm about how, you know, we’re all going to be more productive, have more free time, how it’s going to be the answer to all our problems. And so I think there are people at either end of that conversation. And I always … I love the Helen Fielding quote … I don’t know if you know Helen Fielding. She wrote… 

HUIZINGA: Yeah, Bridget Jones’s Diary … 

SELLEN: … Bridget Jones’s Diary. Yeah. [LAUGHTER] She says, “Nothing is either as bad or as good as it seems,” right. And I live by that because I think things are usually somewhere in the middle. So I’m not saying that we shouldn’t take concerns seriously about AI or be hugely optimistic about the opportunities, but rather, my view on this is that we can do research to get, kind of, line of sight into the future and what is going to happen with AI. And more than this, we should be using research to not just get line of sight but to steer the future, right. We can actually help to shape it. And especially being at Microsoft, we have a chance to do that. So what I mean here is that let’s begin by understanding first the capabilities of AI and get a good understanding of where it’s heading and the pace that it’s heading at because it’s changing so fast, right.  

HUIZINGA: Mm-hmm … 

SELLEN: And then let’s do some research looking at the impact, both in the short term and the long term, about its impact on tasks, on interaction, and, most importantly for me anyway, on people. Yeah, and then we can extrapolate out how this is going to impact jobs, skills, organizations, society at large, you know. So we get this, kind of, arc that we can trace, but we do it because we do research. We don’t just rely on the hyperbole and speculation, but we actually try and do it more systematically. And then I think the last piece here is that if we’re going to do this well and if we think about what AI’s impact can be, which we think is going to impact on a global scale, we need many different skills and disciplines. We need not just machine learning people and engineering and computer scientists at large, but we need designers, we need social scientists, we need even philosophers, and we need domain experts, right. So we need to bring all of these people together to do this properly.

HUIZINGA: Interesting. Well, let’s do break it down a little bit then. And I want to ask you a couple questions about each of the disciplines within the acronym A-I-C-E, or AICE. And I’ll start with AI and another author that we can refer to. Sci-fi author and futurist Arthur C. Clarke famously said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and for many people, AI systems seem to be magic. So in response to that, many in the industry have emphatically stated that AI is just a tool. But you’ve said things like AI is more a “collaborative copilot than a mere tool,” and recently, you said we might even think of it as a “very smart and intuitive butler.” So how do those ideas from the airline industry and Downton Abbey help us better understand and position AI and its role in our world? 

SELLEN: Well, I’m going to use Wodehouse here in a minute as well, but um … so I think AI is different from many other tech developments in a number of important ways. One is, it has agency, right. So it can take initiative and do things on your behalf. It’s highly complex, and, you know, it’s getting more complex by the day. It changes. It’s dynamic. It’s probabilistic rather than deterministic, so it will give you different answers depending on when, you know, when you ask it and what you ask it. And it’s based on human-generated data. So it’s a vastly different kind of tool than HCI, as a field, has studied in the past. There are lots of downsides to that, right. One is it means it’s very hard to understand how it works under the hood, right …  

HUIZINGA: Yeah …  

SELLEN: … and understanding the output. It’s fraught with uncertainty because the output changes every time you use it. But then let’s think about the upsides, especially, large language models give us a way of conversationally interacting with AI like never before, right. So it really is a new interaction paradigm which has finally come of age. So I do think it’s going to get more personal over time and more anticipatory of our needs. And if we design it right, it can be like the perfect butler. So if you know P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and Wooster, you know, Jeeves knows that Bertie has had a rough night and has a hangover, so he’s there at the bedside with a tonic and a warm bath already ready for him. But he also knows what Wooster enjoys and what decisions should be left to him, and he knows when to get out of the way. He also knows when to be very discreet, right. So when I use that butler metaphor, I think about how it’s going to take time to get this right, but eventually, we may live in a world where AI helps us with good attention to privacy of getting that kind of partnership right between Jeeves and Wooster. 

HUIZINGA: Right. Do you think that’s possible? 

SELLEN: I don’t think we’ll ever get it exactly right, but if we have a conversational system where we can mutually shape the interaction, then even if Jeeves doesn’t get things right, Wooster can train him to do a better job. 

HUIZINGA: Go back to the copilot analogy, which is a huge thing at Microsoft — in fact, they’ve got products named Copilot — and the idea of a copilot, which is, sort of, assuaging our fears that it would be the pilot … 

SELLEN: Yeah …  

HUIZINGA: … AI.

SELLEN: Yeah, yeah. 

HUIZINGA: So how do we envision that in a way that … you say it’s more than a mere tool, but it’s more like a copilot? 

SELLEN: Yeah, I actually like the copilot metaphor for what you’re alluding to, which is that the pilot is the one who has the final say, who has the, kind of, oversight of everything that’s happening and can step in. And also that the copilot is there in a supportive role, who kind of trains by dint of the fact that they work next to the pilot, and that they have, you know, specialist skills that can help.  

HUIZINGA: Right …   

SELLEN: So I really like that metaphor. I think there are other metaphors that we will explore in future and which will make sense for different contexts, but I think, as a metaphor for a lot of the things we’re developing today, it makes a lot of sense. 

HUIZINGA: You know, it also feels like, in the conversation, words really matter in how people perceive what the tool is. So having these other frameworks to describe it and to implement it, I think, could be really helpful. 

SELLEN: Yes, I agree. 

[MUSIC BREAK] 

HUIZINGA: Well, let’s talk about intelligence for a second. One of the most interesting things about AI is it’s caused us to pay attention to other kinds of intelligence. As author Meghan O’Gieblyn puts it, “God, human, animal, machine … ” So why do you think, Abi, it’s important to understand the characteristics of each kind of intelligence, and how does that impact how we conceptualize, make, and use what we’re calling artificial intelligence? 

SELLEN: Yeah, well, I actually prefer the term machine intelligence to artificial intelligence … 

HUIZINGA: Me too! Thank you! [LAUGHTER] 

SELLEN: Because the latter implies that there’s one kind of intelligence, and also, it does allude to the fact that that is human-like. You know, we’re trying to imitate the human. But if you think about animals, I think that’s really interesting. I mean, many of us have good relationships with our pets, right. And we know that they have a different kind of intelligence. And it’s different from ours, but that doesn’t mean we can’t understand it to some extent, right. And if you think about … animals are superhuman in many ways, right. They can do things we can’t. So whether it’s an ox pulling a plow or a dog who can sniff out drugs or ferrets who can, you know, thread electrical cables through pipes, they can do things. And bee colonies are fascinating to me, right. And they work as a, kind of, a crowd intelligence, or hive mind, right. [LAUGHTER] That’s where that comes from. And so in so many ways, animals are smarter than humans. But it doesn’t matter—like this “smarter than” thing also bugs me. It’s about being differently intelligent, right. And the reason I think that’s important when we think about machine intelligence is that machine intelligence is differently intelligent, as well. So the conversational interface allows us to explore the nature of that machine intelligence because we can speak to it in a kind of human-like way, but that doesn’t mean that it is intelligent in the same way a human is intelligent. And in fact, we don’t really want it to be, right. 

HUIZINGA: Right … 

SELLEN: Because we want it, we want it to be a partner with us, to do things that we can’t, you know, just like using the plow and the ox. That partnership works because the ox is stronger than we are. So I think machine intelligence is a much better word, and understanding it’s not human is a good thing. I do worry that, because it sounds like a human, it can seduce us into thinking it’s a human …

HUIZINGA: Yeah … 

SELLEN: … and that can be problematic. You know, there are instances where people have been on, for example, dating sites and a bot is sounding like a human and people get fooled. So I think we don’t want to go down the path of fooling people. We want to be really careful about that. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah, this idea of conflating different kinds of intelligences to our own … I think we can have a separate vision of animal intelligence, but machines are, like you say, kind of seductively built to be like us.  

SELLEN: Yeah …  

HUIZINGA: And so back to your comment about shaping how this technology moves forward and the psychology of it, how might we envision how we could shape, either through language or the way these machines operate, that we build in a “I’m not going to fool you” mechanism? 

SELLEN: Well, I mean, there are things that we do at the, kind of, technical level in terms of guardrails and metaprompts, and we have guidelines around that. But there’s also the language that an AI character will use in terms of, you know, expressing thoughts and feelings and some suggestion of an inner life, which … these machines don’t have an inner life, right. 

HUIZINGA: Right! 

SELLEN: So … and one of the reasons we talk to people is we want to discover something about their inner life. 

HUIZINGA: Yessss … 

SELLEN: And so why would I talk to a machine to try and discover that? So I think there are things that we can do in terms of how we design these systems so that they’re not trying to deceive us. Unless we want them to deceive us. So if we want to be entertained or immersed, maybe that’s a good thing, right? That they deceive us. But we enter into that knowing that that’s what’s happening, and I think that’s the difference.

HUIZINGA: Well, let’s talk about the C in A-I-C-E, which is cognition. And we’ve just talked about other kinds of intelligence. Let’s broaden the conversation and talk about the impact of AI on humans themselves. Is there any evidence to indicate that machine intelligence actually has an impact on human intelligence, and if so, why is that an important data point? 

SELLEN: Yeah, OK, great topic. This is one of my favorite topics. [LAUGHTER] So, well, let me just backtrack a little bit for a minute. A lot of the work that’s coming out today looking at the impact of AI on people is in terms of their productivity, in terms of how fast they can do something, how efficiently they can do a job, or the quality of the output of the tasks. And I do think that’s important to understand because, you know, as we deploy these new tools in peoples’ hands, we want to know what’s happening in terms of, you know, peoples’ productivity, workflow, and so on. But there’s far less of it on looking at the impact of using AI on people themselves and on how people think, on their cognitive processes, and how are these changing over time? Are they growing? Are they atrophying as they use them? And, relatedly, what’s happening to our skills? You know, over time, what’s going to be valued, and what’s going to drop away? And I think that’s important for all kinds of reasons. So if you think about generative AI, right, these are these AI systems that will write something for us or make a slide deck or a picture or a video. What they’re doing is they are taking the cognitive work of generation of an artifact or the effort of self-expression that most of us, in the old-fashioned world, will do, right—we write something, we make something—they’re doing that for us on our behalf. And so our job then is to think about how do we specify our intention to the machine, how do we talk to it to get it to do the things we want, and then how do we evaluate the output at the end? So it’s really radically shifting what we do, the work that we do, the cognitive and mental work that we do, when we engage with these tools. Now why is that a problem? Or should it be a problem? One concern is that many of us think and structure our thoughts through the process of making things, right. Through the process of writing or making something. So a big question for me is, if we’re removed from that process, how deeply will we learn or understand what we’re writing about? A second one is, you know, if we’re not deeply engaged in the process of generating these things, does that actually undermine our ability to evaluate the output when we do get presented with it?  

HUIZINGA: Right … 

SELLEN: Like, if it writes something for us and it’s full of problems and errors, if we stop writing for ourselves, are we going to be worse at, kind of, judging the output? Another one is, as we hand things over to more and more of these automated processes, will we start to blindly accept or over-rely on our AI assistants, right. And the aviation industry has known that for years … 

HUIZINGA: Yeah … 

SELLEN: … which is why they stick pilots in simulators. Because they rely on autopilot so much that they forget those key skills. And then another one is, kind of, longer term, which is like these new generations of people who are going to grow up with this technology, what are the fundamental skills that they’re going to need to not just to use the AI but to be kind of citizens of the world and also be able to judge the output of these AI systems? So the calculator, right, is a great example. When it was first introduced, there was a huge outcry around, you know, kids won’t be able to do math anymore! Or we don’t need to teach it anymore. Well, we do still teach it because when you use a calculator, you need to be able to see whether or not the output the machine is giving you is in the right ballpark, right.

HUIZINGA: Right … 

SELLEN: You need to know the basics. And so what are the basics that kids are going to need to know? We just don’t have the answer to those questions. And then the last thing I’ll say on this, because I could go on for a long time, is we also know that there are changes in the brain when we use these new technologies. There are shifts in our cognitive skills, you know, things get better and things do deteriorate. So I think Susan Greenfield is famous for her work looking at what happens to the neural pathways in the age of the internet, for example. So she found that all the studies were pointing to the fact that reading online and on the internet meant that our visual-spatial skills were being boosted, but our capacity to do deep processing, mindful knowledge acquisition, critical thinking, reflection, were all decreasing over time. And I think any parent who has a teenager will know that focus of attention, flitting from one thing to another, multitasking, is, sort of, the order of the day. Well, not just for teenagers. I think all of us are suffering from this now. It’s much harder. I find it much harder to sit down and read something in a long, focused way … 

HUIZINGA: Yeah …  

SELLEN: … than I used to. So all of this long-winded answer is to say, we don’t understand what the impact of these new AI systems is going to be. We need to do research to understand it. And we need to do that research both looking at short-term impacts and long-term impacts. Not to say that this is all going to be bad, but we need to understand where it’s going so we can design around it. 

HUIZINGA: You know, even as you asked each of those questions, Abi, I found myself answering it preemptively, “Yes. That’s going to happen. That’s going to happen.” [LAUGHS] And so even as you say all of this and you say we need research, do you already have some thinking about, you know, if research tells us the answer that we thought might be true already, do we have a plan in place or a thought process in place to address it? 

SELLEN: Well, yes, and I think we’ve got some really exciting research going on in the company right now and in the AICE program, and I’m hoping your future guests will be able to talk more in-depth about these things. But we are looking at things like the impact of AI on writing, on comprehension, on mathematical abilities. But more than that. Not just understanding the impact on these skills and abilities, but how can we design systems better to help people think better, right?  

HUIZINGA: Yeah … 

SELLEN: To help them think more deeply, more creatively. I don’t think AI needs to necessarily de-skill us in the critical skills that we want and need. It can actually help us if we design them properly. And so that’s the other part of what we’re doing. It’s not just understanding the impact, but now saying, OK, now that we understand what’s going on, how do we design these systems better to help people deepen their skills, change the way that they think in ways that they want to change—in being more creative, thinking more deeply, you know, reading in different ways, understanding the world in different ways. 

HUIZINGA: Right. Well, that is a brilliant segue into my next question. Because we’re on the last letter, E, in AICE: the economy. And that I think instills a lot of fear in people. To cite another author, since we’re on a citing authors roll, Clay Shirky, in his book Here Comes Everybody, writes about technical revolutions in general and the impact they have on existing economic paradigms. And he says, “Real revolutions don’t involve an orderly transition from point A to point B. Rather, they go from A, through a long period of chaos, and only then reach B. And in that chaotic period the old systems get broken long before the new ones become stable.” Let’s take Shirky’s idea and apply it to generative AI. If B equals the future of work, what’s getting broken in the period of transition from how things were to how things are going to be, what do we have to look forward to, and how do we progress toward B in a way that minimizes chaos? 

SELLEN: Hmm … oh, those are big questions! [LAUGHS] 

HUIZINGA: Too many questions! [LAUGHS] 

SELLEN: Yeah, well, I mean, Shirky was right. Things take a long time to bed in, right. And much of what happens over time, I don’t think we can actually predict. You know, so who would have predicted echo chambers or the rise of deepfakes or, you know, the way social media could start revolutions in those early days of social media, right. So good and bad things happen, and a lot of it’s because it rolls out over time, it scales up, and then people get involved. And that’s the really unpredictable bit, is when people get involved en masse. I think we’re going to see the same thing with AI systems. They are going to take a long time to bed in, and its impact is going to be global, and it’s going to take a long time to unfold. So I think what we can do is, to some extent, we can see the glimmerings of what’s going to happen, right. So I think it’s the William Gibson quote is, you know, “The future’s already here; it’s just not evenly distributed,” or something like that, right. We can see some of the problems that are playing out, both in the hands of bad actors and things that will happen unintentionally. We can see those, and we can design for them, and we can do things about it because we are alert and we are looking to see what happens. And also, the good things, right. And all the good things that are playing out, … 

HUIZINGA: Yeah …  

SELLEN: … we can make the most of those. Other things we can do is, you know, at Microsoft, we have a set of responsible AI principles that we make sure all our products go through to make sure that we look into the future as much as we can, consider what the consequences might be, and then deploy things in very careful steps, evaluating as we go. And then, coming back to what I said earlier, doing deep research to try and get a better line of sight. So in terms of what’s going to happen with the future of work, I think, again, we need to steer it. Some of the things I talked about earlier in terms of making sure we build skills rather than undermine them, making sure we don’t over automate, making sure that we put agency in the hands of people. And always making sure that we design our AI experiences with human hope, aspirations, and needs in mind. If we do that, I think we’re on a good track, but we should always be vigilant, you know, to what’s evolving, what’s happening here.  

HUIZINGA: Yeah …

SELLEN: I can’t really predict whether we’re headed for chaos or not. I don’t think we are, as long as we’re mindful. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah. And it sounds like there’s a lot more involved outside of computer science, in terms of support systems and education and communication, to acclimatize people to a new kind of economy, which like you say, you can’t … I’m shocked that you can’t predict it, Abi. I was expecting that you could, but … [LAUGHTER] 

SELLEN: Sorry. 

HUIZINGA: Sorry! But yeah, I mean, do you see the ancillary industries, we’ll call them, in on this? And how can, you know, sort of, a lab in Cambridge, and labs around the world that are doing AI, how can they spread out to incorporate these other things to help the people who know nothing about what’s going on in your lab move forward here? 

SELLEN: Well, I think, you know, there are lots of people that we need to talk to and to take account of. The word stakeholder … I hate that word stakeholder! I’m not sure why. [LAUGHTER] But anyway, stakeholders in this whole AI odyssey that we’re on … you know, public perceptions are one thing. I’m a member of a lot of societies where we do a lot of outreach and talks about AI and what’s going on, and I think that’s really, really important. And get people excited also about the possibilities of what could happen.  

HUIZINGA: Yeah …  

SELLEN: Because I think a lot of the media, a lot of the stories that get out there are very dystopian and scary, and it’s right that we are concerned and we are alert to possibilities, but I don’t think it does anybody any good to make people scared or anxious. And so I think there’s a lot we can do with the public. And there’s a lot we can do with, when I think about the future of work, different domains, you know, and talking to them about their needs and how they see AI fitting into their particular work processes. 

HUIZINGA: So, Abi, we’re kind of [LAUGHS] dancing around these dystopian narratives, and whether they’re right or wrong, they have gained traction. So it’s about now that I ask all of my guests what could go wrong if you got everything right? So maybe you could present, in this area, some more hopeful, we’ll call them “-topias,” or preferred futures, if you will, around AI and how you and/or your lab and other people in the industry are preparing for them. 

SELLEN: Well, again, I come back to the idea that the future is all around us to some extent, and we’re seeing really amazing breakthroughs, right, with AI. For example, scientific breakthroughs in terms of, you know, drug discovery, new materials to help tackle climate change, all kinds of things that are going to help us tackle some of the world’s biggest problems. Better understandings of the natural world, right, and how interventions can help us. New tools in the hands of low-literacy populations and support for, you know, different ways of working in different cultures. I think that’s another big area in which AI can help us. Personalization—personalized medicine, personalized tutoring systems, right. So we talked about education earlier. I think that AI could do a lot if we design it right to really help in education and help support people’s learning processes. So I think there’s a lot here, and there’s a lot of excitement—with good reason. Because we’re already seeing these things happening. And we should bear those things in mind when we start to get anxious about AI. And I personally am really, really excited about it. I’m excited about, you know, what the company I work for is doing in this area and other companies around the world. I think that it’s really going to help us in the long term, build new skills, see the world in new ways, you know, tackle some of these big problems. 

HUIZINGA: I recently saw an ad—I’m not making this up—it was the quote-unquote “productivity app,” and it was simply a small wooden box filled with pieces of paper. And there was a young man who had a how-to video on how to use it on YouTube. [LAUGHS] He was clearly born into the digital age and found writing lists on paper to be a revolutionary idea. But I myself have toggled back and forth between what we’ll call the affordances of the digital world and the familiarity and comfort of the physical world. And you actually studied this and wrote about it in a book called The Myth of the Paperless Office. That was 20 years ago. Why did you do the work then, what’s changed in the ensuing years, and why in the age of AI do I love paper so much?

SELLEN: Yeah, so, that was quite a while ago now. It was a book that I cowrote with my husband. He’s a sociologist, so we, sort of, came together on that book, me as a psychologist and he as a sociologist. What we were responding to at the time was a lot of hype about the paperless office and the paperless future. At the time, I was working at EuroPARC, you know, which is the European sister lab of Xerox PARC. And so, obviously, they had big investment in this. And there were many people in that lab who really believed in the paperless office, and lots of great inventions came out of the fact that people were pursuing that vision. So that was a good side of that, but we also saw where things could go horribly wrong when you just took a paper-based system away and you just replaced it with a digital system.  

HUIZINGA: Yeah … 

SELLEN: I remember some of the disasters in air traffic control, for example, when they took the paper flight strips away and just made them all digital. And those are places where you don’t want to mess around with something that works. 

HUIZINGA: Right. 

SELLEN: You have to be really careful about how you introduce digital systems. Likewise, many people remember things that went wrong when hospitals tried to go paperless with health records being paperless. Now, those things are digital now, but we were talking about chaos earlier. There was a lot of chaos on the path. So what we’ve tried to say in that book to some extent is, let’s understand the work that paper is doing in these different work contexts and the affordances of paper. You know, what is it doing for people? Anything from, you know, I hand a document over to someone else; a physical document gives me the excuse to talk to that person …  

HUIZINGA: Right… 

SELLEN: … through to, you know, when I place a document on somebody’s desk, other people in the workplace can see that I’ve passed it on to someone else. Those kind of nuanced observations are useful because you then need to think, how’s the digital system going to replace that? Not in the same way, but it’s got to do the same job, right. So you need to talk to people, you need to understand the context of their work, and then you need to carefully plan out how you’re going to make the transition. So if we just try to inject AI into workflows or totally replace parts of workflows with AI without a really deep understanding of how that work is currently done, what the workers get from it, what is the value that the workers bring to that process, we could go through that chaos. And so it’s really important to get social scientists involved in this and good designers, and that’s where the, kind of, multidisciplinary thing really comes into its own. That’s where it’s really, really valuable. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah … You know, it feels super important, that book, about a different thing, how it applies now and how you can take lessons from that arc to what you’re talking about with AI. I feel like people should go back and read that book. 

SELLEN: I wouldn’t object! [LAUGHTER] 

[MUSIC BREAK] 

HUIZINGA: Let’s talk about some research ideas that are on the horizon. Lots of research is basically just incremental building on what’s been done before, but there are always those moonshot ideas that seem outrageous at first. Now, you’re a scientist and an inventor yourself, and you’re also a lab director, so you’ve seen a lot of ideas over the years. [LAUGHS] You’ve probably had a lot of ideas. Have any of them been outrageous in your mind? And if so, what was the most outrageous, and how did it work out? 

SELLEN: OK, well, I’m a little reluctant to say this one, but I always believed that the dream of AI was outrageous. [LAUGHTER] So, you know, going back to those early days when, you know, I was a psychologist in the ’80s and seeing those early expert systems that were being built back then and trying to codify and articulate expert knowledge into machines to make them artificially intelligent, it just seemed like they were on a road to nowhere. I didn’t really believe in the whole vision of AI for many, many years. I think that when deep learning, that whole revolution’s kicked off, I never saw where it was heading. So I am, to this day, amazed by what these systems can do and never believed that these things would be possible. And so I was a skeptic, and I am no longer a skeptic, [LAUGHTER] with a proviso of everything else I’ve said before, but I thought it was an outrageous idea that these systems would be capable of what they’re now capable of. 

HUIZINGA: You know, that’s funny because, going back to what you said earlier about your stepdad walking you around and asking you how you’d codify a human into a machine … was that just outrageous to you, or is that just part of the exploratory mode that your stepdad, kind of, brought you into? 

SELLEN: Well, so, back then I was quite young, and I was willing to believe him, and I, sort of, signed up to that. But later, especially when I met my husband, a sociologist, I realized that I didn’t agree with any of that at all. [LAUGHTER] So we had great, I’ll say, “energetic” discussions with my stepdad after that, which was fun.  

HUIZINGA: I bet.  

SELLEN: But yeah, but so, it was how I used to think and then I went through this long period of really rejecting all of that. And part of that was, you know, seeing these AI systems really struggle and fail. And now here we are today. So yeah. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah, I just had Rafah Hosn on the podcast and when we were talking about this “outrageous ideas” question, she said, “Well, I don’t really see much that’s outrageous.” And I said, “Wait a minute! You’re living in outrageous! You are in AI Frontiers at Microsoft Research.” Maybe it’s just because it’s so outrageous that it’s become normal?

SELLEN: Yeah … 

HUIZINGA: And yeah, well … Well, finally, Abi, your mentor and adviser, Don Norman … you referred to a book that he wrote, and I know it as The Design of Everyday Things, and in it he wrote this: “Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.” So as we close, I’d love it if you’d speak to this statement in the context of AI, Cognition, and the Economy. How might we see the design of AI systems as an act of communication with people, and how do we get to a place where an understanding of deeply human qualities plays a larger role in informing these ideas, and ultimately the products, that emerge from a lab like yours? 

SELLEN: So this is absolutely critical to getting AI development and design right. It’s deeply understanding people and what they need, what their aspirations are, what human values are we designing for. You know, I would say that as a social scientist, but I also believe that most of the technologists and computer scientists and machine learning people that I interact with on a daily basis also believe that. And that’s one thing that I love about the lab that I’m a part of, is that it’s very interdisciplinary. We’re always putting the, kind of, human-centric spin on things. And, you know, Don was right. And that’s what he’s been all about through his career. We really need to understand, who are we designing this technology for? Ultimately, it’s for people; it’s for society; it’s for the, you know, it’s for the common good. And so that’s what we’re all about. Also, I’m really excited to say we are becoming, as an organization, much more globally distributed. Just recently taken on a lab in Nairobi. And the cultural differences and the differences in different countries casts a whole new light on how these technologies might be used. And so I think that it’s not just about understanding different people’s needs but different cultures and different parts of the world and how this is all going to play out on a global scale. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah … So just to, kind of, put a cap on it, when I said the term “deeply human qualities,” what I’m thinking about is the way we collaborate and work as a team with other people, having empathy and compassion, being innovative and creative, and seeking well-being and prosperity. Those are qualities that I have a hard time superimposing onto or into a machine. Do you think that AI can help us? 

SELLEN: Yeah, I think all of these things that you just named are things which, as you say, are deeply human, and they are the aspects of our relationship with technology that we want to not only protect and preserve but support and amplify. And I think there are many examples I’ve seen in development and coming out which have that in mind, which seek to augment those different aspects of human nature. And that’s exciting. And we always need to keep that in mind as we design these new technologies. 

HUIZINGA: Yeah. Well, Abi Sellen, I’d love to stay and chat with you for another couple hours, but how fun to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us today on Ideas. 

SELLEN: It’s been great. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.

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