Sociotechnical Systems
News & features
Research Focus: Week of May 27, 2024
How can generative AI tools represent less common identities and narratives; Can LLMs help players participate in game narratives; Using LLMs to improve geospatial demographic data; A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization; and more.
Research Focus: Week of May 8, 2023
In this issue: Microsoft researchers win four more awards; AutoRXN automates calculations of molecular systems; LLM accelerator losslessly improves the efficiency of autoregressive decoding; a frequency domain approach to predict power system transients.
In the news | Data.org
Project Resolve and the Healthy Community Hub Deploy Data Science that Works for Communities
The Healthy Community Hub and Project Resolve, a multi-stakeholder collaboration that brings Microsoft Research’s social science, engineering, and computer science expertise to the table with the North Carolina CBO leaders. Microsoft’s team is building out the tool while also leveraging the…
In the news | Financial Times
Three ways to ensure health tech innovation benefits all
As digital technologies become widespread in our lives, they have enormous potential to influence health and wellbeing. To get the most out of them, we need a new form of innovation focused on those who face the toughest barriers. And…
In the news | The Hill
How human-centered tech can beat COVID-19 through contact tracing
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is working on a proposal to massively scale-up testing and contact tracing to tackle the COVID-19 crisis. This effort will involve identifying all of those infected with the coronavirus and notifying everyone…
Facebook faced a great deal of criticism in September, following revelations published in the Wall Street Journal. One example was that Facebook had begun a program, called XCheck, to route public figures away from their content moderation process, to be…
In the news | Harvard Business Review
What a Year of WFH Has Done to Our Relationships at Work
More than a year into the Covid-19 pandemic and WFH, new research from Microsoft shows that employees and teams are becoming much more siloed. In particular, connections with people outside our immediate teams has shrunk dramatically, leading to fewer places…
In the news | TED2020
COVID-19 unraveled the workforce. Here’s how to fix it
“We are living through the tech-enabled unraveling of full-time employment itself,” says anthropologist Mary L. Gray. As the pandemic exposes and accelerates the shift to on-demand online labor, Gray takes us inside the jobs being created to solve the problems…
In the news | Medium
‘Colorblind’ Tech is Killing Us: Why COVID-19 Tech Must Focus on Equity
COVID-19 has taken the lives of more than 120,000 people in the United States and debilitated millions more since arriving on our shores. While anyone can contract the virus, there is a pattern to who gets sick and dies from…