Microsoft Research Podcast

Research manager Karin Strauss and members of the DNA Data Storage Project reflect on the path to developing a synthetic DNA–based system for archival data storage, including the recent open-source release of its most powerful algorithm for DNA error correction.

Get the Trellis BMA code: GitHub - microsoft/TrellisBMA: Trellis BMA: coded trace reconstruction on IDS channels for DNA storage

The efficient simulation of molecules has the potential to change how the world understands biological systems and designs new drugs and biomaterials. Tong Wang discusses AI2BMD, an AI-based system designed to simulate large biomolecules with speed and accuracy.

Read the paper

Get the code

Researcher Siddharth Suri and professor David Holtz give a brief history of prompt engineering, discuss the debate behind their recent collaboration, and share what they found from studying how people’s approaches to prompting change as models advance.

Learn more:

• As Generative Models Improve, People Adapt Their Prompts | Publication, July 2024
• AI, Cognition, and the Economy (AICE) | Initiative page

Researchers Chris Hawblitzel and Jay Lorch share how progress in programming languages and verification approaches are bringing bug-free software within reach. Their work on the Rust verification tool Verus won the Distinguished Artifact Award at SOSP ’24.

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In their 2024 SOSP paper, researchers explore a common—though often undertested—software system issue: retry bugs. Research manager Shan Lu and PhD candidate Bogdan Stoica share how they’re combining traditional program analysis and LLMs to address the challenge.

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Every year, interns from academic institutions around the world apply and grow their knowledge as members of the research community at Microsoft. In this Microsoft Research Podcast series, these students join their internship supervisors to share their experience working alongside some of the leading researchers in their respective fields. 

In this episode, Angela Busheska, an undergraduate engineering student at Lafayette College, talks to Senior Researcher Vaishnavi Ranganathan, about her work on TerraTrace, a platform that brings together statistics and large language models to track land use over time for agricultural and forestry applications. Busheska discusses the personal loss that drew her to climate activism, the chain of events that led to a memorable face-to-face meeting with Microsoft’s chief sustainability officer, and her advice for going after the internship you want and making the experience count.

Learn more:

• TerraTrace | GitHub repo
• Project FarmVibes | Project homepage
• Project FoodVibes | Project homepage

The personalizable object recognizer Find My Things was recently recognized for accessible design. Researcher Daniela Massiceti and software development engineer Martin Grayson talk about the research project’s origins and the tech advances making it possible.

The Find My Things story is an example of research at Microsoft enhancing Microsoft products and services. To try the Find My Things tool, download the free, publicly available Seeing AI app.

Learn more:

• Find My Things: Personalized Accessibility through Teachable AI for People who are Blind or Low Vision | Publication, May 2024
• Understanding Personalized Accessibility through Teachable AI: Designing and Evaluating Find My Things for People who are Blind or Low Vision | Publication, October 2023
• Teachable AI Experiences (Tai X) | Project page
• PeopleLens | Publication, June 2021
• ORBIT: A Real-World Few-Shot Dataset for Teachable Object Recognition | Publication, October 2021
• Collaborators: Teachable AI with Cecily Morrison and Karolina Pakėnaitė | Microsoft Research Podcast, December 2023

College freshman Dexter Greene and Microsoft research manager Richard Black discuss how technology that stores data in glass is supporting students as they expand earlier efforts to communicate what it means to be human to extraterrestrials.

Learn more:

• Avenues: The World School — Golden Record 2.0
• Project homepage
• Golden Record: Overview
• NASA Science
• Project Silica
• Project homepage
• Sealed in glass
• Microsoft Unlocked innovation story, 2023
• Optics for the cloud: storage in the zettabyte era with Dr. Ant Rowstron and Mark Russinovich
• Microsoft Research Podcast, November 2019
• Project Silica proof of concept stores Warner Bros. ‘Superman’ movie on quartz glass
• Microsoft Source blog, November 2019

Model maker and fabricator Lex Story helps bring research to life through prototyping. He discusses his take on failure; the encouragement and advice that has supported his pursuit of art and science; and the sabbatical that might inspire his next career move.

Learn more:

• Microsoft Premonition
• Project Eclipse
• Project PRISM
• 3D Telemedicine
• Jacdac
• Audio Devices

In this episode, Microsoft Product Manager Shrey Jain and OpenAI Research Scientist Zoë Hitzig join host Amber Tingle to discuss “Personhood credentials: Artificial intelligence and the value of privacy-preserving tools to distinguish who is real online.” In their paper, Jain, Hitzig, and their coauthors describe how malicious actors can draw on increasingly advanced AI tools to carry out deception, making online deception harder to detect and more harmful. Bringing ideas from cryptography into AI policy conversations, they identify a possible mitigation: a credential that allows its holder to prove they’re a person––not a bot––without sharing any identifying information. This exploratory research reflects a broad range of collaborators from across industry, academia, and the civil sector specializing in areas such as security, digital identity, advocacy, and policy.