Microsoft Research Podcast

Drawing on his previous work as the UK’s cybersecurity chief, Professor Ciaran Martin explores differentiated standards and public-private partnerships in cybersecurity, and Microsoft’s Tori Westerhoff examines the insights through an AI red-teaming lens.

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Daphne Koller, Noubar Afeyan, and Dr. Eric Topol, leaders in AI-driven medicine, discuss how AI is changing biomedical research and discovery, from accelerating drug target identification and biotech R&D to helping pursue the “holy grail” of a virtual cell.

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Professors Daniel Carpenter and Timo Minssen explore evolving pharma and medical device regulation, including the role of clinical trials, while Microsoft applied scientist Chad Atalla shares where AI governance stakeholders might find inspiration in the fields.

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In this episode, Alta Charo, emerita professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, joins Sullivan for a conversation on the evolving landscape of genome editing and its regulatory implications. Drawing on decades of experience in biotechnology policy, Charo emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between hazards and risks and describes the field's approach to regulating applications of technology rather than the technology itself. The discussion also explores opportunities and challenges in biotech’s multi-agency oversight model and the role of international coordination. Later, Daniel Kluttz, a partner general manager in Microsoft's Office of Responsible AI, joins Sullivan to discuss how insights from genome editing could inform more nuanced and robust governance frameworks for emerging technologies like AI.

In the introductory episode of this new series, host Kathleen Sullivan and Senior Director Amanda Craig Deckard explore Microsoft’s efforts to draw on the experience of other domains to help advance the role of AI testing and evaluation as a governance tool.

Technologists Bill Gates and Sébastien Bubeck discuss the state of generative AI in medicine, how access to “medical intelligence” might help empower people across healthcare, and how AI’s accelerating improvements are likely to affect both delivery and discovery.

Ethan Mollick and Azeem Azhar, thought leaders at the forefront of AI’s influence on work, education, and society, discuss the impact of AI at the individual level and what that means for the healthcare workforce and the organizations and systems in medicine.

The emergence of foundation models has sparked interest in applications to single-cell biology, but when tested in zero-shot settings, they underperform compared to simpler methods. Alex Lu shares insights on why more research on AI models is needed in biological applications.

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A new Nature paper explores Aurora, an AI model that redefines weather prediction with application to other environmental domains such as tropical cyclones. Hear from senior researchers Megan Stanley and Wessel Bruinsma as they share their groundbreaking work.

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In this discussion, Matthew Lungren, Jonathan Carlson, Smitha Saligrama, Will Guyman, and Cameron Runde explore how teams across Microsoft are working together to generate advanced AI capabilities and solutions for developers and clinicians around the globe. 

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