Microsoft Research Podcast

From ancient hieroglyphics to secret decoder rings to World War II Enigma code-makers and code-breakers, cryptography has always held a particular fascination for us. But few of us have the skills – or can actually do the math – to unlock the mysteries of encrypted data. Fortunately, Dr. Kristin Lauter, distinguished mathematician, founder of the Women in Numbers Network, and Principal Researcher and Research Manager for the Cryptography Group at Microsoft Research, can. And she is using her powers for good, not for evil!

Today, Dr. Lauter tells us why she feels lucky  to do math for a living, explains the singular beauty of elliptic curves and the singular difficulty of supersingular isogeny graphs, talks about how homomorphic encryption – part of the field of Private AI – allows us to operate on, while still protecting, our most sensitive data, and shares her dream of one day, seeing a Grace Hopper-like conference to celebrate women in mathematics.

When we think about artificial intelligence and the “world of the future,” our vision is usually more Jetsons than Green Acres. But for Dr. Ranveer Chandra, a Principal Researcher in the Systems and Networking group at Microsoft Research, rural farms are the perfect place to realize the benefits of AI through what he calls precision agriculture, or data-driven farming.

Today, in a wide-ranging interview, Dr. Chandra talks about how his research may eventually make your Wi-Fi signal stronger and your battery life longer, but also shares the story of how spending childhood summers with his grandparents in rural India inspired a line of research that could change the face of farming and help meet the food and nutrition needs of a growing global population.

One of the most intriguing areas of machine learning research is affective computing, where scientists are working to bridge the gap between human emotions and computers. It is here, at the intersection of psychology and computer science, that we find Dr. Daniel McDuff, who has been designing systems, from hardware to algorithms, that can sense human behavior and respond to human emotions.

Today, Dr. McDuff talks about why we need computers to understand us, outlines the pros and cons of designing emotionally sentient agents, explains the technology behind CardioLens, a pair of augmented reality glasses that can take your heartrate by looking at your face, and addresses the challenges of maintaining trust and privacy when we’re surrounded by devices that want to know not just what we’re doing, but how we’re feeling.

Learning to read, think and communicate effectively is part of the curriculum for every young student. But Dr. Adam Trischler, Research Manager and leader of the Machine Comprehension team at Microsoft Research Montreal, would like to make it part of the curriculum for your computer as well. And he’s working on that, using methods from machine learning, deep neural networks, and other branches of AI to close the communication gap between humans and computers.

Today, Dr. Trischler talks about his dream of making literate machines, his efforts to design meta-learning algorithms that can actually learn to learn, the importance of what he calls “few-shot learning” in that meta-learning process, and how, through a process of one-to-many mapping in machine learning, our computers not may not only be answering our questions, but asking them as well.

There’s a big gap between memory and storage, and Dr. Anirudh Badam, of the Systems Research Group at Microsoft Research, wants to close it. With projects like Navamem, which explores how systems can get faster and better by adopting new memory technologies, and HashCache, which brings with it the promise of storage for the next billion, he just might do it.

Today, Dr. Badam discusses the historic trade-offs between volatile and non-volatile memory, shares how software-defined batteries are changing the power-supply landscape, talks about how his research is aiming for the trifecta of speed, cost and capacity in new memory technologies, and reminds us, once again, how one good high school physics teacher can inspire the next generation of scientific discovery.