Microsoft Research Podcast

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.

Researcher Brendan Lucier and professor Mert Demirer are applying their micro- and macroeconomic expertise, respectively, to forecasting the economic impact of AI. They share how they’re using a task-level breakdown of occupations to help predict the future.

Learn more:

• AI, Cognition, and the Economy (AICE) | Initiative page
• Ideas: Designing AI for people with Abigail Sellen | Microsoft Research Podcast, May 2024

Emre Kiciman shares how some keen observations and a desire to have front-end impact led him to make the jump from systems and networking to computational social science and now causal analysis and large-scale AI—and how systems thinking still impacts his work.

Learn more:

• AI Controller Interface: Generative AI with a lightweight, LLM-integrated VM (blog)
• AICI: Prompts as (Wasm) Programs (GitHub)

A lack of appropriate data, decreased model performance, and other obstacles have made it difficult to expand the input language models can receive. Li Lyna Zhang introduces LongRoPE, a method capable of extending content windows to more than 2 million tokens.

Read the paper

Get the code

Senior Researcher Arindam Mitra introduces AgentInstruct. Using raw data sources, the automated multi-agent framework can create diverse, high-quality synthetic data at scale for the post-training of small and large language models.

Read the paper

Printed circuit boards are abundant—in the stuff we use and in landfills. Researcher Jake Smith and professor Aniruddh Vashisth discuss the development of vitrimer-based PCBs that perform comparably to traditional PCBs but have less environmental impact.

Learn more:

• Recyclable vitrimer-based printed circuit boards for sustainable electronics | Nature Sustainability, April 2024
• Microsoft Climate Research Initiative
• Microsoft Research AI for Science
• Storing digital data in synthetic DNA with Dr. Karin Strauss | Microsoft Research Podcast, October 2018

Behnaz Arzani loves hard problems and the freedom to explore. That makes research a great fit! She discusses her work in network management, including the potential role of LLMs in the field; the challenges that excite her; and how storytelling changed her life.

Learn more:

• Solving Max-Min Fair Resource Allocations Quickly on Large Graphs | Publication, February 2024
• Finding Adversarial Inputs for Heuristics using Multi-level Optimization | Publication, February 2024
• MetaOpt: Examining, explaining, and improving heuristic performance | Microsoft Research blog, January 2024
• A Holistic View of AI-driven Network Incident Management | Publication, October 2023
• Behnaz Arzani: Painting, storytelling, and other hobbies | Microsoft Research bio page

Principal PM Manager Weishung Liu shares how a career delivering products and customer experiences aligns with her love of people and storytelling and how—despite efforts to defy the expectations that come with growing up in Silicon Valley—she landed in tech.

Learn more:

• Weishung Liu at Microsoft Research
• Watch For | Project page
• Developer Tech Minutes: Watch For | Video, 2021

Social scientist and HCI expert Abigail Sellen explores the critical understanding needed to build human-centric AI through the lens of the new AICE initiative, a collective of interdisciplinary researchers studying AI impact on human cognition and the economy.

Learn more:

• AI, Cognition, and the Economy (AICE) 
• Responsible AI Principles and Approach | Microsoft AI  
• The Rise of the AI Co-Pilot: Lessons for Design from Aviation and Beyond 
• The Myth of the Paperless Office

Andrey Kolobov discusses WindSeer, a small CNN capable of estimating the wind field around an sUAV in flight more finely and with less compute and data than traditional models. The advancement can help support longer and safer autonomous flights.

Learn more:

• WindSeer: Real-time volumetric wind prediction over complex terrain aboard a small uncrewed aerial vehicle