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.

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• 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.

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

Jacki O'Neill saw an opportunity to expand Microsoft research efforts to Africa. She now leads Microsoft Research Africa, Nairobi (formerly MARI). O'Neill talks about the choices that got her there, the lab’s impact, and how living abroad is good for innovation. 

Learn more:

• Jacki O'Neill at Microsoft Research
• Microsoft Research Africa (formerly MARI)

Researcher Michel Galley explores how he and fellow researchers combined new and existing data to create MathVista, an open-source benchmark for measuring the mathematical reasoning capabilities of foundation models in scenarios that involve text and images.

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Energized by disruption, partner group product manager Rafah Hosn is helping to drive scientific advancement in AI for Microsoft. She talks about the mindset needed to work at the frontiers of AI and how the research-to-product pipeline is changing in the GenAI era.

Learn more:

• AI Frontiers - Microsoft Research
• Responsible AI Principles and Approach | Microsoft AI

Tusher Chakraborty talks about the paper “Spectrumize: Spectrum-efficient Satellite Networks for the Internet of Things,” including a method for supporting communication between a large IoT-satellite constellation and devices on Earth within a limited spectrum.

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The new series “Ideas” debuts with guest Kalika Bali. The speech and language tech researcher talks sci-fi and its impact on her career, the design thinking philosophy behind her research, and the “outrageous idea” she had to work with low-resource languages. 

Learn more:

• The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World | Publication, July 2020
• Project VeLLM | Project page
• Kahani: Visual Storytelling | Project page
• Kahani: Visual Storytelling through Culturally Nuanced Images | Microsoft Research Forum | Episode 1, January 2024
• Teachers in India help Microsoft Research design AI tool for creating great classroom content | Microsoft Research blog, October 2023
• Digital Labor: Project Karya | Project page
• Village by village, creating the building blocks for AI tools with work that also educates | Microsoft Source Asia blog, February 2024

Principal Researcher Ida Momennejad brings her expertise in cognitive neuroscience and computer science to this in-depth conversation about general intelligence and what the evolution of the brain across species can teach us about building AI.

Learn more:

• AI and Microsoft Research | Focus Area
• Evaluating Cognitive Maps and Planning in Large Language Models with CogEval | Publication, October 2023
• Imitating Human Behaviour with Diffusion Models | Publication, May 2023
• Navigates Like Me: Understanding How People Evaluate Human-Like AI in Video Games | Publication, April 2023
• Navigation Turing Test (NTT): Learning to Evaluate Human-Like Navigation | Publication, July 2021
• Predictive Representations in Hippocampal and Prefrontal Hierarchies | Publication, January 2022
• The successor representation in human reinforcement learning | Publication, September 2017
• Encoding of Prospective Tasks in the Human Prefrontal Cortex under Varying Task Loads | Publication, October 2013

Senior Researcher Chang Liu discusses M-OFDFT, a variation of orbital-free density functional theory (OFDFT) that leverages deep learning to help identify molecular properties in a way that minimizes the tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency. 

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