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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Can how we think about our thinking help us better incorporate generative AI in our lives & work? Explore metacognition’s potential to improve the tech’s usability on “Abstracts,” then sign up for Microsoft Research Forum for more on this & other AI work.

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Partner Research Manager and developer experience expert Nicole Forsgren talks about the future of software engineering with AI, why she loves tech, and her reliance on a spreadsheet and her gut when making career-changing decisions.

Learn more:

• Nicole Forsgren at Microsoft Research
• Nicole Forsgren website
• Quantifying the impact of developer experience | Microsoft Azure Blog, January 2024
• Yes, good DevEx increases productivity. Here is the data. | GitHub blog, January 2024
• Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations | Book, 2018

Partner Software Architect Ivan Tashev talks about applying his expertise in audio signal processing to the design and study of audio components for Microsoft products such as Kinect and shares how a focus on what he can control has fueled professional success.

Learn more:

• Ivan Tashev at Microsoft Research
• Distributed Meetings: A Meeting Capture and Broadcasting System | Publication, December 2002
• Research Collection: The Unseen History of Audio and Acoustics Research at Microsoft | Microsoft Research blog, August 2020