Dr. Debadeepta Dey is a Principal Researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group at MSR and he’s currently exploring several lines of research that may help bridge the gap between perception and planning for autonomous agents, teaching them make decisions under uncertainty and even to stop and ask for directions when they get lost! On today’s podcast, Dr. Dey talks about how his latest work in meta-reasoning helps improve modular system pipelines and how imitation learning hits the ML ...
Feb 26, 2020
Dr. Donald Kossmann is a Distinguished Scientist who thinks big, and as the Director of Microsoft Research’s flagship lab in Redmond, it’s his job to inspire others to think big, too. But don’t be fooled. For him, thinking big involves what he calls thinking backwards, a framework of imagining the future, defining progress in reverse order and executing against landmarks along an uncertain path. On today’s podcast, Dr. Kossmann reflects on his life as a database researcher and tells us how Socra...
Feb 19, 2020
In a world where productivity is paramount and only a handful of people have personal assistants, many of us are frustrated by the amount of time we spend in meetings, and worse, the amount time we spend planning, scheduling and rescheduling those meetings! Fortunately, Dr. Pamela Bhattacharya, a Principal Applied Scientist in Microsoft’s Outlook group, wants to turn your email into your own personal assistant. And a smart one at that! Today, Dr. Bhattacharya tells us all about Scheduler, Micros...
Feb 12, 2020
There’s an old adage that says if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. But when it comes to AI, Dr. Saleema Amershi, a principal researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group at Microsoft Research, contends that if you plan to fail, you’re actually more likely to succeed! She’s an advocate of calling failure what it is, getting ahead of it in the AI development cycle and making end-users a part of the process. Today, Dr. Amershi talks about life at the intersection of AI and HCI and do...
Feb 05, 2020
Dr. Jianfeng Gao is a veteran computer scientist, an IEEE Fellow and the current head of the Deep Learning Group at Microsoft Research. He and his team are exploring novel approaches to advancing the state-of-the-art on deep learning in areas like NLP, computer vision, multi-modal intelligence and conversational AI. Today, Dr. Gao gives us an overview of the deep learning landscape and talks about his latest work on Multi-task Deep Neural Networks, Unified Language Modeling and vision-language p...
Jan 29, 2020
Dr. Sriram Rajamani is a Distinguished Scientist and the Managing Director of the Microsoft Research lab in Bangalore. He’s dedicated his career to advancing globally applicable science in the testbed that is India. He is, by any measure, a world-class researcher and leader. He’s also, as you’ll find out shortly, a world-class storyteller! Today, Dr. Rajamani talks about the unique challenges and opportunities of leading MSR’s research efforts in India and what it takes to build a robust researc...
Jan 22, 2020
This episode originally aired in May, 2019. Machine learning is a powerful tool that enables computers to learn by observing the world, recognizing patterns and self-training via experience. Much like humans. But while machines perform well when they can extract knowledge from large amounts of labeled data, their learning outcomes remain vastly inferior to humans when data is limited. That’s why Dr. Patrice Simard, Distinguished Engineer and head of the Machine Teaching group at Microsoft, is us...
Jan 15, 2020
This episode originally aired in May, 2019. If you’re in software development, Dr. Tom Zimmermann, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, wants you to be more productive, and he’s here to help. How, you might ask? Well, while productivity can be hard to measure, his research in the Empirical Software Engineering group is attempting to do just that by using insights from actual data, rather than just gut feelings, to improve the software development process. On today’s podcast, Dr....
Jan 08, 2020
This episode originally aired in May, 2019.Dr. John Langford, a partner researcher in the Machine Learning group at Microsoft Research New York City, is a reinforcement learning expert who is working, in his own words, to solve machine learning. Rafah Hosn, also of MSR New York, is a principal program manager who’s working to take that work to the world. If that sounds like big thinking in the Big Apple, well, New York City has always been a “go big, or go home” kind of town, and MSR NYC is a “g...
Jan 01, 2020
Dr. Sébastien Bubeck is a mathematician and a senior researcher in the Machine Learning and Optimization group at Microsoft Research. He’s also a self-proclaimed “bandit” who claims that, despite all the buzz around AI, it’s still a science in its infancy. That’s why he’s devoted his career to advancing the mathematical foundations behind the machine learning algorithms behind AI. Today, Dr. Bubeck explains the difficulty of the multi-armed bandit problem in the context of a parameter- and data-...
Dec 25, 2019
This episode first aired in November, 2018. Dr. Christopher Bishop is quite a fellow. Literally. Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Fellow of Darwin College in Cambridge, England. Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Fellow of The Royal Society. Microsoft Technical Fellow. And one of the nicest fellows you’re likely to meet! He’s also Director of the Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge, where he oversees a world-class portfolio of research and development endeavors in machine learn...
Dec 18, 2019
With all the buzz surrounding AI, it can be tempting to envision it as a stand-alone entity that optimizes for accuracy and displaces human capabilities. But Dr. Besmira Nushi, a senior researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group at Microsoft Research, envisions AI as a cooperative entity that enhances human capabilities and optimizes for team performance. On today’s podcast, Dr. Nushi talks about what it takes to develop collaborative AI systems and unpacks the unique challenges ma...
Dec 11, 2019
Deep learning methodologies like supervised learning have been very successful in training machines to make predictions about the world. But because they’re so dependent upon large amounts of human-annotated data, they’ve been difficult to scale. Dr. Phil Bachman, a researcher at MSR Montreal, would like to change that, and he’s working to train machines to collect, sort and label their own data, so people don’t have to. Today, Dr. Bachman gives us an overview of the machine learning landscape a...
Dec 04, 2019
There’s a lot of excitement around self-driving cars, delivery drones, and other intelligent, autonomous systems, but before they can be deployed at scale, they need to be both reliable and safe. That’s why Gurdeep Pall, CVP of Business AI at Microsoft, and Dr. Ashish Kapoor, who leads research in Aerial Informatics and Robotics, are using a simulated environment called AirSim to reduce the time, cost and risk of the testing necessary to get autonomous agents ready for the open world. Today, Gur...
Nov 27, 2019
Dr. Sumit Gulwani is a programmer’s programmer. Literally. A Partner Research Manager in the Program Synthesis, or PROSE, group at Microsoft Research, Dr. Gulwani is a leading researcher in program synthesis and the inventor of many intent-understanding, programming-by-example and programming-by-natural language technologies – aka, the automation of “what I meant to do and wanted to do, but my computer wouldn’t let me” tasks. Today, Dr. Gulwani gives us an overview of the exciting “now” and prom...
Nov 20, 2019
Computer programming has often been perceived as the exclusive domain of computer scientists and software engineers. But that’s changing, thanks to the work of people like Dr. Thomas Ball, a Partner Researcher in the RiSE group at Microsoft Research, and Dr. Teddy Seyed, a post-doctoral researcher in the same group. Their goal is to make programming accessible to non-programmers in places like the classroom, the workshop… and even the runway! On today’s podcast, Tom and Teddy talk about physical...
Nov 13, 2019
Remember when a hard drive that could hold a terabyte of data was a big deal? Well, we’re now in an era where peta-, exa- and even zetta-bytes are the bytes of the day, and it turns out it’s hard to fit that many zeroes on a hard drive. That’s where Dr. Ant Rowstron, Deputy Lab Director of Microsoft Research Cambridge, and Mark Russinovich, Chief Technical Officer of Azure, come in. Their respective teams are working on paradigm-breaking solutions to give us phenomenal storage power in an itty-b...
Nov 06, 2019
Jenny Sabin is an architectural designer, a professor, a studio principal and MSR’s current Artist in Residence. Asta Roseway is a principal research designer, a “fusionist” and the co-founder of the Artist in Residence program at Microsoft Research. The two, along with a stellar multi-disciplinary team, recently completed the installation of Ada, the first interactive architectural pavilion powered by AI, in the heart of the Microsoft Research building in Redmond. On today’s podcast, Jenny and ...
Oct 30, 2019
Machine learning is a powerful tool that enables conversational agents to provide general question-answer services. But in domains with more specific taxonomies – or simply for requests that are longer and more complicated than “Play Baby Shark” – custom conversational AI has long been the province of large enterprises with big budgets. But not for long, thanks to the work of Dr. Riham Mansour, a Principal Software Engineering Manager for Microsoft’s Language Understanding Service, or LUIS. She ...
Oct 23, 2019
Dr. Craig Costello is in the business of safeguarding your secrets. And he uses math to do it. A researcher in the Security and Cryptography group at Microsoft Research, Dr. Costello is among a formidable group of code makers (aka cryptographers) who make it their life’s work to protect the internet against adversarial code breakers (aka cryptanalysts), both those that exist today in our classical computing world, and those that will exist in a quantum computing future. On today’s podcast, Dr. C...
Oct 16, 2019
Using technology to help us improve our health is nothing new: a quick web search returns hundreds of apps and devices claiming to help us get fit, quit smoking, master anxiety or just “find our center.” What is new is a serious cohort of researchers exploring how artificial emotional intelligence, or AEI, could help us understand ourselves better and, when used in concert with human caregivers, enhance our well-being. One of those researchers is Jina Suh, a former Xbox developer who got hooked ...
Oct 09, 2019
If someone asked you what snow leopards and Vincent Van Gogh have in common, you might think it was the beginning of a joke. It’s not, but if it were, Mark Hamilton, a software engineer in Microsoft’s Cognitive Services group, budding PhD student and frequent Microsoft Research collaborator, would tell you the punchline is machine learning. More specifically, Microsoft Machine Learning for Apache Spark (MMLSpark for short), a powerful yet elastic open source machine learning library that’s findi...
Oct 02, 2019
Dr. Eyal Ofek is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and his work deals mainly with, well, reality. Augmented and virtual reality, to be precise. A serial entrepreneur before he came to MSR, Dr. Ofek knows a lot about the “long nose of innovation” and what it takes to bring a revolutionary new technology to a world that’s ready for it. On today’s podcast, Dr. Ofek talks about the unique challenges and opportunities of augmented and virtual reality from both a technical and social perspecti...
Sep 25, 2019
Dr. Susan Dumais knows you have things to do, and if you need help finding stuff to get them done (and you probably do) then her long and illustrious career in search technologies has been worth it. Situated firmly in Louis Pasteur’s quadrant of the research grid (the square where you answer “yes” to both the quest for fundamental understanding and use-based applications) the Microsoft Technical Fellow, and Deputy Lab Director of MSR AI, has made finding information the focus of her career, and ...
Sep 18, 2019
In 2018, Microsoft launched the Microsoft AI Residency Program, a year-long, expanded research experience designed to give recent graduates in a variety of fields the opportunity to work alongside prominent researchers at MSR on cutting edge AI technologies to solve real-world problems. Dr. Brian Broll was one of them. A newly minted PhD in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University, Dr. Broll was among the inaugural cohort of AI residents who spent a year working on machine learning in game en...
Sep 11, 2019
Dr. Ed Cutrell is a Principal Researcher in the Ability group at Microsoft Research and he’s convinced that great technology should be available to everyone. Working in the fields of Accessibility and Information and Communication Technologies for Development (aka ICT4D), his research has explored computing solutions for people across the resource and ability spectrum, both here and around the world. Today, Dr. Cutrell gives us an overview of his work in the disability and inclusive design space...
Sep 04, 2019
As computing moves to the cloud, there is an increasing need for privacy in AI. In an ideal world, users would have the ability to compute on encrypted data without sacrificing performance. Enter Dr. Olli Saarikivi, a post-doctoral researcher in the RiSE group at MSR. He, along with a stellar group of cross-disciplinary colleagues, are bridging the gap with CHET, a compiler and runtime for homomorphic evaluation of tensor programs, that keeps data private while making the complexities of homomor...
Aug 28, 2019
The ability to read and understand unstructured text, and then answer questions about it, is a common skill among literate humans. But for machines? Not so much. At least not yet! And not if Dr. T.J. Hazen, Senior Principal Research Manager in the Engineering and Applied Research group at MSR Montreal, has a say. He’s spent much of his career working on machine speech and language understanding, and particularly, of late, machine reading comprehension, or MRC. On today’s podcast, Dr. Hazen talks...
Aug 21, 2019
In an era of unprecedented advances in AI and machine learning, current gen systems and networks are being challenged by an unprecedented level of complexity and cost. Fortunately, Dr. Ganesh Ananthanarayanan, a researcher in the Mobility and Networking group at MSR, is up for a challenge. And, it seems, the more computationally intractable the better! A prolific researcher who’s interested in all aspects of systems and networking, he’s on a particular quest to extract value from live video feed...
Aug 14, 2019
Dr. Nathalie Riche envisions a future in which all of our data will be accessible, meaningful, compelling and artistic. And as a researcher in human computer interaction and information visualization at Microsoft Research, she’s working on technical tools that will help us wrangle our data, extract knowledge from it, and communicate with it in a memorable, persuasive and aesthetically pleasing way. In other words, she wants our data to be both smart… and beautiful! Today, Dr. Riche shares her pa...
Aug 07, 2019
