Episodes
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In this episode, Microsoft senior principal researchers Chris Hawblitzel and Jay Lorch join host Amber Tingle to discuss “Verus: A Practical Foundation for Systems Verification,” which received the Distinguished Artifact Award at this year’s Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, or SOSP. In their research, Hawblitzel, Lorch, and their coauthors leverage advances in programming languages and formal verification with two aims. The first aim is to help make software verification more accessible for systems developers so they can demonstrate their code will behave as intended. The second aim is to provide the research community with sound groundwork to tackle the application of formal verification to large, complex systems.
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In their 2024 SOSP paper, researchers explore a common—though often undertested—software system issue: retry bugs. Research manager Shan Lu and PhD candidate Bogdan Stoica share how they’re combining traditional program analysis and LLMs to address the challenge.
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Every year, interns from academic institutions around the world apply and grow their knowledge as members of the research community at Microsoft. In this Microsoft Research Podcast series, these students join their internship supervisors to share their experience working alongside some of the leading researchers in their respective fields.
In this episode, Angela Busheska, an undergraduate engineering student at Lafayette College, talks to Senior Researcher Vaishnavi Ranganathan, about her work on TerraTrace, a platform that brings together statistics and large language models to track land use over time for agricultural and forestry applications. Busheska discusses the personal loss that drew her to climate activism, the chain of events that led to a memorable face-to-face meeting with Microsoft’s chief sustainability officer, and her advice for going after the internship you want and making the experience count.
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TerraTrace | GitHub repoProject FarmVibes | Project homepageProject FoodVibes | Project homepage -
The personalizable object recognizer Find My Things was recently recognized for accessible design. Researcher Daniela Massiceti and software development engineer Martin Grayson talk about the research project’s origins and the tech advances making it possible.
The Find My Things story is an example of research at Microsoft enhancing Microsoft products and services. To try the Find My Things tool, download the free, publicly available Seeing AI app.
Learn more:
Find My Things: Personalized Accessibility through Teachable AI for People who are Blind or Low Vision | Publication, May 2024Understanding Personalized Accessibility through Teachable AI: Designing and Evaluating Find My Things for People who are Blind or Low Vision | Publication, October 2023Teachable AI Experiences (Tai X) | Project pagePeopleLens | Publication, June 2021ORBIT: A Real-World Few-Shot Dataset for Teachable Object Recognition | Publication, October 2021Collaborators: Teachable AI with Cecily Morrison and Karolina Pakėnaitė | Microsoft Research Podcast, December 2023 -
College freshman Dexter Greene and Microsoft research manager Richard Black discuss how technology that stores data in glass is supporting students as they expand earlier efforts to communicate what it means to be human to extraterrestrials.
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Avenues: The World School — Golden Record 2.0Project homepageGolden Record: OverviewNASA ScienceProject SilicaProject homepageSealed in glassMicrosoft Unlocked innovation story, 2023Optics for the cloud: storage in the zettabyte era with Dr. Ant Rowstron and Mark RussinovichMicrosoft Research Podcast, November 2019Project Silica proof of concept stores Warner Bros. ‘Superman’ movie on quartz glassMicrosoft Source blog, November 2019 -
Model maker and fabricator Lex Story helps bring research to life through prototyping. He discusses his take on failure; the encouragement and advice that has supported his pursuit of art and science; and the sabbatical that might inspire his next career move.
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Microsoft PremonitionProject EclipseProject PRISM3D TelemedicineJacdacAudio Devices -
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.
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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.
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AI, Cognition, and the Economy (AICE) | Initiative pageIdeas: 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.
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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.
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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.
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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 2024Microsoft Climate Research InitiativeMicrosoft Research AI for ScienceStoring 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 2024Finding Adversarial Inputs for Heuristics using Multi-level Optimization | Publication, February 2024MetaOpt: Examining, explaining, and improving heuristic performance | Microsoft Research blog, January 2024A Holistic View of AI-driven Network Incident Management | Publication, October 2023Behnaz 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 ResearchWatch For | Project pageDeveloper 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.
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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.
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Jacki O'Neill at Microsoft ResearchMicrosoft 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 ResearchResponsible 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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