Microsoft Research Podcast Researchers across the Microsoft research community

Transforming research ideas into meaningful impact is no small feat. It often requires the knowledge and experience of individuals from across disciplines and institutions. Collaborators, a Microsoft Research Podcast series, explores the relationships—both expected and unexpected—behind the projects, products, and services being pursued and delivered by researchers at Microsoft and the diverse range of people they’re teaming up with.In this episode, Dr. Gretchen Huizinga speaks with Cecily Morrison (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/cecilym/), MBE, a Senior Principal Research Manager at Microsoft Research, and Karolina Pakėnaitė (https://www.linkedin.com/in/Karolina-Pak%C4%97nait%C4%97/), who also goes by Caroline, a PhD student and member of the citizen design team working with Morrison on the research project Find My Things. An AI phone application designed to help people who are blind or have low vision locate their personal items, Find My Things is an example of a broader research approach known as Teachable AI. Morrison and Pakėnaitė explore the Teachable AI goal of empowering people to make an AI experience work for them. They also discuss how “designing for one” when it comes to inclusive design leads to innovative solutions and what they learned about optimizing these types of systems for real-world use (spoiler: it’s not necessarily more or higher-quality data).Learn more:* Teachable AI Experiences (Tai X) (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/taix/overview/) | Project page* Understanding Personalized Accessibility through Teachable AI: Designing and Evaluating Find My Things for People who are Blind or Low Vision (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/understanding-personalized-accessibility-through-teachable-ai-designing-and-evaluating-find-my-things-for-people-who-are-blind-or-low-vision/) | Publication, October 2023* Microsoft Inclusive Design (https://inclusive.microsoft.design/) | Inclusive design resource center* DeafBlind Everest Project (https://www.deafblindeverestproject.com/) | Karolina (Caroline) Pakėnaitė personal website

Members of the research community at Microsoft work continuously to advance their respective fields. Abstracts brings its audience to the cutting edge with them through short, compelling conversations about new and noteworthy achievements.In this episode, Shrey Jain (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/shreyjain/), a Technical Project Manager at Microsoft Research, and Dr. Zoë Hitzig (http://www.zoehitzig.com/), a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, discuss their work on contextual confidence, which presents a framework to understand and more meaningfully address the increasingly sophisticated challenges generative AI poses to communication.Read the paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01193)

In this new Microsoft Research Podcast series What’s Your Story, Johannes Gehrke explores the who behind the technical and scientific advancements helping to reshape the world. A systems expert whose 10 years with Microsoft spans research and product, Gehrke talks to members of the company’s research community about what motivates their work and how they got where they are today.Across his time at Microsoft, Desney Tan (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/desney/), Managing Director of Microsoft Research Redmond, has had the experience of shepherding research ideas into products multiple times, and much like the trajectory of research, his life journey has been far from linear. In this episode, Tan shares how he moved to the United States from Singapore as a teenager, how his self-described “brashness” as a Microsoft intern helped shift the course of his career, and how human impact has been a guiding force in his work.

Members of the research community at Microsoft work continuously to advance their respective fields. Abstracts brings its audience to the cutting edge with them through short, compelling conversations about new and noteworthy achievements.In this episode, Andy Gordon (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/adg/), a Partner Research Manager, and Carina Negreanu, a Senior Researcher, both at Microsoft Research, join host Dr. Gretchen Huizinga to discuss “Co-audit: Tools to help humans double-check AI-generated content (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/co-audit-tools-to-help-humans-double-check-ai-generated-content/).” This paper brings together current understanding of generative AI performance to explore the need and context for tools to help people using the technology find and fix mistakes in AI output.View the paper (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/co-audit-tools-to-help-humans-double-check-ai-generated-content/)

In this new Microsoft Research Podcast series What’s Your Story, Lab Director Johannes Gehrke explores the who behind the technical and scientific advancements helping to reshape the world. He talks to members of the research community at Microsoft about what motivates their work and how they got where they are today.Ranveer Chandra is Managing Director of Research for Industry and CTO of Agri-Food. He is also Head of Networking Research at Microsoft Research Redmond. His work in systems and networking is helping to bring more internet connectivity to more people and is yielding tools designed to help farmers increase food production more affordably and sustainably. In this episode, he shares what it was like growing up in Jamshedpur, India; why he focuses his efforts in the areas he does; and where the joy in his work comes from.Learn more:* Ranveer Chandra at Microsoft Research (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/ranveer/)* FarmBeats: AI, Edge & IoT for Agriculture (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/farmbeats-iot-agriculture/)* Project FarmVibes (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-farmvibes/)* 6G | Space (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/6g-space/)

Members of the research community at Microsoft work continuously to advance their respective fields. Abstracts brings its audience to the cutting edge with them through short, compelling conversations about new and noteworthy achievements. In this episode, Dr. Sheng Zhang (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/shezhan/), a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, joins host Dr. Gretchen Huizinga to discuss “UniversalNER: Targeted Distillation from Large Language Models for Open Named Entity Recognition (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/universalner-targeted-distillation-from-large-language-models-for-open-named-entity-recognition/).” In this paper, Zhang and his coauthors present mission-focused instruction tuning, a method for distilling large language models into smaller, more efficient ones for a broad application class. Their UniversalNER models achieved state-of-the-art performance in named entity recognition, an important natural language processing (NLP) task. Model distillation has the potential to make NLP and other capabilities more accessible, particularly in specialized domains such as biomedicine, which could benefit from more resource-efficient and transparent options. Learn more:* View the paper (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/universalner-targeted-distillation-from-large-language-models-for-open-named-entity-recognition/)* UniversalNER project website with demo (https://universal-ner.github.io/)* Code on GitHub (https://github.com/universal-ner/universal-ner)* Dataset and models on Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/Universal-NER)