Microsoft Research Podcast

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 finding its way beyond business and into “AI for Good” applications such as the environment and the arts. Today, Mark talks about his love of mathematics and his desire to solve big, crazy, core knowledge sized problems; tells us all about MMLSpark and how it’s being used by organizations like the Snow Leopard Trust and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and reveals how the persuasive advice of a really smart big sister helped launch an exciting career in AI research and development. https://www.microsoft.com/research  

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 perspective; tells us why he believes AR and VR have the potential to be truly revolutionary, particularly for people with disabilities; explains why, while we’re doing pretty well in the virtual worlds of sight and sound, our sense of virtual touch remains a bit more elusive; and reveals how, if he and his colleagues are wildly successful, it won’t be that long before we’re living in a whole new world of extension, expansion, enhancement and equality.https://www.microsoft.com/research

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 has probably made your life a little more productive in the process. Today, Dr. Dumais tells us how the landscape of information retrieval has evolved over the past twenty years; reminds us that queries don’t fall from the sky but are grounded in the context of real people, real events and real time; talks about her current interest in non-web-based search (or how I can easily put my hands on my own digital belongings) and reveals what apples and Michael Jordan have in common with search research.https://www.microsoft.com/research

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 environments and is on the pod to talk about it! Today, Dr. Broll gives us an overview of the work he did and the experience he had as a Microsoft AI Resident, talks about his passion for making complex concepts easier and more accessible to novices and young learners, and tells us how growing up on a dairy farm in rural Minnesota helped prepare him for a life in computer science solving some of the toughest problems in AI.   https://www.microsoft.com/research

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, explains the vital importance of interdisciplinarity – a fancy way of saying many ways of thinking and many ways of knowing – and tells us how a dumb phone beat a smart tablet in rural India… and what that meant to researchers. https://www.microsoft.com/research  

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 homomorphic encryption schemes opaque to users. On today’s podcast, Dr. Saarikivi tells us all about CHET, gives us an overview of some of his other projects, including Parasail, a novel approach to parallelizing seemingly sequential applications, and tells us how a series of unconventional educational experiences shaped his view of himself, and his career as a researcher. https://www.microsoft.com/research

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 about why reading comprehension is so hard for machines, gives us an inside look at the technical approaches applied researchers and their engineering colleagues are using to tackle the problem, and shares the story of how an a-ha moment with a Rubik’s Cube inspired a career in computer science and a quest to teach computers to answer complex, text-based questions in the real world. https://microsoft.com/research

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 feeds and develop “killer apps” that will have a practical impact on the world. Today, Dr. Ananthanarayanan tells us all about Video Analytics for Vision Zero (an award-winning “killer app” that aims to reduce traffic-related fatalities to zero), gives us a wide-angle view of his work in geo-distributed data analytics and client-cloud networking, and explains how the duration and difficulty of a Test Cricket match provides an invaluable lesson for success in life and research. https://www.microsoft.com/research

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 passion for the art of data driven storytelling, reveals the two superpowers of data visualization, gives us an inside look at some innovative projects designed to help us th(ink) with digital ink, and tells the story of how a young woman with an artist’s heart headed into computer science, took a detour to the beach, paid for it with research and ended up with a rewarding career that brings both art and computing together. https://www.microsoft.com/research  

This episode first aired in January, 2018. When we look at a skyscraper or a suspension bridge, a simple search engine box on a screen looks tiny by comparison. But Dr. Simon Peyton Jones would like to remind us that computer programs, with hundreds of millions of lines of code, are actually among the largest structures human beings have ever built. A principle researcher at the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge, England, co-developer of the programming language Haskell, and a Fellow of Britain’s Royal Society, Simon Peyton Jones has dedicated his life to this very particular kind of construction work.Today, Dr. Peyton Jones shares his passion for functional programming research, reveals how a desire to help other researchers write and present better turned him into an unlikely YouTube star, and explains why, at least in the world of programming languages, purity is embarrassing, laziness is cool, and success should be avoided at all costs. https://www.microsoft.com/research