For many people, opening door handles or moving a pen between their fingers is a movement that happens multiple times a day, often without much thought. For a robot, however, these movements aren’t always so easy. In reinforcement learning, robots learn to perform tasks by exploring their environments, receiving signals along the way that indicate how good their behavior is compared to the desired outcome, or state. For the described movements, for example, we can specify a reward function that […]

Cloud Intelligence/AIOps blog series In the first two blog posts in this series, we presented our vision for Cloud Intelligence/AIOps (AIOps) research, and scenarios where innovations in AI technologies can help build and operate complex cloud platforms and services effectively and efficiently at scale. In this blog post, we dive deeper into our efforts to automatically manage large-scale cloud services in deployment. In particular, we focus on an important post-deployment cloud management task that is pervasive across cloud services  

Microsoft has made significant contributions to the prestigious USENIX NSDI’23 conference, which brings together experts in computer networks and distributed systems. A silver sponsor for the conference, Microsoft is a leader in developing innovative technologies for networking, and we are proud to have contributed to 30 papers accepted this year. Our team members also served on the program committee, highlighting our commitment to advancing the field. The accepted research papers span