TLA+ is a high level, open-source, math-based language for modeling computer programs and systems–especially concurrent and distributed ones. It comes with tools to help eliminate fundamental design errors, which are hard to find and expensive to fix once they have been embedded in code or hardware.  The TLA language was first published in 1993 by the pioneering computer scientist Leslie Lamport, now a distinguished scientist with Microsoft Research. After years of Lamport’s stewardship and Microsoft’s support,  

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