As human beings, we encounter unfamiliar situations all the time—learning to drive, living on our own for the first time, starting a new job. And while we can anticipate what to expect based on what others have told us or what we’ve picked up from books and depictions in movies and TV, it isn’t until we’re behind the wheel of a car, maintaining an apartment, or doing a job in a workplace that we’re able to take advantage of one […]

Reinforcement learning is about agents taking information from the world and learning a policy for interacting with it, so that they perform better. So, you can imagine a future where, every time you type on the keyboard, the keyboard learns to understand you better. Or every time you interact with some website, it understands better what your preferences are, so the world just starts working better and better at interacting with people. John Langford, Partner Research Manager, MSR NYC Fundamentally, […]

We are going through a new shift in machine learning (ML), where ML models are increasingly being used to automate decision-making in a multitude of domains: what personalized treatment should be administered to a patient, what discount should be offered to an online customer, and other important decisions that can greatly impact people’s lives. The machine learning revolution was primarily driven by problems that are distant from such decision-making scenarios. The first scenarios include predicting what an image depicts, predicting […]

As artificial intelligence continues its rapid progress, equaling or surpassing human performance on benchmarks in an increasing range of tasks, researchers in the field are directing more effort to the interaction between humans and AI in domains where both are active. Chess stands as a model system for studying how people can collaborate with AI, or learn from AI, just as chess has served as a leading indicator of many central questions in AI throughout the field’s history. AI-powered chess […]

You are here. We see some representation of this every day—a red pin, a pulsating blue dot, a small graphic of an airplane. Without a point of reference on which to anchor it, though, here doesn’t help us make our next move or coordinate with others. But in the context of an office building, street, or U.S. map, “here” becomes a location that we can understand in relation to other points. We’re near the lobby; at the intersection of Broadway […]

At Microsoft, we have been on a quest to advance AI beyond existing techniques, by taking a more holistic, human-centric approach to learning and understanding. As Chief Technology Officer of Azure AI Cognitive Services, I have been working with a team of amazing scientists and engineers to turn this quest into a reality. In my role, I enjoy a unique perspective in viewing the relationship among three attributes of human cognition: monolingual text (X), audio or visual sensory signals, (Y) […]