Microsoft Excel is one of the world’s most important software tools, relied upon users worldwide to create, understand, model, predict, and collaborate. As the Excel team works to leverage new areas of computer science – advancements in programming languages, NLP, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning – they turned to Microsoft Research both to leverage the incredible work done in the organization as well as to help co-create a vision for what Excel should look like years into the future. The Excel team has […]

From BiT (928 million parameters) to GPT-3 (175 billion parameters), state-of-the-art machine learning models are rapidly growing in size. With the greater expressivity and easier trainability of these models come skyrocketing training costs, deployment difficulties, and even climate impact. As a result, we’re witnessing exciting and emerging research into compressing these models to make them less expensive, small enough to store on any device, and more energy efficient. Perhaps the most popular approach to model compression is pruning, in which […]

Is innovation another loss due to the global COVID-19 pandemic? Indicators reveal challenges to overcome—as well as opportunities to build on our collective experience gained in the last year. Measuring collaboration using network machine learning provides a powerful diagnostic tool to address issues as they arise. One challenge lies in how we build relationships in the workplace. With many transitioning to work-from-home environments, more flexible schedules, and new methods of working, there is evidence that interactions at work have been […]

Editor’s note: This research was conducted by Sai Vemprala, Senior Researcher, and Ashish Kapoor, Partner Researcher, of Microsoft Research along with Sami Mian, who was a PhD Researcher at the University of Pittsburgh and an intern at Microsoft at the time of the work. Autonomous systems are composed of complex perception-action loops, where observations of the world need to be processed in real time to result in safe and effective actions. A significant amount of research has focused on creating […]