Presented by Ashley Llorens at Microsoft Research Forum, January 2024
“As the path from research to reality continues to speed up, we remain committed to openly sharing the latest, and coming together to make sense of where we are and where we’re headed.”
– Ashley Llorens, VP and Distinguished Scientist, Microsoft
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Summarize the main three points of Ashley's talk
Transcript
Ashley Llorens, VP and Distinguished Scientist, Microsoft
Microsoft Research Forum, January 30, 2024
ASHLEY LLORENS: As AI accelerates, it’s more important than ever that we engage across disciplines, organizations, and geographies. Last fall, we issued a call for proposals for MSR’s first-ever AI & Society Fellows program. Through this investment, we aim to create deep interdisciplinary collaborations to help maximize the value of AI for people and society. Today we’re thrilled to announce our first cohort of fellows. Here’s more about the program and one of the research challenges we’ll be pursuing.
[Beginning of presentation on AI & Society Fellows program]
HANNA WALLACH, Microsoft Research New York: AI is everywhere. Companies all over the tech industry are pivoting to AI-first strategies, and it kind of feels like literally everyone is talking about large language models at the moment. MSR is launching a new AI & Society Fellows program that’s intended to bring together people from within and outside of Microsoft.
[Slide on research challenges the program focuses on, including intersection of creatives, AI, and society; regulatory innovation for AI drug development; and responsible AI in practice]
DANIELA MASSICETI, Microsoft Research Cambridge UK, 2024 AI & Society principal investigator working on reducing the digital divide of generative AI in the Global South: Our team at Microsoft Research has been deeply studying how well multimodal models will work for blind and low-vision communities when we start to integrate these models into visual-assistive technologies. So what I’m really excited about with this fellowship with Ishtiaque is that it will allow us to extend our understanding to how well these multimodal models will work not only in a new part of the world—in this case, in Bangladesh, which is broadly considered a country in the Global South—but also to a new community—in this case, to artists and designers who are using these generative image models in their day-to-day work.
SYED ISHTIAQUE AHMED, University of Toronto, 2024 AI & Society fellow: I’m excited because this project will help me to bring the benefits of artificial intelligence to my own people back in Bangladesh, some of the communities who have been historically marginalized. I’m also excited because this project will allow me to work with some of the finest researchers in the world in Microsoft Research.
MASSICETI: Ishtiaque is already deeply embedded with this community of Bangladeshi artists and designers, having already led some really culturally sensitive ethnographic work with this community, and so I think this expertise and background that he brings will really help us drive this fellowship work forward and deepen our understanding of how these multimodal models will need to work in order to be truly useful to diverse communities in the Global South.
ISHTIAQUE AHMED: The modern text-to-image tools like DALL-E or Midjourney, they work on a huge database of images which are mostly sourced from the Western world, so the output image looks like a Western image. So when a person from the Global South tries to use these models for producing an image in their context, these models do not actually produce good results. The objective of this project is to find out where exactly the system is broken and how we can come up with a better technology with the local people to fix the system so that these people can get the benefits of this artificial intelligence.
MASSICETI: Microsoft Research is specifically well placed to work on this quest because it has the multidisciplinarity that is required to answer these complex questions that span sociotechnical and socioeconomic issues. In fact, researchers at the Microsoft Africa Research Institute and the Microsoft Research India lab are already leading the charge in this space with their current work looking at models like GPT-4 and how they work with low-resourced African and Asian languages. And finally, working with Microsoft, there is the real potential for your research to really shape and influence products and services that are then used by millions of people around the world.
Learn about all of our 2024 AI & Society fellows and research challenges > (opens in new tab)
[End of presentation on AI & Society Fellows program]
LLORENS: Foundation models are driving a fundamental shift in how research is done—in AI, across the sciences, and in just about every domain of application. Through our Accelerate Foundation Models Research program, we issue grants that make leading models, hosted through Microsoft Azure, accessible to academic research teams.
To date, our grants are supporting nearly 200 projects across 80 research institutions around the world. These projects include work in AI model innovation and evaluation, responsible AI, health, AI for scientific discovery, and more. You can learn more about the projects and researchers doing this important work at the link below.
https://aka.ms/afmr (opens in new tab)
Thanks for joining our first Microsoft Research Forum. As the path from research to reality continues to speed up, we remain committed to openly sharing the latest and coming together to make sense of where we are and where we’re headed. To learn more about the people, projects, and publications we’ve shared today, just ask our new research copilot.
See you next time.