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News & features
Provably efficient reinforcement learning with rich observations
| Akshay Krishnamurthy
Reinforcement learning, a machine learning paradigm for sequential decision making, has stormed into the limelight, receiving tremendous attention from both researchers and practitioners. When combined with deep learning, reinforcement learning (RL) has produced impressive empirical results, but the successes to…
What’s in a name? Using Bias to Fight Bias in Occupational Classification
| Alexey Romanov and Maria De-Arteaga
Bias in AI is a big problem. In particular, AI can compound the effects of existing societal biases: in a recruiting tool, if more men than women are software engineers, AI is likely to use that data to identify job…
Reinforcement learning for the real world with Dr. John Langford and Rafah Hosn
Episode 75, May 8, 2019- Dr. John Langford, a partner researcher in the Machine Learning group at Microsoft Research New York City, is a reinforcement learning expert who is working, in his own words, to solve machine learning. Rafah Hosn,…
Incentivizing information explorers (when they’d really rather exploit)
Everyone is familiar by now with recommendation systems such as on Netflix for movies, Amazon for products, Yelp for restaurants and TripAdvisor for travel. Indeed, quality recommendations are a crucial part of the value provided by these businesses. Recommendation systems…
In the news | VentureBeat
Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Services adds reinforcement learning for recommendations and doodle recognition AI
Microsoft is introducing new ways to deploy AI with Azure Cognitive Services, its prebuilt service to make it easier for people without the technical knowledge of a machine learning engineer or data scientist…
In the news | TechCrunch
Microsoft extends its Cognitive Services with personalization service, handwriting recognition APIs and more
As part of its rather bizarre news dump before its flagship Build developer conference next week, Microsoft today announced a slew of new pre-built machine learning models for its Cognitive Services platform. These include an API…
In the news | TWiML
Fairness in Machine Learning with Hanna Wallach
Today we’re joined by Hanna Wallach, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Hanna and I really dig into how bias and a lack of interpretability and transparency show up across machine learning. We discuss the role that human biases, even…
Data Science Summer School students take a fresh look at the world’s largest rapid transit system
| Jake Hofman
This month marked the 5th anniversary of the Microsoft Research Data Science Summer School (DS3). DS3 is an intensive, eight-week hands-on introduction to data science for college students in the New York City area committed to increasing diversity in computer…
Leading labs with Dr. Jennifer Chayes
Episode 45, October 10, 2018 – Dr. Chayes shares her passion for the value of undirected inquiry, talks about her unlikely journey from rebel to researcher, and explains how she believes her research philosophy – more botanist than boss –…