Microsoft Research Lab – New York City
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In the news | Machine Learning (Theory)
HOMER: Provable Exploration in Reinforcement Learning
Last week at ICML 2020, Mikael Henaff, Akshay Krishnamurthy, John Langford and Dipendra Misra had a paper on a new reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that solves three key problems in RL: (i) global exploration, (ii) decoding latent dynamics, and (iii) optimizing a given…
In the news | Medium | Machine Learning
HOMER: Provable Exploration in Reinforcement Learning
At ICML 2020, Mikael Henaff, Akshay Krishnamurthy, John Langford and Dipendra Misra published a paper presenting a new reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm called HOMER that addresses three main problems in real-world RL problem: (i) exploration, (ii) decoding latent dynamics, and (iii) optimizing…
Provably efficient reinforcement learning with Dr. Akshay Krishnamurthy
MSR’s New York City lab is home to some of the best reinforcement learning research on the planet but if you ask any of the researchers, they’ll tell you they’re very interested in getting it out of the lab and…
In the news | VentureBeat
Microsoft researchers say NLP bias studies must consider role of social hierarchies like racism
As the recently released GPT-3 and several recent studies demonstrate, racial bias, as well as bias based on gender, occupation, and religion, can be found in popular NLP language models. But a team of AI researchers wants the NLP bias…
Harvesting randomness, HAIbrid algorithms and safe AI with Dr. Siddhartha Sen
Dr. Siddhartha Sen is a Principal Researcher in MSR’s New York City lab, and his research interests are, if not impossible, at least impossible sounding: optimal decision making, universal data structures, and verifiably safe AI. Today, he tells us how…
In the news | GeekWire
UW and Microsoft release contact-tracing app, aiming to battle COVID-19 while preserving privacy
Microsoft and University of Washington researchers have teamed up on a new app, CovidSafe, that promises to alert people automatically if they’ve been in close proximity to someone infected by COVID-19, seeking to strike a balance between the sometimes competing…
Exploring the fundamentals of multi-armed bandits
| Alex Slivkins
If you haven’t ever been in a casino, you may have found yourself asking one very pertinent question: On which slot machine am I going to hit the jackpot? Standing in front of a bank of identical-looking machines, you have…
Awards | SIGCHI
Susan Dumais receives 2020 SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award
Susan Dumais, Technical Fellow and Director of the Microsoft Research Labs in New England, New York City and Montréal, and adjunct professor at the University of Washington, received the SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award. This is the highest honor awarded in…
In the news | SIGCHI
Dumais receives SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award
A common theme that runs through her work is the importance of understanding and improving information systems from an interdisciplinary and user-centered perspective. She is a co-inventor of Latent Semantic Analysis, a well-known word embedding technique, which was designed to…