Microsoft Research Podcast

Doug Burger, sustainability expert Amy Luers, and optimization researcher Ishai Menache examine the global emissions implications of datacenter operations, efficiency gains, and AI's potential across electrification, materials, and food systems.Show notes

Microsoft Chief Scientist Jaime Teevan and researchers Jenna Butler, Jake Hofman, and Rebecca Janssen unpack the New Future of Work Report 2025 and explore the ideal AI-driven working world. Plus, is AI a tool or a collaborator? And why the answer matters.Show notes

Are machines truly intelligent? AI researchers Subutai Ahmad and Nicolò Fusi join Doug Burger to compare transformer-based AI with the human brain, exploring continual learning, efficiency, and whether today’s models are on a path toward human intelligence.The Shape of Things to Come podcast series

Microsoft research lead Doug Burger introduces his new podcast series, The Shape of Things to Come, an exploration into the fundamental truths about AI and how the technology will reshape the future.The Shape of Things to Come podcast series

As the Women in Machine Learning Workshop (WiML) marks its 20th annual gathering, cofounders, friends, and collaborators Jenn Wortman Vaughan and Hanna Wallach reflect on WiML’s evolution, navigating the field of ML, and their work in responsible AI.Show notes

Microsoft’s Eric Horvitz and guests Bruce Wittmann, Tessa Alexanian, and James Diggans discuss the Paraphrase Project—a red-teaming effort that exposed and secured a biosecurity vulnerability in AI-driven protein design. The work offers a model for addressing AI’s dual-use risks.Show notes

For the series finale, Peter Lee, Carey Goldberg, and Dr. Zak Kohane compare their predictions to insights from the series’ most recent guests, including experts on AI’s economic and societal impact, leaders in AI-driven medicine, and doctors in training.Show notes

Former Washington State Secretary of Health Dr. Umair Shah and Mayo Clinic CEO Dr. Gianrico Farrugia explore how healthcare leaders are approaching AI when it comes to public health, care delivery, the healthcare-research connection, and the patient experience.Show notes

Next-generation physicians Morgan Cheatham and Daniel Chen discuss how generative AI is transforming medical education, exploring how students and attending physicians integrate new tools while navigating questions on trust, training, and responsibility.Show notes

In the series finale, Amanda Craig Deckard returns to examine what Microsoft has learned about testing as a governance tool. She also explores the roles of rigor, standardization, and interpretability in testing and what’s next for Microsoft’s AI governance work.Show notes: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/podcast/ai-testing-and-evaluation-reflections/

Drawing on his previous work as the UK’s cybersecurity chief, Professor Ciaran Martin explores differentiated standards and public-private partnerships in cybersecurity, and Microsoft’s Tori Westerhoff examines the insights through an AI red-teaming lens.Show notes

Daphne Koller, Noubar Afeyan, and Dr. Eric Topol, leaders in AI-driven medicine, discuss how AI is changing biomedical research and discovery, from accelerating drug target identification and biotech R&D to helping pursue the “holy grail” of a virtual cell.Show notes

Professors Daniel Carpenter and Timo Minssen explore evolving pharma and medical device regulation, including the role of clinical trials, while Microsoft applied scientist Chad Atalla shares where AI governance stakeholders might find inspiration in the fields.Show notes

In this episode, Alta Charo, emerita professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, joins Sullivan for a conversation on the evolving landscape of genome editing and its regulatory implications. Drawing on decades of experience in biotechnology policy, Charo emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between hazards and risks and describes the field's approach to regulating applications of technology rather than the technology itself. The discussion also explores opportunities and challenges in biotech’s multi-agency oversight model and the role of international coordination. Later, Daniel Kluttz, a partner general manager in Microsoft's Office of Responsible AI, joins Sullivan to discuss how insights from genome editing could inform more nuanced and robust governance frameworks for emerging technologies like AI.

In the introductory episode of this new series, host Kathleen Sullivan and Senior Director Amanda Craig Deckard explore Microsoft’s efforts to draw on the experience of other domains to help advance the role of AI testing and evaluation as a governance tool.

Technologists Bill Gates and Sébastien Bubeck discuss the state of generative AI in medicine, how access to “medical intelligence” might help empower people across healthcare, and how AI’s accelerating improvements are likely to affect both delivery and discovery.

Ethan Mollick and Azeem Azhar, thought leaders at the forefront of AI’s influence on work, education, and society, discuss the impact of AI at the individual level and what that means for the healthcare workforce and the organizations and systems in medicine.

The emergence of foundation models has sparked interest in applications to single-cell biology, but when tested in zero-shot settings, they underperform compared to simpler methods. Alex Lu shares insights on why more research on AI models is needed in biological applications.Show notes

A new Nature paper explores Aurora, an AI model that redefines weather prediction with application to other environmental domains such as tropical cyclones. Hear from senior researchers Megan Stanley and Wessel Bruinsma as they share their groundbreaking work.Read the paper

In this discussion, Matthew Lungren, Jonathan Carlson, Smitha Saligrama, Will Guyman, and Cameron Runde explore how teams across Microsoft are working together to generate advanced AI capabilities and solutions for developers and clinicians around the globe. Get started with Azure AI Foundry Labs

Peter Lee and his coauthors, Carey Goldberg and Dr. Zak Kohane, reflect on how generative AI is unfolding in real-world healthcare, drawing on earlier guest conversations to examine what’s working, what’s not, and what questions still remain.

Silicon has long borne the burden of heat transfer in electronics, but in a post-Moore’s Law world, researchers like Hongxia Hao and Bing Lv are using AI to discover and design next-generation materials that exceed the limits of silicon’s thermal conductivity.Read the paper

New AI models aren’t just changing the world of research; they’re also poised to impact society. Xing Xie talks about Societal AI, a white paper that explores the changing landscape with an eye to future research and improved communication across disciplines.Read the paper

Healthcare experts Laura Adams, Vardit Ravitsky, and Dr. Roxana Daneshjou discuss responsible AI implementation in medicine, examining governance approaches, shifting patient-provider relationships, and the identification of bias to ensure equitable deployment.

Evangelist for patient empowerment Dave deBronkart and Manatt Heath’s Christina Farr discuss how generative AI is redefining healthcare by empowering patients, challenging traditional care models, and creating new opportunities for innovation and collaboration. 

Microsoft’s Dr. Matthew Lungren and Epic’s Seth Hain discuss the challenges and opportunities of leveraging generative AI for enhanced patient care and improved clinical documentation and recordkeeping at scale—plus what’s next for the technology in the field.

Innovative AI research often depends on access to resources. Microsoft wants to help. Technical Advisor Evelyne Viegas and distinguished faculty from two Minority Serving Institutions discuss the benefits of Microsoft’s Accelerating Foundation Models Research program in their lives and research.

UC San Diego Health’s Dr. Christopher Longhurst and UC San Francisco Health’s Dr. Sara Murray explore how generative AI is changing patient care, clinical workflows, and decision-making and how they envision the technology impacting the future of healthcare.

Host Peter Lee, Microsoft Research president, discusses the motivation behind the new series and the GPT-4 encounter that helped him view the tech not only as a potential tool for improving healthcare but a chance to reexamine what it means to care for people. 

Microsoft announced the creation of the first topoconductor and first QPU architecture with a topological core. Dr. Chetan Nayak, a technical fellow of Quantum Hardware at the company, discusses how the breakthroughs are redefining the field of quantum computing.

In this episode, guest host Chris Stetkiewicz talks with Microsoft Principal Researcher Akshay Nambi about his focus on developing AI-driven technology that addresses real-world challenges at scale. Drawing on firsthand experiences, Nambi combines his expertise in electronics and computer science to create systems that enhance road safety, agriculture, and energy infrastructure. He’s currently working on AI-powered tools to improve education, including a digital assistant that can help teachers work more efficiently and create effective lesson plans and solutions to help improve the accuracy of models underpinning AI tutors.

Struggles with programming languages helped research manager Shan Lu find her calling as a bug hunter. She discusses one bug that really haunted her, the thousands she’s identified since, and how she’s turning to LLMs to help make software more reliable.

How do you generate and test materials that don’t exist yet? Researchers Tian Xie and Ziheng Lu share the story behind MatterGen and MatterSim, AI tools poised to transform materials discovery and help drive advances in energy, manufacturing, and sustainability.

As the “biggest election year in history” comes to an end, researchers Madeleine Daepp and Robert Osazuwa Ness and Democracy Forward GM Ginny Badanes discuss AI’s impact on democracy, including Daepp and Ness’s research into the tech’s use in Taiwan and India.

Just after his NeurIPS 2024 keynote on the co-evolution of systems and AI, Microsoft CVP Lidong Zhou joins the podcast to discuss how rapidly advancing AI impacts the systems supporting it and the opportunities to use AI to enhance systems engineering itself.Learn more:Verus: A Practical Foundation for Systems Verification | Publication, November 2024SuperBench: Improving Cloud AI Infrastructure Reliability with Proactive Validation | Publication, July 2024BitNet: Scaling 1-bit Transformers for Large Language Models | Publication, October 2023

In this special edition of the podcast, Technical Fellow and Microsoft Research AI for Science Director Chris Bishop joins guest host Eliza Strickland in the Microsoft Booth at the 38th annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) in Vancouver, British Columbia, to talk about deep learning’s potential to improve the speed and scale at which scientific advancements can be made.

Researcher Jindong Wang and Associate Professor Steven Euijong Whang explore the NeurIPS 2024 work ERBench. ERBench leverages relational databases to create LLM benchmarks that can verify model rationale via keywords in addition to checking answer correctness. Read the paperGet datasets and codes

Next-token prediction trains a language model on all tokens in a sequence. VP Weizhu Chen discusses his team’s 2024 NeurIPS paper on how distinguishing between useful and “noisy” tokens in pretraining can improve token efficiency and model performance.Read the paperGet the code

Pranjal Chitale discusses the 2024 NeurIPS work CVQA. Spanning 31 languages and the cultures of 30 countries, this VQA benchmark was created with native speakers and cultural experts to evaluate model performance across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts.Read the paperGet the dataset

Can existing algorithms designed for simple reinforcement learning problems be used to solve more complex RL problems? Researcher Dylan Foster discusses the modular approach he and his coauthors explored in their 2024 NeurIPS paper on RL under latent dynamics.Read the paper

When Senior Principal Research Manager Nicole Immorlica discovered she could use math to make the world a better place for people, she was all in. She discusses working in computer science theory and economics, including studying the impact of algorithms and AI on markets. 

Research manager Karin Strauss and members of the DNA Data Storage Project reflect on the path to developing a synthetic DNA–based system for archival data storage, including the recent open-source release of its most powerful algorithm for DNA error correction.Get the Trellis BMA code: GitHub - microsoft/TrellisBMA: Trellis BMA: coded trace reconstruction on IDS channels for DNA storage

The efficient simulation of molecules has the potential to change how the world understands biological systems and designs new drugs and biomaterials. Tong Wang discusses AI2BMD, an AI-based system designed to simulate large biomolecules with speed and accuracy.Read the paperGet the code

Researcher Siddharth Suri and professor David Holtz give a brief history of prompt engineering, discuss the debate behind their recent collaboration, and share what they found from studying how people’s approaches to prompting change as models advance.Learn more:As Generative Models Improve, People Adapt Their Prompts | Publication, July 2024AI, Cognition, and the Economy (AICE) | Initiative page

Researchers Chris Hawblitzel and Jay Lorch share how progress in programming languages and verification approaches are bringing bug-free software within reach. Their work on the Rust verification tool Verus won the Distinguished Artifact Award at SOSP ’24.Read the paper

In their 2024 SOSP paper, researchers explore a common—though often undertested—software system issue: retry bugs. Research manager Shan Lu and PhD candidate Bogdan Stoica share how they’re combining traditional program analysis and LLMs to address the challenge.Read the paper

Every year, interns from academic institutions around the world apply and grow their knowledge as members of the research community at Microsoft. In this Microsoft Research Podcast series, these students join their internship supervisors to share their experience working alongside some of the leading researchers in their respective fields. In this episode, Angela Busheska, an undergraduate engineering student at Lafayette College, talks to Senior Researcher Vaishnavi Ranganathan, about her work on TerraTrace, a platform that brings together statistics and large language models to track land use over time for agricultural and forestry applications. Busheska discusses the personal loss that drew her to climate activism, the chain of events that led to a memorable face-to-face meeting with Microsoft’s chief sustainability officer, and her advice for going after the internship you want and making the experience count.Learn more:TerraTrace | GitHub repoProject FarmVibes | Project homepageProject FoodVibes | Project homepage

The personalizable object recognizer Find My Things was recently recognized for accessible design. Researcher Daniela Massiceti and software development engineer Martin Grayson talk about the research project’s origins and the tech advances making it possible.The Find My Things story is an example of research at Microsoft enhancing Microsoft products and services. To try the Find My Things tool, download the free, publicly available Seeing AI app.Learn more:Find My Things: Personalized Accessibility through Teachable AI for People who are Blind or Low Vision | Publication, May 2024Understanding Personalized Accessibility through Teachable AI: Designing and Evaluating Find My Things for People who are Blind or Low Vision | Publication, October 2023Teachable AI Experiences (Tai X) | Project pagePeopleLens | Publication, June 2021ORBIT: A Real-World Few-Shot Dataset for Teachable Object Recognition | Publication, October 2021Collaborators: Teachable AI with Cecily Morrison and Karolina Pakėnaitė | Microsoft Research Podcast, December 2023

College freshman Dexter Greene and Microsoft research manager Richard Black discuss how technology that stores data in glass is supporting students as they expand earlier efforts to communicate what it means to be human to extraterrestrials.Learn more:Avenues: The World School — Golden Record 2.0Project homepageGolden Record: OverviewNASA ScienceProject SilicaProject homepageSealed in glassMicrosoft Unlocked innovation story, 2023Optics for the cloud: storage in the zettabyte era with Dr. Ant Rowstron and Mark RussinovichMicrosoft Research Podcast, November 2019Project Silica proof of concept stores Warner Bros. ‘Superman’ movie on quartz glassMicrosoft Source blog, November 2019

Model maker and fabricator Lex Story helps bring research to life through prototyping. He discusses his take on failure; the encouragement and advice that has supported his pursuit of art and science; and the sabbatical that might inspire his next career move.Learn more:Microsoft PremonitionProject EclipseProject PRISM3D TelemedicineJacdacAudio Devices