Plural Technology Collaboratory
Building the technological foundations for a plural society, where diverse communities can cooperate, self-govern, and thrive through advanced AI.
News & features
What’s Your Story: Weishung Liu
| Johannes Gehrke and Weishung Liu
Principal PM Manager Weishung Liu shares how a career delivering products and customer experiences aligns with her love of people and storytelling and how—despite efforts to defy the expectations that come with growing up in Silicon Valley—she landed in tech.
In the news | TIME
Inside Audrey Tang’s Plan to Align Technology and Democracy
E. Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang’s new book provides a vision of how advanced collaborative technology can bolster democracy.
Intern Insights: Dr. Madeleine Daepp with Jennifer Scurrell and Alejandro Cuevas
| Madeleine Daepp, Alejandro Cuevas, and Jennifer Scurrell
Connecting with researchers, collaborating across disciplines, and exploring a new city—PhD students Jennifer Scurrell and Alejandro Cuevas talk to Senior Researcher Madeleine Daepp about the internship experience at Microsoft Research.
In the news | OpenAI
Democratic Inputs to AI
Our nonprofit organization, OpenAI, Inc., is launching a program to award ten $100,000 grants to fund experiments in setting up a democratic process for deciding what rules AI systems should follow, within the bounds defined by the law.
Collaborators: Gov4git with Petar Maymounkov and Kasia Sitkiewicz
| Gretchen Huizinga, Petar Maymounkov, and Kasia Sitkiewicz
Collaboration is key to bringing ideas from lab to life. In the first episode of the #MSRPodcast series “Collaborators,” learn how GitHub’s Kasia Sitkiewicz and Protocol Labs’ Petar Maymounkov are teaming up to make open-source collaborative work better.
Research Focus: Week of April 24, 2023
Welcome to Research Focus, a series of blog posts that highlights notable publications, events, code/datasets, new hires and other milestones from across the research community at Microsoft. Yael Tauman Kalai, a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, has been awarded…
Cryptography in the Cryostat
Michael Freedman At a disarmament conference of 1932 Einstein described our technological vs. social maturity as a razor blade in the hand of a three-year-old. Ninety years has led to little gains in our social maturity and vast expansions of…
E. Glen Weyl, Shrey Jain, Karen Easterbrook, Jason Entenmann We are excited to introduce the Plural Technology Collaboratory (PTC), a cross-company and multi-partner collaboration with a home base within Microsoft Research (MSR) Special Projects. Collectively, we are exploring how to…
E. Glen Weyl, Kasia Sitkiewicz, Petar Maymounkov Open-source software, as exemplified by the communities that have formed around the “git” protocol for collaborative software development and version management, is one of the great wonders of digital technology. Communal open-source projects…