Microsoft Research Lab – Africa, Nairobi
News & features
Awards | ACM SIGCHI
ACM SIGCHI Societal Impact Award
Jacki O’Neill, founding Lab Director of Microsoft Research Africa, Nairobi, was given the 2026 Societal Impact Award by ACM SIGCHI for her research in computer science which has had extensive societal impact specifically in the areas of financial inclusion, future…
Paza: Introducing automatic speech recognition benchmarks and models for low resource languages
| Mercy Muchai, Kevin Chege, Nick Mumero, and Stephanie Nyairo
Microsoft Research unveils Paza, a human-centered speech pipeline, and PazaBench, the first leaderboard for low-resource languages. It covers 39 African languages and 52 models and is tested with communities in real settings.
Research Focus: Week of May 7, 2025
In this issue: New research on compound AI systems and causal verification of the Confidential Consortium Framework; release of Phi-4-reasoning; enriching tabular data with semantic structure, and more.
Microsoft Research Forum Episode 3: Globally inclusive and equitable AI, new use cases for AI, and more
“We’re at the very early stage of generative AI and the impacts it will have on work. This is a fast-moving field, and there’s an immense opportunity to take control of the agenda and build truly globally equitable AI systems”,…
Microsoft researchers discuss the challenges and opportunities of making AI more inclusive and impactful for everyone—from data that represents a broader range of communities and cultures to novel use cases for AI that are globally relevant.
Jacki O’Neill discusses the importance of creating globally equitable generative AI. She addresses the technical and sociotechnical challenges that must be tackled to positively transform work futures worldwide.
What’s Your Story: Jacki O’Neill
| Johannes Gehrke and Jacki O'Neill
Jacki O’Neill saw an opportunity to expand Microsoft research efforts to Africa. She now leads Microsoft Research Africa, Nairobi (formerly MARI). O’Neill talks about the choices that got her there, the lab’s impact, and how living abroad is good for…
Research Focus: Week of April 15, 2024
In this issue: New research on appropriate reliance on generative AI; Power management opportunities for LLMs in the cloud; LLMLingua-2 improves task-agnostic prompt compression; Enhancing COMET to embrace under-resourced African languages:
In the news | ACM Bytecast
ACM Bytecast Ep49 – Jacki O’Neill
In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Bruke Kifle hosts Jacki O’Neill, Director of the Microsoft Africa Research Institute (MARI) in Nairobi, Kenya, where she is building a multi-disciplinary team combining research, engineering, and design to solve local problems globally. Her…