News and Awards

From look-alike SUVs to AI interfaces, designers from Figma, Microsoft, Pentagram, and more reveal the objects, places, and experiences they’re working to improve this year.

Global adoption of artificial intelligence continued to rise in the second half of 2025, increasing by 1.2 percentage points compared to the first half of the year, with roughly one in six people worldwide now using generative…

Welcome to a special edition of Tools and Weapons, as Brad Smith and Juan M. Lavista Ferres review the results from Microsoft’s newest AI Diffusion Report. These show the state of global AI usage as…

January 7 – In the past decade, cloud-scale analytics tools have transformed the digital fight against deforestation. Instead of manual reviews of satellite images taking multiple months, land-use change can today be monitored in near-real…

Microsoft Research is open-sourcing its cutting‑edge 3D Holoportation technology that was used to transform healthcare by bringing doctors and patients together across vast distances. The work highlights real‑time, life‑size 3D telepresence that allows clinicians to…

As AI becomes a bigger part of everyday life, scientists are finding exciting new ways of harnessing its transformative power to tackle some of society’s biggest challenges. From designing new materials to mapping flood risks…

With our partners at Planet, our team has developed TEMPO, an AI model that estimates building density and height from Planet’s satellite imagery for every place on Earth, every three months!

Fellows are Optica members who have served with distinction in the advancement of optics and photonics. Francesca was elected for her pioneering contributions to the field of high-speed optical communications and optical signal processing.

Microsoft has introduced Fara-7B, a new 7-billion parameter model designed to act as a Computer Use Agent (CUA) capable of performing complex tasks directly on a user’s device. Fara-7B sets new state-of-the-art results for its…