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.
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.
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.
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.
Advances in AI are driving meaningful real-world impact. Principal Researcher Akshay Nambi shares how his passion for tackling real-world challenges across various domains fuels his work in building reliable and robust AI systems.
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.
When 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.
Behnaz Arzani loves hard problems and the freedom to explore. That makes research a great fit! She discusses her work in network management, including the potential role of LLMs in the field; the challenges that excite her; and how storytelling changed her life.
Social scientist and HCI expert Abigail Sellen explores the critical understanding needed to build human-centric AI through the lens of the new AICE initiative, a collective of interdisciplinary researchers studying AI impact on human cognition and the economy.
