Microsoft Research Summit ran October 19–21, 2021. For 30 years, the Microsoft Research community has worked across labs around the world on advances no product team would tackle alone. The Summit is where that work surfaces for the rest of us. If you are curious about where the science behind Microsoft’s products is heading, this is the event to watch.
The same teams build the algorithms, models, and machine learning that ship inside Dynamics 365, Office 365, and Azure. One favourite recent example: Azure Metrics Advisor, root-cause analysis on time-series data, which Samsung uses to resolve anomalies faster and keep their Smart TV service running.
Summit recordings and sessions: Microsoft Research Summit 2021.
Microsoft Research Summit: why it matters more than a normal product launch
Most Microsoft events sell what shipped. Microsoft Research Summit sells what is being figured out. The line-up runs across responsible AI, healthcare, environment, scientific discovery and human language technologies, with the people doing the work walking through papers and demos that will not show up in a Build keynote for another two or three years. If you build on Microsoft platforms, this is the cheapest way to see where the platform itself is heading.
7 best Microsoft Research Summit 2021 sessions to bookmark
- The Future of Scientific Discovery: how ML accelerates chemistry, materials, and life sciences.
- Human Language Technologies: large-scale translation and speech work that ended up inside Microsoft Translator and Teams.
- Responsible AI: the engineering practices that became Microsoft\’s Responsible AI Standard.
- AI for Healthcare: diagnostic and clinical workflow research with NHS and Mayo Clinic.
- Climate and Sustainability: Project Carbon, AI for Earth, and the data pipelines behind Microsoft\’s own carbon negative pledge.
- Mixed Reality and HoloLens 2: the human-computer interaction research that fed Mesh.
- Quantum Computing: where Azure Quantum was heading and what developers could start trying.
How Microsoft Research Summit work ends up in the products I build with
The shortest path from a Microsoft Research Summit paper to a customer is usually through Azure AI services. Speech, vision, language, anomaly detection (the Metrics Advisor example above is one of them), and decision services all started life as MSR projects. By the time it shows up in the Azure portal, the research has been hardened into something a Power Platform maker can call from a flow. That is the chain to watch.
Related talks from this blog
- Heading to Seattle for Microsoft Build 2023: the developer event two years later that turned the MSR-to-Azure pipeline into Copilot.
- ITU Power Platform 2024 guest lecture: how the same research showed up in the maker tools by 2024.
- Power Platform Partner Day FY23: the Danish partner day where the AI roadmap was first broken down for the channel.
