
Microsoft Research Forum
Location: Virtual
Microsoft Research Forum is a virtual series highlighting purposeful research and its real-world impact, from fundamental exploration to advancing AI responsibly, scaling innovation through products and open source, and driving positive change for society.
Up next: Season 2 | Episode 4
Thursday, May 14, 2026 | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM Pacific Time

Agenda

Senior Creative Technologist
Microsoft Research AI Frontiers

Principal Researcher
Microsoft Research AI Frontiers

Microsoft Research AI Frontiers
TALK | NEW ADVANCEMENT OUT OF THE LAB
New release and demo from the Microsoft Research AI Frontiers lab
Abstract to come.

Agentic Engineer
Microsoft Research Redmond
TALK | NEW ADVANCEMENT OUT OF THE LAB
Introducing GitHub Agentic Workflows: AI that runs your repo
What if your repo could run itself? GitHub Agentic Workflows bring AI agents directly into repository automation, enabling tasks to run end-to-end inside GitHub Actions. With built-in guardrails and Microsoft-hosted models on Azure, this system introduces a safe, scalable way to automate development workflows using intent-driven AI.

Principal Researcher
Microsoft Research India
TALK | OPEN RESEARCH EXPLORATION
Introducing Interwhen: Steering reasoning agents with real-time verification
What if AI agents could check their work as they go? This verification method extracts verifiable properties from natural language and evaluates them using symbolic or model-based verifiers. Interwhen, a new open-source library, enables real-time verification of each step, helping agents act more safely and reliably in complex, real-world tasks.

Senior Researcher
Microsoft Research New England
TALK | MISSION ON AI
New fine-tuning of language models: Match meaning, not tokens
Language models are usually trained to predict the next word, but that does not always lead to the best overall answers. We introduce energy-based fine-tuning, a new method that trains models to produce better full responses, leading to stronger results without the need for complex reward models or verifiers.

Economist
Microsoft Research New York City
TALK | AI FOR ALL
Guiding the AI disruption to the Good Place
The true impact of AI does not lie in how well it takes tests or surfs the web, but in how effectively it teaches, coordinates, and operates in a web built for agents rather than humans. We anticipate the augmentation of workflows for AI, reduced communication frictions, and the rise of AI-powered intermediaries that better align markets with human goals. Our research examines how to guide this transition toward open, innovation-driven ecosystems, so that AI’s inevitable advance delivers broad-based welfare gains rather than locking society into narrow, walled gardens.
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Microsoft Research Forum

