iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

If you're not yet following Ben’s research, I highly recommend checking it out! #AIInnovators #AppliedResearch #NewFutureOfWork #LeadingLikeAScientist

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Ben and his co-authors call these constraints and preferences “standing instructions” (arxiv.org/pdf/2311.09796), enabling AI models to remember details like your preferred cuisine or budget whenever you ask for restaurant recommendations.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Personalization is another critical area of Ben’s research. By allowing users to explicitly state their general preferences and building models around them, AI can provide personalized responses and recommendations.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Ben’s effort to apply logical reasoning to a particularly complex field – identifying loopholes in the US federal tax code – promises to help people navigate and interpret complex documents in a wide range of domains (www.taxnotes.com/featured-ana...).

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

In the workplace, addressing complex intents and reasoning often requires making sense of vast amounts of documents and business practices grounded in human interactions, individual artifacts, and evolving knowledge that changes over time.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Additionally, his research on decomposing complex intents into smaller steps allows AI systems to handle multi-step tasks while keeping humans in the loop for reasonability checks at every decision point (arxiv.org/abs/2305.08677).

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

One AI challenge is enabling systems to understand and process complex utterances expressed in NL. Ben’s work involves converting NL into machine-readable formats, which is essential for accurate automated interactions with databases, APIs, and chatbots (aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-m...).

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Ben is a researcher at Microsoft, where he leads work on conversational AI for professionals, and is also on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

How can AI move beyond simple responses and reliably address complex tasks? Meet Benjamin Van Durme (www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...), who is pushing the boundaries of natural language tools so they can handle multi-step processes with contextual understanding.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

With Microsoft celebrating its 50th anniversary, here’s to the next 50 years of turning emails into insights and documents into dialogs!

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

As we move into 2025, AI is set to transform all aspects of work, but only if we are able to build on what we already know about productivity while being open to learning. This past year taught us that there are new ways AI can drive purpose, sustain persistence, and foster collaboration.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

By leveraging AI’s strengths in planning and synthesis, this kind of uncoordinated large-scale collaboration will make it possible to harness collective intelligence, enabling groups to solve problems and create knowledge more effectively than ever before (teevan.org/publications...).

teevan.org

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

But AI’s ability to process input from multiple people at scale will also disrupt collaboration in more profound ways. We already see people using Excel to extract themes from columns of text, where each row represents an idea from a different person.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

Microsoft’s decades of experience supporting collaboration, managing permissions, and facilitating sharing are proving invaluable as we integrate AI into these spaces.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

Given the importance of conversations, we're embedding AI into collaborative spaces. One of the best Copilot experiences is in Teams meetings, because AI enhances collaboration by summarizing discussion, suggesting action items, even prompting attendees to engage in more meaningful conversations.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

3) Collaborative: From working alone to thinking together.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

But the nature of knowledge artifacts is evolving. Much of the knowledge people return to is now generated through conversation (w/ people or AI) and reused not only by people but also by AI for grounding. Microsoft was a document company, but now must become a dialog company (vimeo.com/927715632).

vimeo.com

Jaime Teevan - From Documents to Dialogues: How LLMs are Shaping the Future of Work

The future of work is changing rapidly, with knowledge increasingly embedded in conversations rather than documents. In this talk, Jaime Teevan will explore how…

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

Currently, most conversations with AI are ephemeral. People must reestablish context every time they return to an AI system. This is at odds with the fact that work takes place over time. Fifty years ago, Microsoft began its journey by helping people create documents to digitally persist knowledge.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

2) Persistent: From storing documents to sustaining dialogs.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

But we are learning that AI can go even further by prompting people to fully articulate their goals and explore new directions. Right now, AI simply obeys commands. Looking forward, it will also challenge people to think differently (cacm.acm.org/opinion/ai-s...).

cacm.acm.org

AI Should Challenge, Not Obey – Communications of the ACM

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

People can now directly express their purpose, rather than having to translate it into computer-understandable actions. But expressing purpose is still hard to do. Decades of research show that recognition is easier than recall, and prompt support strategies are proving to be powerful tools here.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

1) Purposeful: From executing tasks to unlocking potential.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

Work has always been 1) purposeful, 2) persistent, and 3) collaborative, but AI is fundamentally redefining how computing supports these essential aspects. Let’s look at how.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

But the early glimpses we got this year of how people are starting to use Copilot suggests AI will teach us new ways to think about productivity as well. If 2024 was the year of taking what we know and applying it to how we use AI at work, 2025 can be the year of taking a fresh look at work given AI

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

In 2025, Microsoft will turn 50, and the wealth of knowledge the company has built over half a century of pioneering productivity solutions will supercharge how AI helps people summarize email and write documents.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

The fact that we’re already observing significant impact is interesting because, honestly, 2024 was also the year of using AI in the most boring ways possible. Right now, people are pretty much just using AI to summarize email threads and write documents for them, if they're using it at all.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

In 2024 we learned a lot about how AI is impacting work. People report that they're saving 30 minutes a day using AI (aka.ms/nfw2024), and randomized controlled trials reveal they’re creating 10% more documents, reading 11% fewer e-mails, and spending 4% less time on e-mail (aka.ms/productivity...).

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

I know there's a lot there to digest, but don't worry. In the new year I'll continue my annual tradition of walking through the slides. Consider this a sneak peak to get ahead of the game.

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Reposted by Jaime Teevan

Longqi Yang @ylongqi.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

I am at #NeurIPS this week! We are hiring full-time applied scientists in @microsoft.com Office of Applied Research, particularly those pushing the boundaries of model finetuning. Catch me for a chat or drop by Microsoft booth! #GenAI #Hiring #LLM #Copilot

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Reposted by Jaime Teevan

Brent Hecht @bhecht.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

Hello Bluesky! We're hiring amazing scientists in the productivity division at Microsoft. Come work with me, @teevan.bsky.social, and a whole legion of awesome researchers. jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/jo...

jobs.careers.microsoft.com

Search Jobs | Microsoft Careers

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

And if you're not yet following Sunayana’s research, I highly recommend checking it out! #AIInnovators #AppliedResearch #NewFutureOfWork #LeadingLikeAScientist

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

To learn more about what Sunayana is doing to ensure that generative AI benefits everyone around the world, I recommend listening to what she had to say during a recent MSR panel discussion on AI’s global impact (www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...).

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Recognizing the need for fair and transparent evaluation, she also implemented the PARIKSHA platform (www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...), which not only involves a diverse set of evaluators but also regularly updates its assessments to reflect ongoing improvements in Indic LLMs.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Her paper “MEGA: Multilingual Evaluation of Generative AI” (aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-m...) was the first large-scale multilingual benchmarking effort and explored how well LLMs perform across various tasks and languages.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

The lack of sufficient linguistic and cultural diversity in existing benchmarks similarly makes evaluating how LLMs perform for different languages and cultures hard.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

In a recent paper (www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...) Sunayana proposed a method to integrate cultural differences into LLMs using the World Value Survey as seed data. This approach aims to create culturally aware models by fine-tuning them with semantically equivalent data from diverse cultures.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Most language models are predominantly trained on data from the web, which does not equally represent all languages and cultures. This creates an inherent inequity from the start of the model-building process.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Her research is focused on making AI more inclusive by bridging the gap between diverse languages and cultures, and recently she’s been working closely with the Office team to help shape our multilingual strategy.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Can AI truly serve everyone, regardless of language or culture? Meet Sunayana Sitaram (www.linkedin.com/in/sunayana/), a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India, who is working hard to ensure that it will.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

If you're not yet following Brent’s research, I highly recommend checking it out! #AIInnovators #AppliedResearch #OAR #NewFutureOfWork #LeadingLikeAScientist

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Brent is the driving force behind Microsoft’s New Future of Work report (see aka.ms/nfw2023pdf for the most recent edition), and he’s coordinated numerous studies to understand AI’s impact on productivity (see aka.ms/productivity... for a summary).

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

For example, he conducted a study to understand how the rapid shift to remote work during the pandemic impacted collaboration networks, and found that firm-wide remote work led to a shift in focus from weak to strong ties (www.nature.com/articles/s41...).

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Brent moved to Microsoft from a tenured position at Northwestern because he wanted to find answers to the big questions people have about the future of work.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

If AI replied with a link, for example, other people were more likely to reply with links as well.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

I first met Brent when he interned with me back in 2010. We explored how AI could be used to answer the questions people ask on social media (teevan.org/publications...), and found that AI-generated replies not only provided useful information but also influenced the replies that people gave.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Inspired by insights like this, Brent played a vital role in helping to start the ACM Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency conference, and served on its founding executive committee.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

One study he conducted, for example, highlighted the cultural signals embedded in large NLP corpora written in different languages (e.g., Wikipedia) and their downstream effect on the AI systems built on top of them (dgergle.soc.northwestern.edu/resources/He...).

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Brent’s early research was pivotal in identifying and addressing what we now recognize as ‘algorithmic bias.’

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

As Director of Applied Science at Microsoft, Brent spearheads the integration of groundbreaking AI research into Microsoft's core products and leads a team of researchers working in areas such as LLM reasoning, privacy in LLMs, and human-centered AI.

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