AI & Tech Newsletter

Advancing science & engineering with Antigravity’s /teamwork

Education Innovation

After 600 experiments, here's what I discovered about JEPA world models

New AI “copilot” helps engineers design better structures

The use of algorithms to design structures has led to new parts optimized for ultralight aircraft, high-bandwidth antennas, and F1 racing cars. But the best algorithmic design techniques still require lots of computation and time: Users only see the final design after it’s…

Helping robots fit into the human workplace

Despite fears about robots replacing humans at work, there are still plenty of things humans can do far better than machines. That’s fine with Robust AI, a startup building robots designed to complement what humans do best. The company’s mobile robot, named Carter, resembles a…

Microsoft Research Focus – Edition #98

What’s new in research? In this edition of Microsoft Research Focus, based on the Research Focus newsletter (opens in new tab), host Anson Ho shares some of the latest news and cutting-edge research from across Microsoft—from bringing AI-powered universal translation closer to…

New research could lead to faster, trustworthy AI models for climate prediction

Accurate, up-to-date climate projections are essential for planning decisions that enhance the resilience of power grids, protect public health, maximize agricultural yields, and more. Now, MIT researchers have developed a technique that streamlines the production of fast…

Theoretical Limits of Language Model Alignment

Language model (LM) alignment improves model outputs to reflect human preferences while preserving the capabilities of the base model. The most common alignment approaches are (i) reinforcement learning, which maximizes the expected reward under a KL-divergence constraint, and…

NSF’s X-Labs Program Draws Support From Charities and Investors

When the U.S. National Science Foundation began its X-Labs program in May, the agency said the higher-risk, higher-funded awards would create new kinds of partnerships that would confront urgent scientific and technological challenges. Now the NSF is doubling down on the idea…

Lazare, veni foras: Reprogramming Dormant Neurons to Backdoor AI Agents

Microsoft researchers have discovered “Lazarus,” a backdoor technique that can reprogram dormant neurons in an AI model, causing an otherwise normal AI agent to execute malicious commands when a hidden trigger appears. The threat is especially serious for AI agents with tool or…

Evaluating the Evaluators: Investigating LLM Judges for Personalized Writing Style Assessment

This paper was accepted at the Can We Trust AI Evaluation? Workshop at NeurIPS 2026. We evaluate how good large language model (LLM) judges are for personalized writing tasks. This is important when a user’s preferred writing style is known (e.g., “upbeat”) and an LLM judge is…

Weighted State Souping for Efficient Long-Context Retrieval

This paper was accepted at the Workshop on Personalized, Aligned, Long-term Memory for AI Systems (PALM) at NeurIPS 2026. State space models (SSMs) combine fast inference and fixed state size with competitive language-modeling performance. Recently, state souping has been…

Exploring the world's languages with Language Explorer

Natural Language Processing

On the Importance of Gating: Memorization vs. In-Context Learning in State Space Models

State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as a compelling alternative to Transformers, enabling sequence modeling with constant memory and linear compute. Although SSMs exhibit reasonable performance and favorable computational characteristics, they continue to lag behind…

AI Agents Are Testing the Limits of Zero-Trust Security

This article is brought to you by Queen’s University Belfast. Several teams around the globe are leveraging AI by creating a task force of agents managed by an orchestrator and creating applications to support risk assessment, client profiling, match making, and information…

AI-assisted learning platform helps robots reason beyond literal commands

Humans are intuitive by nature. We can sense meaning beyond the literal words that we encounter. Now, a new artificial intelligence-assisted learning platform developed by MIT engineers is enabling robots to read larger meaning into a human’s natural language commands. In a…

Measuring how AI agents handle everyday wet-lab science

OpenAI introduces BioBasicsBench, a 100-task benchmark measuring how well AI agents interpret raw experimental data and handle everyday wet-lab science.

Detecting signs of hypertension using wearable sensors

Health & Bioscience

Formally verifying agent-written full-stack web apps with PDD Kit

At a glance Formal methods for everyday software. PDD Kit helps you turn your intent into a formal spec, then proves the code your agent writes for every input and uses tests where a proof can’t reach. It takes formal methods beyond niche, specialist work to engineers without a…

Clearing up a robot’s fuzzy memory

In an emergency, a human might someday ask a robotic assistant to fetch a wall-mounted defibrillator located down the hall. But if the robot has incorrectly labeled the defibrillator as a fire extinguisher in its stored memory, it may not know where to find the life-saving…

Faster Retrieval for Better, More Efficient RAG

Maximum inner product search (MIPS) sits at the core of recommendation systems, search, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Given a query vector, MIPS systems search within a database of millions of candidate key vectors for the one that best matches the query. The…

Agile Deliberation: How AI helps humans define the gray areas

Data Mining & Modeling

Learn the rules: The hacker mindset

For some, rules pose limitations. For others, like Microsoft Research Manager Mike Walker, they’re opportunities. Walker’s fascination with rules and their role in the social order has allowed him to find success professionally and personally, from uncovering weaknesses in…