Research Internships at Microsoft provide a dynamic environment for research careers with a network of world-class research labs led by globally-recognized scientists and engineers, who pursue innovation in a range of scientific and technical disciplines to help solve complex challenges in diverse fields, including computing, healthcare, economics, and the environment.

The Interactive Multimodal AI Systems (IMAIS) group at Microsoft Research seeks a Research Intern to work on a project related to Situated Intelligence. The Situated Intelligence research effort aims to enable computers to reason about the physical everyday world, at human scale, and in real time, and fluidly collaborate with people in physical space. Fueled by current advances in perception, large language models, and devices, this emerging computing paradigm will generate within the next decade a new ecosystem of applications, such as systems for mixed-reality task assistance, remote collaboration, educational scenarios, social robots in homes or public spaces, intelligent factory floors, and many more. These systems require computational models for situated communicative processes anchored into reasoning about the physical context. Our work ranges from developing representations (for example, what are key variables for reasoning about turn-taking in a multiparty conversation?) to constructing inference models (for example, which of the surrounding objects is the target of my interlocutor’s attention?) to decision making (for example, should I take an action now?) and all the way to execution (for example, how should I render that action in the world, given the context?).