AI's sharing economy: Microsoft creates publicly available datasets

Samira Ebrahimi Kahou and her colleagues at Microsoft Research Maluuba recently set out to solve an interesting research problem: How could they use artificial intelligence to correctly reason about information found in graphs and pie charts? One big obstacle, they discovered, was that the research area was so new that there weren't any existing datasets available for them to test their hypotheses. The FigureQA dataset, which the team released publicly earlier this fall, is one of a number of datasets, metrics and other tools for testing AI systems that Microsoft researchers and engineers have created and shared in recent years. Researchers all over the world use them to see how well their AI systems do at everything from translating conversational speech to predicting the next word a person may want to type. The teams say these tools provide a codified way for everyone from academic researchers to industry experts to test their systems, compare their work and learn from each other.