Posts in category: Microsoft AI

Transcript

JINA SUH: So in this particular project we’re working on now, we’re focusing our attention on people leaders. And these people leaders have to make decisions that impact the work practices, work culture, you know, eventually the wellbeing of the team. And so the question we’re raising is how do we design tools that support these people leaders to attend to their work practices, their team, and their environment to enable more decisive and effective action in a data-driven way?

SHAMSI IQBAL: And so we need to think big, think from an organizational point of view. And then we need to think about if we walk it back, how does this impact teams? And if we want teams to function well, how do we enable and empower the individuals within those teams?

GRETCHEN HUIZINGA: You’re listening to Collaborators, a Microsoft Research Podcast showcasing the range of expertise that goes into transforming mind-blowing ideas into world-changing technologies. I’m Dr. Gretchen Huizinga.

I’m here today with Dr. Jina Suh, a Principal Researcher in the Human Understanding and Empathy group at Microsoft Research, and Dr. Shamsi Iqbal, the Principal Applied and Data Science Manager for the Viva Insights team in the Microsoft Data Platform and Growth organization. Jina and Shamsi are collaborating on a research project for Viva Insights that they hope will help people leaders reduce uncertainties and make informed and data-driven decisions for their teams. Before we unpack how they hope to do that, let’s meet our collaborators. Jina, I’ll start with you. Tell us a bit more about the Human Understanding and Empathy group at Microsoft Research and your role there. So what lines of research does the group pursue? And what are your particular interests and passions?

JINA SUH: Thank you for having me here, first of all. So our group does exactly what the name says. [LAUGHTER] We use technologies to gain understanding about people, and we try to design and develop technologies that use this understanding towards human wellbeing. Um, so we try to build technologies that are more empathic, you know, therapeutic; they can assist and augment people and so forth. And so my particular area of interest is in, um, identifying challenges and barriers for mental wellbeing and designing technology interventions and tools to support mental wellbeing. And so while I’ve done this research in the clinical domains, my interest of late has been around workplace wellbeing or mental health in non-clinical domains.

HUIZINGA: Mm hmm. So tell me a little bit more; when you say human understanding and empathy, and yet you’re working with machines, um, are you focused more on the psychological aspects of understanding people and applying those to machine technologies?

SUH: That and, and some more. So we use technologies to gain better understanding about people, their psychologies, their physiology, the contexts around them, whether they’re at work in front of a computer or they’re working out. But we also use technology to bring interventions in a way that actually is more accessible than traditional, I guess, going to therapists, um, and seeing, seeing somebody in person. So we try to bring technologies and interventions in the moment of wherever you are.

HUIZINGA: Yeah, we could have a whole podcast on “can machines have empathy?” but we won’t … today! Maybe I’ll have you back for that. Uh, Shamsi, you’ve had research space in Building 99, and now you’re embedded in a product group. So give us a brief guided tour of Microsoft Viva, and then tell us about the specific work you’re doing there.

SHAMSI IQBAL: Well, thanks, Gretchen. I’m super excited to be here and especially with my good friend Jina today. So let me talk a little bit about Microsoft Viva first. So, um, this is an employee experience platform that is built for organizations, teams, and individuals to support their workplace experience needs. And by experience needs, what I mean is, uh, things that help them thrive at work. So you could imagine these are data-driven insights about how they work and how they achieve their goals, curated knowledge that helps them get to their goals. There are opportunities to foster employee communications and collaborations. There is also learning opportunities tailored to their needs … um, all elements that are really important for people thriving at work.

HUIZINGA: So give me like a 10,000-foot view. I understand there’s four sort of major elements to, to Viva, and you’re particularly in the Insights. What are the other ones, and what does each of them do kind of in the context of what you just said?

IQBAL: So there are a few, and there are a few that are also coming on board soon.

HUIZINGA: Ooohhh! [LAUGHS]

IQBAL: So there is, for example, there is Viva Engage, uh, that helps with employee communication and collaboration. There is Viva Goals that helps you with exactly what I said— goals—and helps you achieve outcomes. There is Viva Topics that helps you with the knowledge generation and knowledge curation and contextually, uh, help people get access to that knowledge. So, so these are a few examples of the modules that are within Viva. And I work in Viva Insights. I lead a team of applied scientists and data scientists, and our particular charter is to bring deep science into the product. And we do this through incubation of new ideas, where we get to partner with MSR and OAR and all these other cool research groups that exist in, in Microsoft. And then we are also tasked with translating some of these complex research findings into practical product directions. So these are kind of like the two main things that we are responsible for.

HUIZINGA: So without giving away any industry secrets, can you hint at what is coming online, or is that all under wraps right now?

IQBAL: Well, I mean, some things are obviously under wraps, so I shouldn’t be letting out all the secrets. But in general, right now, we are focusing on really organizations and organizational leaders and how we can help them achieve the outcomes that they’re trying to achieve. And we are trying to do this in a, in a data-driven way where we can show them the data that is going to be important for them, to help them, uh, reach their organizational decisions. And also at the same time, we want to be able to point them towards actions and provide them support for actions that will help them better achieve those outcomes.

HUIZINGA: Yeah. I’ll be interested when we get into the meat of the project, how what Jina does with human understanding and empathy plays into what you’re doing with kind of business/workplace productivity and I guess we’ll call it wellbeing, because if you’re doing a good job, you usually feel good, right?

IQBAL: Right. So yeah, I think that that’s really important, and that’s where Jina and I kind of started, is that thinking about productivity and wellbeing really being intertwined together. So I mean, if you’re not feeling good about yourself, you’re really not going to be productive. That is at an individual level …

HUIZINGA: … and vice versa. Shamsi, before we go on, I want you to talk a little bit more about your move from research to product. And I’ve often called this the human version of tech transfer, but what prompted the move, and how is your life the same or different now that you’re no longer sort of a research official?

IQBAL: Well, I still like to think of myself as a research official, but I’ll, I’ll give you a little bit of history behind that. So I was in Microsoft Research for, what, 13 years and kind of like settled into my role thinking that, well, going for the next big project and working on the research insights and kind of like making impact at the research level was satisfying. And then COVID happened. 2020. The workplace transformed completely. And I took a step back, and I was thinking that, well, I mean, this may be the time to take the research that we have done for so many years in the lab and take it to practice.

HUIZINGA: Yeah.

IQBAL: And so there was this opportunity in Viva Insights at that point, which was just announced, and I felt that, well, let me go and see if I can do actually some tech transfer there, so bring in some of the work that we have been doing in MSR for years and see how it applies in a practical setting.

HUIZINGA: Yeah. And, and obviously you’re connected to a lot of the people here like Jina. So having followed both of you—and not in a stalker kind of way—but following you and your work, um, over the last couple of years, I know you have a rich history of both research and academic collaborations, but I want to know what you’re working on now and kind of give us an explanation of the project and how it came about. I like to call this “how I met your mother.” Although you guys have known each other for years. So, Jina, why don’t you take the lead on this, and Shamsi can corroborate if the story’s accurate on how you guys got together on this, but what are you doing with this project, and, um, how did it come about?

SUH: Yeah, so I wanted to kind of go back to what Shamsi was saying before. We’ve been collaborating for a while, but our common passion area is really at the intersection of productivity and, and wellbeing. And I think this is like, I don’t know, a match made in heaven … is to help people be productive by, um, you know, helping them achieve wellbeing at work and vice versa. And so my focus area is individual wellbeing. And as prior literature should have warned me, and I had, I had been ignoring, helping individuals can only go so far. There are organizational factors that make it difficult for individuals to perform activities that help them thrive. And so Shamsi and I have been working on several projects that started as individual tools, but later it really revealed fundamental organizational issues where we couldn’t just ignore factors outside of an individual. So in this particular project we’re working on now, we’re focusing our attention on people leaders. These are organizational leaders and executives like C-suites, as well as middle managers and line managers. And these people leaders have to make decisions that impact the work practices, work culture, you know, eventually the wellbeing of the team. And sometimes these decisions are made with a hunch based on anecdotes or these decisions are not made at all. And so the question we’re raising is how do we design tools that support these people leaders to attend to their work practices, um, their team, and their environment to enable more decisive and effective action in a data-driven way? And so what is the role of data in this process, and how do we facilitate that, you know, reflexive conversation with data to reduce uncertainty about these decisions?

HUIZINGA: Mmmm. You know what I love, and this is just a natural give-and-take in the conversation, but the idea that the, the individual is a situated being in a larger cultural or societal or workplace setting, and you can’t just say, well, if I make you happy, everything’s cool. So you’ve got a lot of factors coming in. So it’s really interesting to see where this work might go. I love that. Some collaborators just started working with each other and you guys, because you’ve been together for some time, have an established relationship. How do you think, Shamsi, that that has impacted the work you do or … if at all? I mean, because we’re focusing on collaboration, I’m kind of interested to tease out some of the people on the show who have just started working together. They don’t know each other. They’re in different states, different countries. Are there any advantages to working together for years and now doing a collaboration?

IQBAL: Oh! I can name so many advantages! Jina and I have worked closely for so long. We know each other’s strengths, weaknesses, working styles. So I mean, when I moved into Viva Insights, I knew that Jina was going to be a close collaborator not just because of the projects that we had worked on and the natural connection and alignment to Viva Insights, but it’s just because I knew that whenever I have a question, I can go to Jina and she’s going to go and dig out all the research. She maybe already knew that I was going to ask that question, and she had that already ready. I don’t know. I mean, she seems to read my mind before even I know the questions that I was going to ask her. So this was very natural for me to continue with that collaboration. And my colleagues over in Viva Insights, they also know Jina from previous, uh, interactions. So whenever I say that, “Well, I’m collaborating with Jina Suh in MSR,” and they say, “Oh yeah, we know Jina! So we are in good hands.”

HUIZINGA: Jina, is that true? You can read minds?

SUH: I am …

HUIZINGA: Or just hers? [LAUGHTER]

SUH: I’m … I’m sweating right now! [LAUGHTER] I’m so nervous.

HUIZINGA: Oh my gosh! … Well, so how about you? I mean, you had talked earlier about sort of a language barrier when you don’t know each other and, and because you’ve both been researchers, so … what advantages can you identify from this kind of connection?

SUH: Yeah, I think having Shamsi in the product group and having Shamsi being, uh, in Microsoft Research before, she knows how to translate my words into the product words, and I, I, I’m pretty sure, Shamsi, you, you might have struggled at the beginning. I’m not sure … at the product group.

IQBAL: I did, I did. I still do! [LAUGHTER]

SUH: But I think that struggle, I mean, she knows how to amplify my research and how to, um, talk about it in a way that the product groups will appreciate it. And she finds and identifies opportunities where research is needed, where I could actually shine. You know, before it was like, “I did all this research! Come look at me! Come look at me!” Shamsi will like, you know, find me, find opportunities for me, and say, “Hey, we have this gap. Can you come and speak about that?” And so, I don’t know, having that bridge I think really helps. And Shamsi is more than a collaborator. She’s more of a mentor for me, um, in that regard.

HUIZINGA: Awesome … so academics definitely have a particular way of talking and writing … and communicating, and product people do, too. So what might be an example of what would need that kind of level of translation, if you will? What, what might not someone get?

IQBAL: I think one of the things that I am still learning, and it took me a while to get to that point where I really started understanding that I need to fill this gap because there is a substantial gap between where research findings are and how that actually resonates with a product team.

HUIZINGA: Interesting.

IQBAL: And I think that the biggest question there is that taking the research findings and situating it in a real-world problem. So in the product world, we talk a lot about customer needs. And coming from research, I had the idea that, well, I will identify the problems and if it’s a compelling problem and I have a good solution, the product teams will come. I have no responsibility in figuring out the customer need because, come on, I already identified a great problem. And I think that I have been humbled over the past couple of years that that is quite not how it works. But being in that space now allows me … every time I come across a research question or I’m setting up some kind of a hypothesis, I take a step back and think about, OK, so how does it relate to the product? What customer need, for now, are we solving, or a future customer need are we going to solve?

HUIZINGA: Right.

IQBAL: And I think that with Jina, she keeps me grounded in the research, but she also has an engineering background, as well. So it is not that she does not understand the space. She understands the constraints in implementation in building something. So that is really good for me because I can borrow that knowledge. And when I talk to my product colleagues, I, I can leverage that, as well.

HUIZINGA: That’s, that’s hilarious because you’ve just identified a third group, which is engineering. Jina, I’m interested to know how previous collaborations might have informed the approach to the work you do now, so briefly talk about your early work together and what learnings could you share from any early successes or failures?

SUH: Yeah, maybe this is a little one-sided than a story about a collaboration, but I’ve, I’ve always looked up to Shamsi as kind of like the expert in productivity and wellbeing, so …

IQBAL: I am now blushing! [LAUGHTER]

SUH: So I think I’m more on the receiving end in this collaborative relationship …

IQBAL: That is not true! [LAUGHTER]

SUH: So, you know, I’ve always been passionate about mental health and emotional wellbeing, and unfortunately, mental health isn’t a high priority for a lot of people and organizations. And, you know, in the workplace, it’s sometimes tricky whether this concept of mental health should or should not be part of the work equation. And I’ve always admired how Shamsi was able to naturally … I mean, it’s, it’s kind of amazing how seamlessly she’s integrating aspects of mental health into the research that she does without really calling it mental health. [LAUGHTER] So, for example, like helping people transition in and out of work and disengage from work. I mean, how close to mental health could that be? You know, taking breaks at work, helping people focus more and distract less … like all these studies around attention that she’s done for years. So these kinds of, um, way that Shamsi is able to bring aspects of something that I’m really passionate about into, uh, into the workplace and into a language where product groups and the businesses really care about, that’s one of my biggest learnings from looking up to Shamsi and working together. You know, she’s constantly helping me, trying to understand, um, how do we actually formulate and, and talk about wellbeing in the context of the workplace so that leaders and organizational leaders, as well as product and business owners, as well, Microsoft in general, appreciate the work that we do. So that’s been really a blessing to have Shamsi be my partner …

HUIZINGA: Yeah. Shamsi, do you want to spread the love back on her? [LAUGHS]

IQBAL: Yeah, I think that I get motivated by Jina every single day, and, um, I think one of the things, which … I was going to interrupt you, but you were, you were, you were articulating this so nicely that I felt that I needed to wait and not interrupt and then pick an opportune moment to interrupt! So I, I, I am bringing back my PhD thesis into this conversation. [LAUGHS]

HUIZINGA: Right on!

IQBAL: Yeah! So, so one thing which was super interesting to me when I moved over to the product group and I was starting to look deeply into how we can bring some of the wellbeing-related work into the product. And I started digging into the organizational behavior literature. And what was fascinating is that everything we talked about in terms of wellbeing had a different definition in terms of like workplace thriving. And so things about giving people mental space to work and giving people opportunity to grow and belonging and all of these constructs that we typically relate to mental health, those are actually important workplace wellbeing constructs that have a direct relationship to workplace outcomes. And so I tried to reframe it in that way so that it doesn’t come across as a “good to have”; it comes across as a “really necessary thing to have.” What has happened over the past few months or so, I would say, there has been a shift in how organizations are thinking about people and individuals and wellbeing and productivity, and this is just a function of how the world is right now, right? So organizations and leaders are thinking that maybe now is the time to bring the focus back onto outcomes— productivity, revenue. And it seems that all the other things that we were focusing on … 2020, 2021 … about really being employee-centric and allowing employees to bring their best selves to work, it seems on the surface that that has gone sideways. But I’m going to argue that we should not be doing that because at the end of the day, the individuals are the ones whose work is going to aggregate up to the organizational outcomes. So if we want organizations to succeed, we need individuals to succeed. And so, um, at the beginning of the podcast, Gretchen, you were talking about individuals being parts of organizations. So individuals are embedded in teams; teams are embedded in organizations. So if organizations figure out what they want to do, it kind of bubbles down to the individuals. And so we need to think big, think from an organizational point of view, because that keeps us scoped and constrained. And then we need to think about if we walk it back, how does this impact teams? And if we want teams to function well, how do we enable and empower the individuals within those teams? So, so it’s a, it’s a bigger construct than what we had originally started with. And I think that now I am also pushing myself to think beyond just individuals and thinking about how we can best support individuals to thinking about how that actually bubbles up to an organization.

HUIZINGA: Right.

SUH: This is exactly what I’m talking about. [LAUGHTER]

HUIZINGA: Yeah, no, I’m …

SUH: This is exactly … She’s helping me. [LAUGHS]

HUIZINGA: It’s a podcast and you can’t see Jina smiling and nodding her head as Shamsi’s talking. Umm, let’s, let’s drill in a little bit on alignment between product and research, because we talked a little bit earlier about the language barrier and sometimes the outcome difference. And it’s not necessarily conflicting, but it might be different. How do you get to what I’ll call the Goldilocks position of alignment, and what role do you think collaboration plays, if any, in facilitating that alignment?

IQBAL: So it is not easy. And, I mean, obviously, and I think that again, this is where I’m starting to learn how to do this better. I think that starting off with a problem that a product team cares about—and the leaders in the product team care about—I think that that’s where we really want to start. And in this particular collaboration that Jina and I are right now, um, we started off with having a completely different focus, and then in January I came back and told Jina, scratch that; we’ll have to go back to the drawing board and change things! And she didn’t bat an eyelash. Because I was expecting that she would push back and say that, well, I, I have things to deliver, as well. You can’t come and randomize me. But I mean, knowing Jina, she was completely on board. I mean, I was worried. She was less worried than I was. But I think that, um, going back to your original question, I think that alignment in terms of picking a problem that product teams care about, I think that that’s super important. I think that then, going back to the original point about translating the research findings, for this particular project, what we are doing is that we are looking at something that is not going to block the product right now in any way. We are looking at something in the future that will hopefully help, and we are really trying to understand this population in, in a much more deeper way than what we have done before.

HUIZINGA: Right, right. Jina on that same note, you know, Shamsi’s actually sitting over in product right now, so she’s talking about finding a problem that product people care about. But what about from the research angle? How do product people get you on board?

SUH: Yeah, I think for me, I, I wonder about my role in Microsoft Research. You know, why am I in Microsoft doing research? Why am I not doing research somewhere else? So I try to make a concerted effort to see if there are collaborators outside of just research to justify and to make sure that my impact is beyond just research. And so it was just natural, like, you know, me and Shamsi having shared interests, as well as her, you know … collaborating together with Shamsi and her moving to Viva was a natural kind of transition for me. And so having connections into Viva and making sure that I participate in, you know, Viva share-outs or other things where I learn about the product’s priorities, as well as the questions that they have, concerns, challenges that they’re facing. Those are all great opportunities for me to learn about what the product is going through and how I can maybe think about my research direction a little bit differently. You know, I feel like every research question can be morphed into different things, can be looked at it from different perspectives. But having that extra, um, signal from the product group helps me, you know, think about it in a different way, and then I can approach the product group and say, hey, I heard your challenges, and I thought about it. Here’s my research direction. I think it aligns. You know, it’s kind of a back-and-forth dance we have to play, and sometimes it doesn’t quite work out. Sometimes, you know, we just don’t have the resources or interests. But you know, in this case with Shamsi and Viva, I think our interests are just like perfectly aligned. So, you know, Shamsi talked about pivoting … Shamsi has given me enough warnings or, you know, kind of signals that things are changing early enough that I was already thinking about, OK, well, what does it mean for us to pivot? So it wasn’t that big of a deal.

HUIZINGA: Well, yeah, and we’ll get to pivot in a second. So the interesting thing to me right now is on this particular project, where you’re working on data-driven insights for people leaders to make data-driven decisions, how do you then balance say, you have a job at Microsoft Research, you have a lane that you’re running in in terms of deliverables for your bosses, does that impact you in terms of other things you’re doing? Do you have more than one project on the go at a time, or are you pretty focused on this? How does it look?

IQBAL: Jina is smiling! [LAUGHTER]

SUH: I think the DNA of a researcher is that you have way too many things going [LAUGHS] on than you have hands and arms to handle them, so, yes, I have a lot of things going on …

HUIZINGA: What about the researchers? Do the product people have to figure out something that the researchers care about?

IQBAL: So when we started first conceptualizing this project, I think that we started off with the intent that we will have research outcomes and research contributions, but that would be constrained within a particular product space. I think that that’s how we kept it kind of like both interesting for research and for product.

HUIZINGA: Got it.

IQBAL: I mean, one of the responsibilities that I have in my new role is that I also have to kind of deliver ideas that are not going to be immediately relevant maybe but towards the future. And so this gives me the opportunity to explore and incubate those new ideas. Maybe it works out; maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it creates a new direction. The product team is not going to hold me accountable for that because they have given me that, that flexibility that I can go and explore.

HUIZINGA: Have some runway …

IQBAL: Yeah. And so that’s, that’s why I tried to pick something—or Jina and I worked together to pick something—which would have enough interest as a research contribution as well as something that could be picked up by product leader, as well.

HUIZINGA: That’s a perfect way of putting it. You know, speaking of incubation, in some ways, Microsoft is well known for its internships. And you have an intern working on this project right now. So it’s sort of a Microsoft/Microsoft Research/university, um, collaboration. Jina, tell us about the student you’re working with and then talk about how Microsoft Research internships are beneficial, maybe … and anchor that on this particular project.

SUH: So the intern that is working on our project is Pranav Khadpe. He’s a PhD student in the, uh, Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. So Pranav studies and builds infrastructures that strengthen interdependence and collaboration in occupational communities, which is, I think, really aligned to what this podcast is trying to do!

HUIZINGA: Yeah, absolutely.

SUH: So for example, he builds technologies that support people seeking help and getting feedback, getting mentoring and a sense of belonging through interaction with others within those communities. And I think internships primarily have the benefit of mentoring for the future generation of researchers, right? We’re actually building this pipeline of researchers into technology companies. We’re giving them opportunities to, to experience what it’s like to be in the industry research and use that experience and, and entice them to come work for us, right? [LAUGHS]

HUIZINGA: Right. It’s a farm team!

SUH: Right. [LAUGHTER] Um, so I feel like I have this dual role at Microsoft Research. On one hand, we are researchers like Shamsi and I. We need to continue to push the boundaries of scientific knowledge and disseminate it with the rest of the world. But on the other hand, I need to bring value of that research back into our products and business, right? And so, um, internships that are designed with product partners are really forcing functions for us to think about this dual role, right? It’s a learning opportunity for all of us involved. So from the research side, we learn how to find the right balance between research and product, um, and ensuring that we do successful technology transfer. But from the product perspective, they learn how to apply scientific rigor in their product decisions or decisions that they make … or designs that they make. And it’s a, it’s a really great opportunity for Pranav to be sitting in between the product and research. He’s not only learning what he’s already being trained to do in his PhD, being mainly an independent researcher, but he’s also learning how to bring that back into the product. So now he’s being trained not only to be a researcher in MSR but perhaps an applied scientist in the industry, as well. So I think there’s that benefit.

HUIZINGA: And that gets back to the individual being situated within an organization. And so being an independent researcher is cool, but you’re always going to be working with a team of some kind … if you want a paycheck. [LAUGHS] Or you can just go off and invent. Shamsi, I always ask what could possibly go wrong? Some people hate that question, but I think it’s worth asking. And while I know that data driven—quotation marks around that, air quotes around that—is generally a positive buzz-phrase in decision-making today, I wonder how you’re addressing this augment-not-replace mandate in the work you’re doing. How do you keep humans in the loop with real life wisdom and emotions and prevent the march toward what I would call outsourcing decision-making, writ large, to machines?

IQBAL: I think it’s a, it’s a great question, and it’s a very timely one, right? And, uh, the way that I like to think about it, being a human-computer interaction researcher is—who is now dealing with a lot of data—is that data can show but not necessarily tell. And I think that the “telling” part comes from the humans. Maybe in the future, AI and data will be able to do the telling job better, but right now, humans have the context. So a human being who has the context can look at the data and explain why it is showing certain things. And I think that that’s where I feel that the integration of the human in that process is so important. The challenge is showing them the right data. I think that that is also where the human comes in, in figuring out what they need to see. The data can show them that, and then the human gets to tell the story around it.

HUIZINGA: OK. Jina, do you have any insights on that?

SUH: One of the challenges is that, um, we’re not only just building tools to help people look at the data and contextualize it and explain it and understand it but also show them how powerful it can be in changing their behaviors, changing their organization. And it takes work. So one challenge that, you know, we were just having a discussion over lunch is that, how do we actually get people to be motivated enough to interact with the data, have a conversation with the data? And so these are some of the questions that we are still … uh, we don’t have an answer for; we’re still trying to answer. But, you know, our role is not just to feed data and help them look at it and tell a story about it, but also demonstrate that it’s empowering so that they can have more engaging experience with that data.

HUIZINGA: Tell me what you mean by having a conversation with the data. I mean, what does that look like?

SUH: The obvious … most obvious example would be with the large language models.

HUIZINGA: OK!

SUH: You can have a …

HUIZINGA: An actual conversation!

SUH: An actual conversation with the data. But you can also do that through user experience, right? You can be asking questions. I think a lot of these things happen naturally in your head. You’re formulating questions about data. You’re finding insights. You move on to the next question. You become curious. You ask the next question. You explain it. You bring your context to it and then you explain it. So that sort of experience. But I think that takes a lot of work. And we need to make sure that we entice them to, to make sure that there’s value in doing that extra work.

HUIZINGA: Well, and the fact that you’re embedded in a group called Human Understanding and Empathy and that your intern is on human-computer interaction, the human-centeredness is a huge factor in this kind of work today. Ummm. The path from lab to life, as they say—wait, it’s what I say!—is not necessarily straight and linear and sometimes you have to pivot or, as I like to say, add a kick ball change to the research choreography. How did this work begin? Shamsi, you told a story, um, early on, and I think people like stories. I’m going to have you both address this, but I want Shamsi to go first. How did it begin, and then how did it change? What were the forcing functions that made the pivot happen and that you both reacted to quite eagerly, um, both to meet the research and organizational outcomes?

IQBAL: As we said many times in this podcast, I mean, Jina and I, we, we naturally gravitate towards the same research problems. And so, we were looking at one aspect of Viva Insights last year with another intern, and that internship project, apart from being really impactful and well-received in Viva Insights, as well, I think it was just a lot of fun doing a joint internship project with Jina. And so this time when the application period came around, it was a no-brainer. We were going to submit another proposal. And at that point … based on some of the work that we had done last year … so we were really going to focus on something around how we can help people managers and their reports have better conversations and … towards their goals. Right, Jina? I think that that’s where we had kind of like decided that we were going to focus on. And then we started interviewing interns with that project in mind, and then it was December or January where things shifted, the tech world went through quite a tumultuous time, and, uh, we just had to pivot because our organization had also changed directions and figured that, well, we need to focus more on supporting organizations and organization leaders through this time of change. Which meant that we could still do our internship project, but it just didn’t seem right in terms of what we could do, in terms of impact and maybe immediate impact, too, uh, for the field. So Jina and I talked. I recommended that we shift the intern that we had talked to. I think that we had already talked to Pranav. I mean, he seemed really versatile and smart. And then we just decided, I think he’ll be OK. I think that he will be fine. I think that he would actually be even a better fit for the project that we have in mind.

HUIZINGA: Yeah. You know, as you’re talking, I’m thinking, OK, yeah, we think of the workers in a workplace, but the pressure on leaders or managers is intense to make the right decision. So it seems really in line with the empathy and the productivity to bring those two together, to, to help the people who have the severe pressure of making the right decisions at the right time for their teams, so that’s awesome. Jina, do you have anything to add to the pivot path? I mean, from your perspective.

SUH: Yeah, I mean, like I was saying, I think Shamsi was giving us, or me, plenty of signals that this might be happening. So it gave me plenty of opportunities to think about the research. And really, we didn’t make too many changes. I mean, I’d, I’d like to think that we’re, we’re trying to get at the same problem but from a slightly different angle. And so, you know, before it was individual and manager conversations. Now we’re going from, you know, managers to organizational leaders. At the end of the day, like the real transformative change in an organization happens through the leadership. And so, I think before, we were just kind of trying to connect the individual needs to their, to their immediate managers. But now I think we’re going at the problem in a more fundamental way, really tackling the organizational leaders, helping them make the right decisions to, to help their organizations thrive. And I’m more excited about this new direction than before.

HUIZINGA: Yeah. You know, I hadn’t asked this, and I should be asking it to everyone that comes in the booth or on screen. What are the primary methodologies you engage with in this research? I mean, quantitative, qualitative, mixed?

SUH: Yeah, we, we do everything, I think. [LAUGHS] Um, I, I think that’s the beauty of the human-computer interaction … the space is huge. So we do anything from qualitative interviews, uh, you know, contextual inquiry, like observing people, understanding their work practices, to interviewing people, as well as running survey studies. We’ve done purely quantitative studies, as well, looking at Viva Insights data and understanding the correlation between different signals that Viva Insights is providing with workplace stress at a large scale, at high fidelity, so…

IQBAL: I think another thing that I would add is that sometimes we also build prototypes based on the ideas that we come up with and so we get to evaluate those prototypes in, in smaller scale but in far more depth. And so those kinds of results are also super important for the product teams because that helps bring those ideas to life, is that well, I understand your research and I understand your research findings, but what do I do with it? And so if you have a prototype and that shows that, well, this is something that you might be able to do, and then it’s up to them to figure out whether or not this is actually scalable.

HUIZINGA: Well, as we wrap up, I’d like to give each of you, uh, the chance to do a little future envisioning. And I know that that’s kind of a researcher’s brain anyway, is to say what kind of a future do I want to help build? But how will the workplace be different or better because of the collaborative work you’ve done? Jina, why don’t you go first.

SUH: As researchers, I think it’s our job to get ahead of the curve and to really teach the world how to design technology in a, in a way that considers both its positive and negative impacts. So in the context of using data at work, or data about work, how the data gets used for and against people at work …

HUIZINGA: Ooohh!

SUH: … there’s a lot of fear. Yes, there’s a lot of fear about workplace surveillance.

HUIZINGA: Yeah!

SUH: And so the question for us is, you know, how do we demonstrate that this data can be used ethically and responsibly and that there is value in, in this data. So I, I am hoping that, you know, through this collaboration, I’m hoping that we can pave the way for how to design these technologies responsibly, um, and, and develop data-driven practices.

HUIZINGA: Shamsi, close the show with us and tell me your preferred future. What, what are you going to contribute to the workplace world?

IQBAL: So I would just add one more thing. I think that data responsibility, transparency, and ethical use of data, I think it’s at the core of Microsoft’s mission, and I think it’s on us to show that in our products. I think that the other thing, which is a little away from the data, I think that just going back to this concept of leaders and, uh, individuals, I have always maintained that there is oftentimes a tension between what an individual’s goals might be and what an organization’s goals might be. And I’m hoping through this work that we can kind of like help resolve some of those tensions, that once organization leaders are provided with the right kind of insights and data, they will be more motivated to take actions that will be also beneficial to individuals. Oftentimes, that connection is not very clear, uh, but I’m hoping that we can shed some light on it.

HUIZINGA: Jina, Shamsi, so good to see you again. Smiles so big. Thanks for coming in and sharing your “insights” today.

SUH: Thank you for having us.

IQBAL: Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun.

Transcript

HAIYAN ZHANG: And as animation rendering improves, we have the ability to get to a wholly life-like character. So how do we get there? You know, we’re working with animators. We want to bring in neuroscientists, game developers, user researchers. There’s a lot of great work happening across the games industry in machine learning research, looking at things like motion matching, helping to create different kinds of animations that are more human-like. And it is this bringing together of artistry and technology development that’s going to get us there. 

GRETCHEN HUIZINGA: You’re listening to Collaborators, a Microsoft Research Podcast showcasing the range of expertise that goes into transforming mind-blowing ideas into world-changing technologies. I’m Dr. Gretchen Huizinga.

I’m delighted to be back in the booth today with Haiyan Zhang. When we last talked, Haiyan was Director of Innovation at Microsoft Research Cambridge in the UK and Technical Advisor to Lab Director Chris Bishop. In 2020, she moved across the pond and into the role of Chief of Staff for Microsoft Gaming. Now she’s the General Manager of Gaming AI at Xbox, and I normally say, let’s meet our collaborators right now, but today, we’ll be exploring several aspects of collaboration with a woman who has collaborating in her DNA. Welcome back, Haiyan! 

ZHANG: Hi, Gretchen. It’s so good to be here. Thank you for having me on the show.

HUIZINGA: Listen, I left out a lot of things that you did before your research work in the UK, and I want you to talk about that in a minute, but first, help us understand your new role as GM of Gaming AI. What does that mean, and what do you do?

ZHANG: Right. Uh, so I started this role about a year ago, last summer, actually. And those familiar with Xbox will know that Xbox has been shipping AI for over a decade and in deep collaborations with Microsoft Research, with technologies like TrueSkill and TrueMatch, uh, that came out of the Cambridge lab in the UK. So we have a rich history of transferring machine learning research into applied product launch, and I think more recently, we know that AI is experiencing this step change in its capabilities, what it can empower people to do. And as we looked across all the various teams in Xbox working on machine learning models, looking at these new foundation models, this role was really to say, hey, let’s bring everybody together. Let’s bring it together and figure out what’s our strategy moving forward? Are there new connections for collaboration that we can form across teams from the platform services team to the game development teams? Are there new avenues that we should be exploring with AI to really accelerate how we make games and how we deliver those great game experiences to our players? So my role is really, let’s bring together that strategy for Xbox AI and then to look at new innovations, new incubation, that my team is spearheading, uh, in new areas for game development and our gaming platform.

HUIZINGA: Fascinating. Are you the first person to have this role? I mean, has there been a Gaming AI person before you?

ZHANG: Did you … did you get that from [LAUGHS] what I just … yeah, did you get that hint from what I just said?

HUIZINGA: Right!

ZHANG: The role didn’t exist before I came into the role last summer. And sometimes, you know, when you step into a role that didn’t exist before, a part of that is just to define what the role is by looking at what the organization needs. So you are totally right. This is a completely new role, and it is very timely because we are at that intersection where AI is really transformational. I mean, we’ve seen machine learning gain traction with deep learning, uh, being applied in many more areas, and now with foundation models, with these large language models, we’re just going to see this completely new set of capabilities emerge through technology that we want to be ready for in Xbox.

HUIZINGA: You know, I’m going to say a phrase I hate myself for saying, but I want to double click on that for a minute. [LAUGHS] Um, AI for a decade or more in Xbox … how much did the new advances in large learning models and the GPT phenom help and influence what you’re doing?

ZHANG: Well, so interestingly, Gretchen, I, I’ve actually been secretly doing this role for several years before they’ve made it official. So back in Cambridge in the UK, with Microsoft Research, uh, I was working with our various AI teams that were working within gaming. So you might have talked before to Katja Hofmann’s team working on reinforcement learning.

HUIZINGA: Absolutely.

ZHANG: The team working on Bayesian inference with TrueSkill and TrueMatch. So I was helping the whole lab think about, hey, how do we take these research topics, how do we apply them into gaming? Coming across the pond from the UK to Redmond, meeting with different folks such as Phil Spencer, the CEO of Microsoft Gaming, the leadership team of Xbox and really trying to champion, how do we get more, infuse more, AI into the Xbox ecosystem? Every year, I would work with colleagues in Xbox, and we would run an internal gaming and AI conference where we bring together the best minds of Microsoft Research and the product teams to really kind of meet in the middle and talk about, hey, here are some research topics; here are some product challenges. So I think for the last five or six years, I’ve, I’ve been vying for this role to be created. And finally, it happened!

HUIZINGA: Sort of you personify the role anyway, Haiyan. Was that conference kind of a hackathon kind of thing, or was it more formal and, um, bring minds together and … academic wise?

ZHANG: Right. We saw a space for both. That there needed to be more of a translation layer between, hey, here are some real product challenges we face in Xbox, both in terms of how we make the games and then how we build the networking platform that players join to access the games. So here are some real-world problems we face. And then to bring that together with, hey, here are some research topics that people might not have thought about applied to gaming. In recent times, we’ve looked at topics like imitation learning. You know, imitation learning can be applied to a number of different areas, but to apply that into video games, to say, hey, how can we take real player data and be able to try to develop AI agents that can play, uh, in the style of those human players, personalized for human players? You know, this is where I think the exciting work happens between problems in the real world and, uh, researchers that are looking at bigger research topics and are looking for those real-world problems.

HUIZINGA: Right. To kind of match them together. Well, speaking of all the things you’ve done, um, you’ve had sort of a Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? kind of career path, um, everything from software engineering and user experience to hardware R&D, design thinking, blue-sky envisioning. Some of that you’ve just referred to in that spectrum of, you know, real-world problems and research topics. But now you’re doing gaming. So talk a little bit about the why and how of your technology trek, personally. How have the things you did before informed what you’re doing now? Sort of broad thinking.

ZHANG: Thanks, Gretchen. You know, I’ve been very lucky to work across a number of roles that I’ve had deep passion for and, you know, very lucky to work with amazing colleagues, both inside of Microsoft and outside of Microsoft, so it’s definitely not something by plan, so it’s more that just following my own passions has led me down this path, for better or for worse. [LAUGHTER] Um, so I mean, my career starts in software engineering. So I worked in, uh, Windows application development, looking at data warehousing, developing software for biomedical applications, and I think there was a point where, you know, I, I really loved software architecture and writing code, and I, I wanted to get to the why and the what of what we build that would then lead to how we build it. So I wanted to get to a discipline where I could contribute to why and what we build.

HUIZINGA: Yeah.

ZHANG: And that led me on a journey to really focus in on user experience and design, to say, hey, why do we build things? Why do we build a piece of software? Why do we build a tool? It’s really to aid people in whatever tasks that they’re doing. And so that user experience, that why, is, is going to be so important. Um, and so I went off and did a master’s in design in Italy and then pursued this intersection of user research, user experience, and technology.

HUIZINGA: A master’s degree in Italy … That just sounds idyllic. [LAUGHS] So as you see those things building and following your passions and now you’re here, do you find that it has informed the way you see things in your current role, and, and how might that play out? Maybe even one example of how you see something you did before just found its way into, hey, this is what’s happening now; that, that fits, that connects.

ZHANG: You know, I think in this role and also being a team leader and helping to empower a team of technologists and designers to do their best work in this innovation space, it’s kind of tough. You know, it … sometimes I find it’s really difficult to wear many hats at the same time. So when I’m looking at a problem – and although I have experience in writing software, doing user research, doing user experience design – it’s really hard to bring all of those things together into a singular conversation. So I’m either looking at a problem purely through the coding, purely through the technology development, or purely through the user research. So I haven’t, I haven’t actually figured out a way to integrate all of those things. So when I was in the UK, when I was more working with a smaller team and, uh, really driving the innovation on my own, it was probably easier to, uh, to bring everything together, but then I’m only making singular things. So, for example, you know, in the UK, I developed a watch that helped a young woman called Emma to overcome some of the tremor symptoms she has from her Parkinson’s disease, and I developed some software that helped a young woman – her name is Aman – who had memory loss, and the software helped her be able to listen to her classes – she was in high school – to listen to her classes, record notes, be able to reflect back on her notes. So innovation really comes in many forms: at the individual level, at the group level, at the society level. And I find it just really valuable to gain experience across a spectrum of design and technology, and in order to really make change at scale, I think the work is really, hey, how do we empower a whole team? How do we empower a whole village to work on this together? And that is a, a very unique skill set that I’m still on a journey to really grasp and, and, and learn together with all my colleagues.

HUIZINGA: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about gaming more specifically now and what’s going on in your world, and I’ll, I’ll start by saying that much of our public experience with AI began with games, where we’d see headlines like “AI Beats the World Chess Champion” or the World Go Champion or even, um, video games like Ms. Pac-Man. So in a sense, we’ve been conditioned to see AI as something sort of adversarial, and you’ve even said that, that it’s been a conceptual envisioning of it. But do you see a change in focus on the horizon, where we might see AI as less adversary and more collaborator, and what factors might facilitate that shift?

ZHANG: I think we could have a whole conversation about all the different aspects of popular culture that has made artificial intelligence exciting and personified. So I can think of movies like WarGames or Short Circuit, just like really fun explorations into what might happen if a computer program gained some expanded intelligence. So, yes, we are … I think we are primed, and I think this speaks to some core of the human psyche that we love toying with these ideas of these personalities that we don’t totally understand. I mean, I think the same applies for alien movies. You know, we have an alien and it is completely foreign! It has an intelligence that we don’t understand. And sometimes we do project that these foreign personalities might be dangerous in some way. I also think that machine learning/AI research comes in leaps and bounds by being able to define state-of-the-art benchmarks that everyone rallies around and is either trying to replicate or beat. So the establishment of human performance benchmarks, that we take a model and we say this model can perform this much better than the human benchmark, um, is a way for us to measure the progress of these models. So I think the establishment of these benchmarks has been really important to progress AI research. Now we see these foundation models being able to be generalized across many different tasks and performing well at many different tasks, and we are entering this phase where we transition from making the technology to building the tools. So the technology was all about benchmarks: how do we just get the technology there to do the thing that we need it to do? To now, how do we now mold the technology into tools that actually assist us in our daily lives? And I think this is where we see more HCI researchers, more designers, bringing their perspectives into the tool building, and we will see this transition from beating human benchmarks to assistive tools – copilots – that are going to aid us in work and in play.

HUIZINGA: Yeah. Well, you have a rich history with gaming, both personally and professionally. Let me just ask, when did you start being a gamer?

ZHANG: Oh my goodness. Yeah, I actually prefer the term “player” because I feel like “gamer” has a lot of baggage in popular culture …

HUIZINGA: I like that. It’s probably true. When did you start gaming?

ZHANG: I have very fond memories of playing Minesweeper on my dad’s university PC. And so it really started very early on for me. It’s funny. So I was an only child, so I spent a lot of time on my own. [LAUGHS]

HUIZINGA: I have one!

ZHANG: And one of the first hobbies I picked up was, uh, programing on our home PC, programing in BASIC.

HUIZINGA: Right …

ZHANG: And, you know, it’s very … it’s a simple language. I think I was about 11 or 12, and I think the first programs that I wrote were trying to replicate music or trying to be simple games, because that’s a way for, you know, me as a kid, to see some exciting things happening on the screen.

HUIZINGA: Right …

ZHANG: Um,so I’d say that that was when I was trying to make games with BASIC on a PC and also just playing these early games like Decathlon or King’s Quest. So I’ve always loved gaming. I probably have more affinity to, you know, games of my, my childhood. But yeah, so started very early on, um, and then probably progressed I’d say I probably played a little too much Minecraft in university with some like many sleepless nights. That was probably not good. Um, and then I think has transitioned into mobile games like Candy Crush, just like quick sessions on a commute or something. And that’s why I prefer the term “player” because there’s, there’s billions of people in the world who play games, and I don’t think they think of themselves as gamers.

HUIZINGA: Right.

ZHANG: But you know, if you’re playing Solitaire, Candy Crush, you are playing video games.

HUIZINGA: Well, that was a preface to the, to the second part of the question, which is something you said that really piqued my interest. That video games are an interactive art form expressed through human creativity. But let’s get back to this gaming AI thing and, and talk a little bit about how you see creativity being augmented with AI as a collaborative tool. What’s up in that world?

ZHANG: Right. Yeah, I, I, I really fundamentally believe that, you know, video games are an experience. They’re a way for players to enter a whole new world, to have new experiences, to meet people in all walks of life and cultures that they’ve not met before; either they are fictional characters or other players in different parts of the world. So being able to help game creators express their creativity through technology is fundamental to what we do at Xbox. With AI, there’s this just incredible potential for that assistance in creativity to be expanded and accelerated. For example, you know, in 1950, Claude Shannon, who was the inventor of information theory, wrote a paper about computer chess. And this is a seminal paper where he outlined what a modern computer chess program could be – before there were really wide proliferation of computers – and in it, he talked about that there were innate advantages that humans had that a computer program could never achieve. Things like, humans have imagination; humans have flexibility and adaptability. Humans can learn on the fly. And I think in the last seven decades, we’ve now seen that AI is exhibiting potential for imagination and flexibility. And imagination is something that generative AI is starting to demonstrate to us, but purely in terms of being able to express something that we ask of it. So I think everybody has this experience of, hey, I’d really like to create this. I’d really like to express this. But I can’t draw. [LAUGHTER] I want to take that photo, but why do my photos look so bad? Your camera is so much better than mine! And giving voice to that creativity is, I think, the strength of generative AI. So developing these tools that aid that creativity will be key to bringing along the next generation of game creators.

HUIZINGA: So do you think we’re going to find ourselves in a place where we can accept a machine as a collaborator? I mean, I know that this is a theme, even in Microsoft Research, where we look at it as augmenting, not replacing, and collaborating, you know, not canceling. But there’s a shift for me in thinking of tools as collaborators. Do you feel like there’s a bridge that needs to be crossed for people to accept collaboration, or do they … or do you feel like it just is so much cooler what we can do with this tool that we’re all going to discover this is a great thing?

ZHANG: I think, in many ways, we already use tools as collaborators, uh, whether that’s a hammer, whether that’s Microsoft Word. I mean, I love the spell-check feature! Oh, geez! Um, so we already use tools to help us do our work ­– to make us work faster, type faster, um, check our grammar, check our spelling. This is the next step change in that these tools, the collaboration is going to be more complex, more sophisticated. I am somebody that welcomes that because I have so much work and need to get it done. At the same time, I really advocate for us, as a society, as our community, to have an open dialogue about it.

HUIZINGA: Yeah.

ZHANG: Because we should be talking about, what is it to be human, and how do we want to frame our work and our values moving forward given these new assistive tools? You know, when we talk about art, the assistance provided by generative AI will allow us to express, through words, what we want and then to have those words appear as an image on the page, and I think this will really challenge the art world to push artists beyond perhaps what we think of art today to new heights.

HUIZINGA: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a whole host of questions and issues and, um, concerns even that we’re going to face. And I think it may be a, like you say, a step change in even how we conceptualize what art … I mean, even now, Instagram filters, I mean, or Photoshop or any of the things that you could say, well, that’s not really the photo you took. But, um, well, listen, we’ve lived for a long time in an age of what I would call specialization or expertise, and we, we’ve embraced that, you know, talk to the experts, appeal to the experts. But the current zeitgeist in research is multidisciplinary, bringing many voices into the conversation. And even in video games, it’s multiplayer, multimodal. So talk for a minute about the importance of the prefix “multi” now and how more voices are better for collaborative innovation.

ZHANG: So I want to start with the word “culture,” because I fundamentally believe that when we have a team building an experience for our users and players, that team should reflect the diversity of those users and players, whether that’s diversity in terms of different abilities, in terms of cultural background. Teams that build these new experiences need to be inclusive, need to have many, many voices. So I want to start the “multi” discussion there, and I encourage every team building products to think about that diversity and to move to recruit towards diversity. Then, let’s talk about the technology: multi-modality. So games are a very rich medium. They combine 3D, 2D, behaviors, interactions, music, sounds, dialogue. And it’s only when these different modalities come together and converge and, and work in perfect synchronicity that you get that amazing immersive experience. And we’ve seen foundation models do great things with text, do amazing things with 2D, some 3D now we’re seeing, and this is what I’m trying to push, that we need that multi-modality in generative AI, and multi-modality in terms of bringing these different mediums together. Multi-disciplinary, you know, what I find interesting is that, um, foundation models, LLMs like GPT, are at the height of democratized technology. Writing natural language as a prompt to generate something is probably the simplest form of programing.

HUIZINGA: Oh interesting.

ZHANG: It does not get simpler than I literally write what I want, and the thing appears.

HUIZINGA: Wow.

ZHANG: So you can imagine that everybody in the world is going to be empowered with AI. And going from an idea, to defining that idea through natural language, to that idea becoming into reality, whether that’s it made an app for me, it made an image for me … so when this is happening, “multidisciplinary” is going to be the natural outcome of this, that a designer’s going to be able to make products. A coder is going to be able to make user experience. A user researcher is going to go from interviewing people to showing people prototypes with very little gap in order to further explore their topic. So I think we will get multidisciplinary because the technology will be democratized.

HUIZINGA: Right. You know, as you talk, I’m, I’m thinking “prompts as programing” is a fascinating … I never thought of it that way, but that’s exactly it. And you think about the layers of, um, barriers to entry in technology, that this has democratized those entry points for people who say I can never learn to code. Um, but if you can talk or type, you can! [LAUGHS] So that’s really cool. So we don’t have time to cover all the amazing scientists and collaborators working on specific projects in AI and gaming, but it would be cool if you’d give us a little survey course on some of the interesting, uh, research that’s being done in this area. Can you just name one or two or maybe three things that you think are really cool and interesting that are, um, happening in this world?

ZHANG: Well, I definitely want to give kudos to all of my amazing research collaborators working with large language models, with other machine learning approaches like reinforcement learning, imitation learning. You know, we know that in a video game, the dialogue and the story is key. And, you know, I work with an amazing research team with, uh, Bill Dolan, um, Sudha Rao, who are leading the way in natural language processing and looking at grounded conversational players in games. So how do we bring a large language model like GPT into a game? How do we make it fun? How do we actually tell a story? You know, as I said, technology is becoming democratized, so it’s going to be easy to put GPT into games, but ultimately, how do we make that into an experience that’s really valuable for our players? On the reinforcement learning/imitation learning front, we’ve talked before about Project Paidia. How do we develop new kinds of AI agents that play games, that can help test games, that can really make games more fun by playing those games like real human players? That is our ultimate goal.

HUIZINGA: You know, again, every time you talk, something comes into my head, and I’m thinking GPTs for NPCs. [LAUGHS]

ZHANG: I like that.

HUIZINGA: Um, and I have to say I’m, I’m not a game player. I’m not the target market. But I did watch that movie Free Guy and got exposure to the non … what is it called?

ZHANG: Non-player characters.

HUIZINGA: That’s the one. Ryan Reynolds plays that, and that was a really fun experience. Well, I want to come back to the multi-modality dimension of the technical aspects of gaming and AI’s role in helping make animated characters more life-like. And that’s key for a lot of gaming companies is, how real does it feel? So what different skills and expertise go into creating a world where players can maintain their sense of immersion and avoid the uncanny valley? Who are you looking to collaborate with to make that happen?

ZHANG: Right. So the uncanny valley is this space where, when you are creating a virtual character and you bring together animation, whether it’s facial animation, body movements with sound, with their voice, with eye movement, with how they interact with the player, and the human brain has an ability to recognize, subconsciously, recognize another human being. And when you play with that deep-seated instinct and you create a virtual character, but the virtual character kind of slightly doesn’t move in the right way, their eyes don’t blink in the right way, they don’t talk in the right way, it, it triggers, in the deep part of someone’s brain, a discomfort. And this is what we call the uncanny valley. And there are many games that we know they’re stylized worlds and they’re fictional, so we try to get the characters to a place where the player knows that it’s not a real person, but they’re happy to be immersed in this environment. And as animation rendering improves, we have the ability to get to a wholly life-like character. So how do we get there? You know, we’re working with animators. We want to bring in neuroscientists, game developers, user researchers. There’s a lot of great work happening across the games industry in machine learning research, looking at things like motion matching, helping to create different kinds of animations that are more human-like. And it is this bringing together of artistry and technology development that’s going to get us there.

HUIZINGA: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, speaking of the uncanny valley – and I’ve experienced that on several animated movies where they … it’s just like, eww, that’s weird – um, and we, we have a quest to avoid it. We, we want them to be more real. And I guess what we’re aiming for is to get to the point in gaming where the experience is so realistic that you can’t tell the difference between the character in the game and humans. So I have to ask, and assume you’ve given some thought to it, what could possibly go wrong if indeed you get everything right?

ZHANG: So one thing is that video games are definitely a stylized visual art, so we also welcome game creators who want to create a completely cartoon universe, right?

HUIZINGA: Oh, interesting, yeah.

ZHANG: But for those creators that want to make that life-like visual experience, we want to have the technology ready. In terms of, hey, as you ask, what could possibly go wrong if indeed we got everything right, I think that throughout human history, we have a rich legacy of exploring new ideas and challenging topics through fiction. For example, the novels of Asimov, looking at robots and, and the laws of robotics, I believe that we can think of video games as another realm of fiction where we might be able to explore these ideas, where you can enter a world and say, hey, what if something went wrong when you have these life-like agents? It’s a safe place for players to be able to have those thoughts and experiences and to explore the different outcomes that might happen.

HUIZINGA: Yeah.

ZHANG: I also want to say that I think the bar for immersion might also move over time. So when you say, what could possibly go wrong if we got everything right? Well, it’s still a video game.

HUIZINGA: Yeah.

ZHANG: And it might look real, but it’s still in a game world. And I think once we experience that, the bar might shift. So for example, when the first black-and-white movies, uh, came out and people saw movies for the first time, I remember seeing a documentary where one of the first movies was somebody filming a train, a steam train, coming towards the camera, and the audience watching that jumped! They ran away because they thought there was a steam train coming at them. And I think since then, people have understood that that is not happening. But I think this bar of immersion that people have will move over time because ultimately it is not real. It is in a digital environment.

HUIZINGA: Right. Well, and that bar finds itself in many different milieus, as it were. Um, you know, radio came out with War of the Worlds, and everyone thought we were being invaded by aliens, but we weren’t. It was just fiction. Um, and we’re also dealing with both satire and misinformation in non-game places, so it’s up to humans, it sounds like, to sort of make the differentiation and adapt, which we’ve done for a long time.

ZHANG: I totally agree. And I think this podcast is a great starting point for us to have this conversation in society about topics like AGI, uh, topics like, hey, how is AI going to assist us and be copilots for us? We should be having more of that discussion.

HUIZINGA: And even specifically to gaming I think one of the things that I hope people will come away with is that we’re thinking deeply about the experiences. We want them to be good experiences, but we also want people to not become, you know, fooled by it and so on. So these are big topics, and again, we won’t solve anything here, but I’m glad you’re thinking about it. So people have called gaming — and sometimes gamers — a lot of things, but rarely do you hear words like welcoming, safe, friendly, diverse, fun, inviting. And yet Xbox has worked really hard to kind of earn a reputation for inclusivity and accessibility and make gaming for everyone. Now I sound like I’m doing a commercial for Xbox, and I’m really not. I think this has been something that’s been foregrounded in the conversation in Xbox. So talk about some of the things you’ve done to, as you put it, work with the community rather than just for the community.

ZHANG: Right. I mean, we estimate there are 3 billion players in the world, so gaming has really become democratized. You can access it on your phone, on your computer, on your console, on your TV directly. And that means that we have to be thinking about, how do we make gaming for everybody? For every type of player? We believe that AI has this incredible ability to make gaming more fun for more people. You know, when we think about games, hey, how do we make gaming more adaptive, more personalized to every player? If I find this game is too hard for me, maybe the game can adapt to my needs. Or if I have different abilities or if I have disabilities that prohibits my access to the game, maybe the game can change to allow me to play with my friends. So this is an area that we are actively exploring. And, you know, even without AI, Xbox has this rich history of thinking about players with disabilities and how we can bring features to allow more people to play. So for example, recently Forza racing created a feature to allow people with sight impairment to be able to drive in the game by using sound. So they introduced new 3D sounds into the game, where someone who cannot see or can only partially see the screen can actually hear the hairpin turns in the road in order to drive their car and play alongside their family and friends.

HUIZINGA: Right.

ZHANG: We’ve also done things like speech-to-text in Xbox Party Chat. How do we allow somebody who has a disability to be able to communicate across countries, across cultures, across languages with other players? And we are taking someone’s spoken voice, turning it into text chat so that everybody within that party can understand them and can be able to communicate with them.

HUIZINGA: Right. That’s interesting. So across countries, you could have people that don’t speak the same language be able to play together …

ZHANG: Right. Exactly.

HUIZINGA: …and communicate.

ZHANG: Yeah.

HUIZINGA: Wow. Well, one of the themes on this show is the path that technologies travel from mind to market, or lab to life, as I like to say. And we talk about the spectrum of work from blue-sky ideas to blockbuster products used by millions. But Xbox is no twinkle in anyone’s eye. It’s been around for a long time. Um, even so, there’s always new ideas that are making their way into established products and literally change the game, right? So without giving away any industry secrets, is there anything you can talk about that would give us hint as to what might be coming soon to a console or a headset or a device near us?

ZHANG: Oh my goodness. You know I can’t give away any product secrets!

HUIZINGA: Dang it! I thought I would get you!

ZHANG: Um, I mean, I’m excited by our ability to bring more life-like visuals, more life-like behavior, allowing players to play games anywhere at a fidelity they’ve not seen before. I mean, these are all exciting futures for AI. At the same time, generative AI capabilities to really accelerate and empower game developers to make games at higher quality, at a faster rate, these are the things that the industry wants. How do we turn these models, these technologies, into real tools for game developers?

HUIZINGA: Yeah. I’m only thinking of players, and you’ve got this whole spectrum of potential participants.

ZHANG: I think the players benefit when the creators are empowered. It starts with the creators and helping them bring to life their games that the players ultimately experience.

HUIZINGA: Right. And even as you talk, I’m thinking there’s not a wide gap between creator and player. I mean, many of the creators are avid gamers themselves and …

ZHANG: And now when we see games like Minecraft or Roblox, where the tools of creativity are being brought to the players themselves and they can create their own experiences …

HUIZINGA: Yeah.

ZHANG: …I want to see more of those in the world, as well.

HUIZINGA: Exciting. Well, as we close, and I hate to close with you because you’re so much fun, um, I’d like to give you a chance to give an elevator pitch for your preferred future. I keep using that term, but I know we all think in terms of what, what we’d like to make in this world to make a mark for the next generation. You’ve already referred to that in this podcast. So we can close the circle, and I’ll ask you to do a bit of blue-sky envisioning again, back to your roots in your old life. What do video games look like in the future, and how would you like to have changed the gaming landscape with brilliant human minds and AI collaborators?

ZHANG: Oh my goodness. That’s such a tall order! Uh, I think ultimately my hope for the future is that we really explore our humanity and become even more human through the assistance of AI. And in gaming, how do we help people tell more human stories? How do we enable people to create stories, share those stories with others? Because ultimately, I think, since the dawn of human existence, we’ve been about storytelling. Sitting around a fire, drawing pictures on a cave wall, and now we are still there. How do we bring to life more stories? Because through these stories, we develop empathy for other people. We experience other lives, and that’s ultimately what’s going to make us better as a society, that empathy we develop, the mutual understanding and respect that we share. And I see AI as a tool to get us there.

HUIZINGA: From cave wall to console … Haiyan Zhang, it’s always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for joining us today.

ZHANG: Thank you so, much, Gretchen. Thank you.