Microsoft Research Podcast

Ideas: Bug hunting with Shan Lu

January 23, 2025 | Gretchen Huizinga and Shan Lu
Struggles with programming languages helped research manager Shan Lu find her calling as a bug hunter. She discusses one bug that really haunted her, the thousands she’s identified since, and how she’s turning to LLMs to help make software more reliable.

Recent Podcasts

  1. Outlined illustrations of Chris Hawblitzel and Jay Lorch for the Microsoft Research Podcast, Abstracts series.

    Abstracts: November 5, 2024 

    November 5, 2024 | Amber Tingle, Chris Hawblitzel, and Jay Lorch

    Researchers Chris Hawblitzel and Jay Lorch share how progress in programming languages and verification approaches are bringing bug-free software within reach. Their work on the Rust verification tool Verus won the Distinguished Artifact Award at SOSP ’24.

  2. Outlined illustrations of Shan Lu and Bogdan Stoica for the Microsoft Research Podcast.

    Abstracts: November 4, 2024 

    November 4, 2024 | Gretchen Huizinga, Shan Lu, and Bogdan Stoica

    In their 2024 SOSP paper, researchers explore a common—though often undertested—software system issue: retry bugs. Research manager Shan Lu and PhD candidate Bogdan Stoica share how they’re combining traditional program analysis and LLMs to address the challenge.

  3. photo of Lex Story for the What's Your Story episode of the Microsoft Research podcast

    What’s Your Story: Lex Story 

    August 22, 2024 | Johannes Gehrke and Lex Story

    Model maker and fabricator Lex Story helps bring research to life through prototyping. He discusses his take on failure; the encouragement and advice that has supported his pursuit of art and science; and the sabbatical that might inspire his next career move.

  4. Stylized microphone and sound waves illustration.

    Abstracts: August 15, 2024 

    August 15, 2024 | Amber Tingle, Shrey Jain, and Zoë Hitzig

    Advanced AI may make it easier for bad actors to deceive others online. A multidisciplinary research team is exploring one solution: a credential that allows people to show they’re not bots without sharing identifying information. Shrey Jain and Zoë Hitzig explain.

  5. What's Your Story podcast | Emre Kiciman

    What’s Your Story: Emre Kiciman 

    August 1, 2024 | Johannes Gehrke and Emre Kiciman

    Emre Kiciman shares how some keen observations and a desire to have front-end impact led him to make the jump from systems and networking to computational social science and now causal analysis and large-scale AI—and how systems thinking still impacts his work.

  6. Microsoft Research Podcast - Abstracts

    Abstracts: July 29, 2024 

    July 29, 2024 | Gretchen Huizinga and Li Lyna Zhang

    A lack of appropriate data, decreased model performance, and other obstacles have made it difficult to expand the input language models can receive. Li Lyna Zhang introduces LongRoPE, a method capable of extending content windows to more than 2 million tokens.

  7. Microsoft Research Podcast - Abstracts

    Abstracts: July 18, 2024 

    July 18, 2024 | Gretchen Huizinga and Arindam Mitra

    Senior Researcher Arindam Mitra introduces AgentInstruct. Using raw data sources, the automated multi-agent framework can create diverse, high-quality synthetic data at scale for the post-training of small and large language models.