Brenda Potts

Aurora 1.5 is a major extension of Microsoft’s Aurora Earth System foundation model that adds 22 more weather variables relevant to energy, agriculture, transport, and climate risk, along with hourly temporal resolution and probabilistic ensemble forecasting. Released as open source on GitHub with model checkpoints on Hugging Face, Aurora 1.5 enables researchers and developers to use, evaluate, and build on the model.

Polished charts from simple specs. Flint allows AI agents to reliably generate expressive, visually polished charts from simple, human-editable specifications. Semantic types guide design. Flint leverages semantic data types to express meanings of data. They help the compiler choose appropriate scales, baselines, formatting, and color schemes. Layouts adapt to the data.

AI agents often fail because their instructions, or skills, are manually modified with no guarantee of improvement. SkillOpt turns skill editing into a training process, making agent behavior more reliable without changing model weights. SkillOpt treats an agent skill file as a trainable parameter outside a frozen target model, turning skill writing from one-shot prompting into a controlled optimization process.