technology research in india kentaro toyama, phd assistant managing director microsoft research...
TRANSCRIPT
Technology Research in India
Kentaro Toyama, PhD
Assistant Managing Director
Microsoft Research India
Presentation to Technology Management Program George Mason University
May 23, 2007 – Bangalore
A Case Study of Microsoft Research India
Outline
India
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research India– Overview– Research Groups
Technology for Emerging Markets
Beyond Microsoft
Outline
India
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research India– Overview– Research Groups
Technology for Emerging Markets
Beyond Microsoft
India
People• ~1.1 billion people
– Over half under 25 years old• 22 languages• Annual incomes $100-$100M+• 28 states
Area• ~1/3 the area of United States
Technology• ~20M PCs, installed base• ~140M mobile subscriptions
– +7M each month
Sources: CIA Factbook, TRAI, CNN
Roads in India
India, a Personal View
My first trip to India (2004)
India, a Personal View
People• ~1.1 billion people
– Over half under 25 years old• 22 official languages • Annual incomes $100-$100M+• 28 states
Area• ~1/3 the area of United States
Technology• ~20M PCs, installed base• ~140M mobile subscriptions
– +7M each month
but, power held by fewtremendous energy and optimism
incredible diversity, EM microcosmreminiscent of European Union
impact of weather (ubiquity of agriculture)
huge interest in PCs, by everyonemobiles, mobiles, everywhere
Huge potential opportunity for Microsoft.
But, there are new challenges that
neither India nor Microsoft have ever faced before.
Rural school in Chinhat, Uttar Pradesh
Rural village with a VSAT Internet connection near Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh
A small Internet café on a market street in a town near Bombay
Infosys campus, Bangalore
Outline
India
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research India– Overview– Research Groups
Technology for Emerging Markets
Beyond Microsoft
Microsoft ResearchEstablished 1991
700+ full-time staff in 5 locations– Redmond; Beijing; Cambridge, UK;
Mountain View, CA; Bangalore
Over 60 computer-science research areas represented– Regular publications in major CS
journals and conferences
Contributions to Microsoft products– Ranging from development tools,
data mining, photo editing, text-to-speech, grammar checking, spam filtering, etc.
http://research.microsoft.com
MSR HQ in Redmond
Microsoft Research Mission
Goals:
• World-class academic research
• Impact on Microsoft products and business groups
• Collaborations with external institutions to further technology research worldwide
MSR HQ in Redmond
MSR India Mission
Goals:
• World-class academic research
• Impact on Microsoft products and business groups
• Collaborations with external institutions to further technology research in India, South Asia, and Emerging Markets
Microsoft Research IndiaIn Sadashivnagar, Bangalore
Outline
India
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research India– Overview– Research Groups
Technology for Emerging Markets
Beyond Microsoft
Microsoft in India
Six subsidiaries:
• Sales & Marketing 1990• Software Development 1999• Technical Support 2003• Consulting Services 2004• Research 2005• IT Support 2005
• Established January, 2005
• Six research areas– Cryptography, Security & Algorithms– Digital Geographics– Mobility, Networks & Systems– Multilingual Systems– Rigorous Software Engineering– Technology for Emerging Markets
• Currently ~50 full-time staff; large internship program
• Collaborations with government, academia, industry, and NGOs
http://research.microsoft.com/india Microsoft Research India
In Sadashivnagar, Bangalore
MSR India at a Glance
PeopleFull-time staff total: 49
Technical staff total: 43
• 20 with PhD (46%)– 5 PhD from India– 15 PhD from abroad
• Location before joining:– India: 23 (53%) – Abroad: 20 (47%)
• 6 women, 34 men (16% women)
Competition: IBM, Yahoo!, Bell Labs, HP Labs, Google, Etc.
Group photo (January, 2006)
• Total internships in 2006: 81– To date: 122
• Institutions represented (40+ total):– India
• BITS Pilani• IIIT-Bangalore• IIIT-Hyderabad • IISc• IITs (Delhi, Madras, Bombay)• ISI Calcutta• …
– Abroad• Carnegie Mellon• UC Berkeley• University of Washington• Georgia Tech• Harvard• Oxford• London School of Economics• New York University• University College London• Yale• …
Lab Size FY06
0
20
40
60
80
100
Month
Staf
f Intern
FTEs
Lab size over two years
Internships
Conferences, Etc. Conferences, workshops, and tutorials co-sponsored or co-organized by
MSR India in 2006:
• Wireless Networking Summit (WiNS) [April 2006, Goa]– 2 days, 80+ participants (Victor Bahl, Uday Desai, Mythreyee Ganapathy)
• ICASSP Tutorial on “Text-Dependent Speaker Recognition” [May 2006, Toulouse]– 1 day (Amitav Das)
• IEEE/ACM Int’l Conf. on ICT and Development (ICTD) [May 2006, Berkeley]– 2 days, 200+ participants (Raj Reddy, Anno Saxenian, Kentaro Toyama)
• Cryptography summer school [May-Jun 2006, Bangalore]– 21 days, 80+ participants (Venkie, Vidya Natampally, Anandan)
• Afternoon with Design [Aug 2006, Bangalore]– 1/2 day, 60+ participants (Archana Prasad)
• Virtual Earth Academic Summit [Nov-Dec 2006, Redmond]– 2 days, 60+ participants (Gur Kimchi, Kentaro Toyama)
• IJCAI Workshop on AI for ICT and Development [Jan 2007, Hyderabad]– 1 day, 20 participants (Kentaro Toyama, Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Krithi Ramamritham, Anupam Basu)
• IJCAI Tutorial on Design in ICT and Development [Jan 2007, Hyderabad]– 1/2 day, 30 participants (Bernardine Dias, Rahul Tongia, Kentaro Toyama)
• Part-of-Speech (POS) Tagset Workshop [Jan 2007, Bangalore]– 9 days, 20 participants (A Kumaran)
• MSR sponsorship and co-organization • MSR researcher ledKey:
Outline
India
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research India– Overview– Research Groups
Technology for Emerging Markets
Beyond Microsoft
Cryptographic primitives New paradigms for
cryptanalysis protocols System and code security Algorithms Error-correction problems in
machine learning
Mathematical and practical aspects of…
Cryptography, Security, and AlgorithmsGoals
Fast Arithmetic for Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems
Elliptic curve addition
Markov-Chain-based analysis of a number system tailored for faster elliptic curve arithmetic in cryptographic systems
• History
– Summer 2005: Early explorations– Early 2006: Refinement and
verification– Fall 2006: Tech transfer
• Transferred:
– Arithmetic algorithms– Whiteboxing tool for digital rights
management
David JaoS. Ramesh Raju
Venkie
Collaboration with Windows DRM
Digital Geographics
Invent new technologies to support digital mapping and location-based services
Conduct research in…– Graphics– User interfaces– Spatial databases– Image processing– Visualization– Etc.
Goals
Auto-generated panoramic map(Neeharika Adabala)
Virtual IndiaMultilingual online map of Indian cities
generated from Survey of India data.
• History– Jan 2005: MoU signed with Ministry of
Science & Technology
– Jan 2006: Online prototype unveiled by Minister Kapil Sibal
– Summer 2006: Tech transfer
• Transferred:– Tile generation pipeline– Transliteration
• Person transferred, also – Udayan Khurana [Thapur Institute of
Engineering and Technology] • (MSR intern IDC employee)
Kannada and Hindi views of Bangalorein Virtual India
Joseph Joyand Virtual India
virtual team
Collaboration with Virtual Earth / Windows Live Local
To conduct research in networked systems:– Internet-scale systems– Distributed systems– Network protocols– Wireless networking– Mobile computing– Sensor networks
Goals
Mobility, Networks & Systems
COMBINE: collaborative downloading
Proximity Networking
– SPACE: Lightweight Peer-to-Peer Trust
• ACM HotNets 2006– COMBINE: Collaborative
Downloading• IEEE HotMobile 2007 (to appear)
– WiFiAds: Location-sensitive Advertising
• IEEE HotMobile 2007 (to appear)
Sensor Networks
– SenSlide: Sensor System for Landslide Prediction
• ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, 2007 (to appear)
Sample Projects
SPACE: establishing peer-to-peer trust
Mobility, Networks & Systems
To develop seamless natural-language-neutral approaches in all aspects of linguistic computing
To help create an Indic-language research ecosystem
Multilingual SystemsGoals
wikiBABEL project
TransliterationOntologies
Machine TranslationSummarization
Intonation Studies
Language Research
SQL Operators
wikiBabel
Comp. Corpus
Corpora Collection & Management
POS Tags
TTP
Language Tools
Char-set Conversion
Multilingual SystemsProject Overview
Improve productivity by bringing rigor to “software development in the large”
Look at Microsoft platform from the point of view of partners and customers, and conduct research to improve their productivity
Rigorous Software EngineeringVision
RSE team, summer 2006
Netra
Netra schematic
Analysis tool for finding security flaws in access-control configurations
• History
– Fall 2005: Prototype developed– January 2006: Presented to TAB– Fall 2006: Tech transfer
• Transferred:
– Specification language– Analysis tool– Visualization tool
Prasad NaldurgStephan Schwoon
Sriram RajamaniJohn Lambert
Collaboration with Secure Windows Initiative
Why India?• Cryptography
– Extremely bright math students
• Digital Geographics– Strong interest in mapping
• Mobility, Networks, and Systems– E.g., Fastest growing mobile-phone market
• Multilingual Systems– 22 national languages, multilingual speakers
• Rigorous Software Engineering– E.g., world’s most advanced system integrators
Outline
India
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research India– Overview– Research Groups
Technology for Emerging Markets
Beyond Microsoft
Technology for Emerging Markets
Social:– Understand (potential)
technology users in emerging-market countries
• E.g., urban middle-class• E.g., rural entrepreneurs
Technical:– Identify applications of
computing that support socio-economic development of poor communities worldwide
Sugarcane co-op member usinga mobile phone to check on
details of his harvest in Warana, Maharashtra
Goals
Computers in Agriculture
Rural Microfinance and IT Peri-Urban Internet Cafes
MultiPoint for Education Digital Study Hall
IT and MicroentrepreneursParticipatory Development
Udai Singh PawarMSc, Physics
Randy WangPhD, Computer Science
Jonathan DonnerPhD, Communications
Aishwarya Lakshmi RatanMPA, International Development
Nimmi RangaswamyPhD, Sociology
Rajesh VeeraraghavanMS, Economics and CS
Savita BailurPhD cand., Information Sys.
Information ecology of small businesses in developing markets
Multiple mice to multiply the value of PCs in schools.
DVD exchange over postal service and TVs as display for rural education
Study of Internet cafes in areas between urban and rural
Experiments with computing and communication systems in agriculture
An analysis of ICT in development projects using the lens of post-colonial theory.
Preventative Healthcare
Indrani MedhiMDes, Design
UIs without text for users who are illliterate and may never have seen a computer before
Can computers help existing structures for rural microfinance?
Technology for Emerging MarketsSample Projects
Text-Free UI
Text-free user interface?
Indrani MedhiAman Sagar
Kentaro Toyama
Identify design principles for designing UIs that allow non-literate, first-time computers user to gain value from their first interaction with a computer.
• Group: Tech for Emerging Markets
• Title: “Text-Free User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semi-Literate Users”
• Authors: Indrani Medhi, Aman Sagar, Kentaro Toyama
• Venue: IEEE/ACM First Int’l Conference on Information and Communication Technology and Develompent, UC Berkeley, May 2006.
Selected for special issue of ITID: ICTD2006 Best Papers!
MultiPoint
MultiPoint user studies
Multiple mice cheaply multiply the value of PCs in resource-constrained schools.
• History
– Summer 2005: ethnographic studies in rural Indian schools
– Fall 2005: First prototype
– 2006: Tech transfer
• Transferred: paradigm and SDK
• Dissemination through Imagine Cup 2007
(was: MultiMouse)
Udai Singh PawarJoyojeet PalRahul Gupta
Kentaro Toyama
Collaboration with Market Expansion Group and Education Core
Outline
India
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research India– Overview– Research Groups
Technology for Emerging Markets
Beyond Microsoft
What the Press Says (1/3)
After the tech boom - what's India's next big thing? – “Following the dramatic success of India's IT
services companies over the last decade, many industry watchers are now hungrily awaiting the country's next trick - to create a software or hardware giant along the lines of an Indian Google or an Indian Intel.”
Steve Ranger, silicon.com, April, 2007
http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/insideindia/0,3800013641,39166051,00.htm
What the Press Says (2/3)
India and Innovation at Davos – “The next round of outsourcing is outsourcing
innovation. And here India is the center of the global economic universe. By language, training, education, and diasporadic disposition, India's role in the world economic is more brain-driven, service-driven and ultimately innovation driven. And India, chaotic though it may be, is free and democratic. You don't have an army of censors watching over the internet and blogs, as you do in China.”
Bruce Nussbaum, BusinessWeek (Jan 20, 2006)
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2006/01/india_and_innov.html
India an innovation giant? Yes!– “…innovation includes services, manufacturing
processes, customer facing and back-end process in services.”
– “To me, Bharati Airtel is the most innovative company of our times for the way it has created a successful business model. The company has outsourced everything but its customers, thus being able to offer mobile telephony at 10 paise a minute; nowhere in the world can you get such rates.”
– S. Kapur, Business Standard, February 21, 2007
What the Press Says (3/3)
http://in.rediff.com/money/2007/feb/21guest.htm
Conclusion
India
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research India– Overview– Research Groups
Technology for Emerging Markets
Beyond Microsoft
Rajkumar Riots
Kannada film actor, Rajkumar passed away on April 12, 2006. He lived within several blocks of MSR India.
Fans and riff-raff rioted, imitating riots following his kidnapping in 2000.
Most building windows were broken.
No physical harm to lab members.
Building fully restored, thanks to insurance.
Code4Bill ContestThe Prize: Write code for Bill Gates, reporting
to his technical assistant for one year
Seven-month contest run by MS India DPE– Three rounds of puzzles and coding challenges
online– Two rounds of interviews– Final round of presentations, winner selected by
jury– 24,000 contestants– 19 in last round, all offered (and took) internships
with Microsoft.– Four interned at MSR India.
And, the winner is…– Abishek Kumarasubramanian
• IIT-Madras– Earlier worked at MSR India as an
intern– Currently working as an assistant
researcher at MSR until visa issues clear
Abishek with Bill Gates’s then technical assistant, Alex Gounares
