Technology Research in India Kentaro Toyama, PhD

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

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

India, a Personal View

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

Outline

• India

• Microsoft Research

• Microsoft Research India

• Overview
• Research Groups

• Technology for Emerging Markets

• Beyond Microsoft

Microsoft Research

• Established 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

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 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

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

MSR India at a Glance

• 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

People

• Full-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.

Internships

• 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
• …

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)

Outline

• India

• Microsoft Research

• Microsoft Research India

• Overview
• Research Groups

• Technology for Emerging Markets

• Beyond Microsoft

Cryptographic primitives

• Cryptographic primitives

• New paradigms for cryptanalysis protocols

• System and code security

• Algorithms

• Error-correction problems in machine learning

Fast Arithmetic for Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems

• 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

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.

Virtual India

• Multilingual 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)

Mobility, Networks & Systems

• To conduct research in networked systems:

• Internet-scale systems
• Distributed systems
• Network protocols
• Wireless networking
• Mobile computing
• Sensor networks

Mobility, Networks & Systems

• 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)

Multilingual Systems

• To develop seamless natural-language-neutral approaches in all aspects of linguistic computing

• To help create an Indic-language research ecosystem

Multilingual Systems

Netra

• 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

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

Text-Free UI

• 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.

MultiPoint

• 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

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

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)

What the Press Says (3/3)

• 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

Firms with Labs in India

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 Contest

• The 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

Thank you!

• http://research.microsoft.com/india

• Questions? [e-mail]