Microsoft launches research facility in Bangalore

Bangalore, Jan 12: Microsoft, the global major in software, services and solutions, Wednesday launched its research facility in Bangalore.

Microsoft Research launched its operations in India and signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the ministry of science and technology and ocean development to partner in research projects.

The Bangalore lab, the third Microsoft Research facility outside the United States, will conduct long-term basic and applied research.

Microsoft Research India would initially start investigating areas of Geographic Information Systems, technologies for emerging markets, multilingual systems and sensor networks, its managing director P Anandan told.

“MSRI will make much of the government’s non-sensitive geographic data available to the public in a format that is easy to browse and comprehend, with intuitive visualisation of data. Eventually, such a system could enable people to exchange information, much like the Internet, but indexed by region and geography,” he said.

According to an MSR statement, ” The Microsoft Research India (MSRI), mission is to conduct long-term basic and applied research and collaborate with Indian research institutions and universities as part of Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to engaging with academic and scientific communities worldwide to accelerate scientific progress and innovation in computer science and software engineering.”

MSRI plans to employ about two dozen scientists, interns and support staff in the first year, the statement said.

MSRI’s operations were launched by Union Minister of State for Science and Technology, and Ocean Development Kapil Sibal, who also signed the MoU between the MSRI and the Ministry.

The first collaborative project would be a GIS project that would bring together a variety of satellite imagery, remote sensing and other geographic data in a geographically indexed database, the statement said.

As the project progresses, Indian citizens can actually get a bird’s eye view of the country. Comprehensive digitisation of India’s terrain can support relief planning and monitoring in the wake of natural disasters.

“This is the first of many alliances we envision in India with the government and other research bodies to help solve some of the toughest problems in computing and accelerate the next generation of innovation in software and computing.

“We are also actively collaborating with academic institutions and have identified several projects to incubate creative approaches aimed at fulfilling the needs of the undeserved communities,” Anandan said.

“We have selected specific projects through the request for proposal (RFP) process from various institutions across the country and awarded $250,000 in total funding for these projects,” Venkatesan said.

Some of the institutions where the projects will be undertaken are Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, Indian Institute of Information Technology and Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) in Mumbai, Delhi, Kanpur and Chennai.

Microsoft’s other research facilities are located at Redmond in Washington, San Francisco and Silicon Valley in the US, Cambridge in England and Beijing in China.

Incidentally, China and India are the only two countries outside the US where Microsoft has entire scale of operations, including software development centers, sales and marketing offices.

Microsoft is keen on doing pure research in India that would show how “computing could impact rural areas and benefit emerging markets”, says a senior scientist-businessman who heads the company’s main research centre in the United States.

Ling, one of the key people at Microsoft Research, is very clear that “while the 700-odd people of Microsoft Research do pure research,” in Redmond, San Francisco, Cambridge, Beijing and now Bangalore, “we would very much want as much of this work to make the transition to commercial products.”

Much of this is already reality through the local language initiatives the company is funding in its markets. What will be exciting in the days to come will be, say, the access a farmer will get to the results of the best university research on soil testing, crop patterns and other information immediately relevant to him, in his own language literally at the touch of a few buttons.

Another important technology is software that will ‘decide’ which messages or missed phone calls are important and route them accordingly to a mobile phone or a computer or fax. So if you are on a well deserved holiday away from everything, a call from your children could be directed to your cell phone but one from your boss could go to a computer at home.

In the future, just about everything will have a computer “buried in it” and the trick is to make them work well together, says Ling.