Microsoft Research India: What's Up?

The usual excuse given for moving offshore, say to India, is to take advantage of cheap labor. However, that's probably not the case with Microsoft Research (MSR), which opened an R&D lab in Bangalore at the beginning of this year. So what is Microsoft Research up to?

In a recent interview with MIT Technology Review's Wade Roush, MSR India's assistant managing director Kentaro Toyama explained what's happening. According to Toyama, MSR India is conducting research on six areas:

• Cryptography.
• Digital geographies (any kind of digital map or location-based services and software).
• Multilingual systems (speech recognition, natural language processing, and the like).
• Communications hardware (distributed sensor networks).
• Software engineering (tools to make software development easier).
• Emerging markets.

It's worth noting that the MRS India web site also included "Security and Algorithms" as another area of research.

When it comes to software development (or "Rigorous Software Engineering" as the web site puts it), it is no surprise that research into collaborative global development of particular interest For example, as Toyama points out, how do you "write specifications for a particular program such that you can really just throw it over the fence [to a team in a different country] and it doesn't require a lot of discussion?" Toyama goes on to add that MSR India researchers spend time with Microsoft product groups, educating them about emerging markets.

All in all, MSR is a 700-member group with labs in Redmond, the San Francisco Bay Area, Cambridge, Beijing, and Bangalore.

To its credit, MSR has been open about sharing its research activities at conferences, papers, and in articles such as:

• "Predicting Communications Bottlenecks", by Stathis Papaefstathiou.
• "Composing Reactive Animations", by Conal Elliott.
• "Improving Performance with Custom Pool Allocators for STL", by Anthony Aue.

among others.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 07:45 AM  Permalink