Future of Computing @Microsoft TechFest

Algorithms are the latest

research group in MSR India. Please tell us about this field.

We have 7 research groups at MSR India as of

now. Last summer, Dr. Ravi Kannan, a Sr. Algorithms professor at Yale

University joined us. An algorithm is an interesting area that has

communities of Indian researchers working both within India and in the US.

As a company, MS is moving into a lot of new areas, like search, wireless

networking, etc that have some very interesting research problems, at the

core of which are complex algorithms. Another reason for having an

algorithms group is that they're undergoing transition. They used to be

theoretically focused a few decades ago. Their researchers would hardly

write any code, and were busy proving the correctness of algorithms,

analyzing their complexity, etc. But as a community, they realized that

there are big problems-billions of nodes in routing networks, billions of

entries in databases, literally billions of web pages. In many of these

cases, the data is not stored on a single computer. It's not available from

a single source, and storing all the data and then processing it is

virtually impossible. So, one has to rely on streaming algorithms, where

data is processed as it comes in. There are also statistical algorithms,

which use probabilistic methods to do things, giving probabilistic/

statistical answers instead of definite ones. That's a new and exciting

research direction for the field itself.

India has many fields that require

considerable research, e.g. power and utility sector, wherein data centers

are coping with the problem of power consumption. What research is happening

in this area?



In a certain sense, societal problems provide ideas and opportunities

for you to explore. We've pursued many problems that other labs elsewhere

would not have seen. Once you think of the problem, you'll think of its

application in a different context for elsewhere in the world. Even if the

problem is localized, the solution or technology that you develop almost

always applies to every place in the world for many different kinds of

problems that even you may not have thought of in the first place. Take our

Robust Locations research for instance, which provides a new way of looking

up an address in an online map. Existing maps like Google maps presume a

certain format to your address, e.g. House number, street, city. They look

at that structure and parse it. But the addresses in India are very

different, e.g. in Bangalore, a typical address would be like 7th main and

6th cross, Sadashiv Nagar, Opposite RTO office. It has a bunch of queues and

tokens, landmarks etc. Plus, it can be in so many different languages as

well. So we developed an address geo-coder that doesn't assume any

particular format. It works really well, and we've been pursuing it with the

product groups at Microsoft. It works even when there are spelling errors.

Finally, the addressing was a problem we thought of due to the environment

we're in, but its solution could apply to any other country.

Is there any research related to social

networking?



We have a social networking group, which is developing technologies for
emerging markets. We did a project that we called Combine, which was

inspired by the fact that in India, usage of cellphones for information

sharing info is much more common than anywhere else. If people want to

download a media file such as an image, audio, video, etc, it's very slow on

the mobile phone. We've created a system that will automatically split the

media source into smaller pieces and have several cellphones in the

neighborhood download them. These would then all be send to one phone via

Bluetooth and combined. There are challenges in this, e.g. we don't know how

many cellphones are around, whether somebody would allow his/her cellphone

to be used for this job, security and privacy issues, etc. But ultimately,

the idea here is to use a mobile device for a collaborative and collective

effort.