Made in India

Technologies by Microsoft Research Labs, India

WikiBABEL



This is a community collaborative environment in which automatic translation

of a pre-specified set of source documents to a target language is made

available, which can be corrected, changed, added to (as a wiki) by a user

community for common purposes. Such modified documents become a good usable

repository of knowledge in a target language, and at the same time provides

training data for making the automatic translation better. The technology has

been deployed by the MSDN community for correction of automatically translated

source MSDN articles (primarily, product literature, user-guides, experience

scenarios, Q/A, etc., which are primarily produced in English) from English to

Portuguese, for the Brazilian MSDN community. The deployment had been largely

successful with several thousands of users having contributed up to a few

million corrections over last six months, making the MSDN documents readily

available in Portuguese.

Netra



Correctly configuring access control is a difficult problem. For example, if

you have an application that an administrator runs routinely, and if some hacker

gains write access to its executable, then the hacker can replace it and gain

administrative privileges. How do we prevent such holes in access control? Netra

is a tool that systematically analyzes all access control metadata on a system

and looks for such kinds of configuration errors.

It uses logic programming to model the Operating System's access control

logic, as well as policy specifications and uses logical inferences to

systematically find and eradicate such problems. Netra has now been adopted by

the Secure Windows Initiative (SWI) group inside Microsoft to help audit access

control for all of Microsoft's products.

Holmes



In every large project, when there are failures, a lot of effort is spent

diagnosing its root cause. Holmes records for each run the paths that were taken

in the code, and uses a statistical model of paths built from a large number of

successful and failing runs to predict statistically the likely causes of

failure. The project has been adopted by an internal Microsoft compiler team.

Schema driven adapters



Microsoft BizTalk Server comes with an adapter framework to help 3rd party

developers interface BizTalk with LoB (Line Of Business) apps like Seibel, SAP,

etc. MSR India did a research project where it proposed specifying most such

adapters declaratively at the level of schemas, thereby greatly reducing the

amount of code that an adapter developer has to write. This proposal was called

“Schema Driven Adapters”, and the ideas were adopted and shipped as part of the

Adapter development toolkit in BizTalk.

Technologies from IBM Research Labs, India

Sensei to improve spoken English



A web-based, interactive online spoken language assessment technology to help

people who speak English as a second language to improve their speaking skills.

It finds broad application in call centers, individuals, and even schools and

businesses, who're increasingly going global.

Business Finder



A real-time, presence based mobile resources management technology that

helps consumers find and use the nearest, most highly rated and available

service vendors like plumbers, electricians, carpenters or doctors. This

technology combines sophisticated GIS applications and data analysis with mobile

telephone networks to provide timely information to consumers.

National Health Data Network Project



This project has resulted in a report, which was submitted to the

President of India in early 2005. The report envisioned an information-based

healthcare system for India, in which technology could actively assist in

improving the nation's health. The project developed a secure, standards-based

prototype for sharing health data across the country, implementing some of the

recommendations made in the report.

The Spoken Web



A new technology called the Spoken Web to transform how people create

content and interact  with information  and transaction services — using the

spoken interactions over phones instead of using the PC and textual  interfaces.

The Spoken Web is based on the concept of a “VoiceSite” which is analogous to

websites but accessible over phone through a voice interface. This is

particularly compelling for people who don't have access to a personal computer

and Internet, or are unable to read or write.

Hindi Speech Recognition Technology



This technology can understand and transcribe human speech with minimal use

of keyboard, thereby helping people unfamiliar with computers or the Hindi

keyboard. The technology has been licensed to Centre for Development of Advanced

Computing (CDAC) to develop a Hindi speaker independent, continuous speech

recognition system.

Modeling Natural Disasters



A mathematical model that enables government bodies, relief agencies and

solution providers to do strategic planning and enable effective allocation of

resources for natural responsive disaster management. The model uses a

stochastic linear optimization or integer programming approach to manage and

reduce the risk of natural disasters.

eCoupons



This technology is a system for generation, distribution, management and

redemption  of electronic  coupons. It was incorporated in IBM's WebSphere

Commerce 5.4 & 5.5 products. The system has several unique features, such as a

coupon wallet and automatic recommendations on coupons that may be applicable to

a shopping cart.

Products by Microsoft Development Center, India

Virtual PC 2007



This product needs no introduction. It's the desktop virtualization software

from Microsoft. Developed by Microsoft India Development center, the product saw

over 450,000 downloads in just one first week of its release.

JScript



The Jscript language and tools in Visual Studio 2008 are another

contribution by MSIDC, as well as the Jscript Authoring services. These services

have introduced JScript “intelligence” support to any other programming

language. In the last couple of years, the lab has also shipped three versions

of Visual J# as part of Visual Studio .NET, Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio

2005.

Shielding paper documents against forgery

A project by HP Labs, India that aims to reduce sham occurring in forgery of

paper documents

Paper documents are widely used to support business transactions. These

include grade and degree certificates for obtaining employment, bank and

financial statements for applying for loans and identity and address proofs for

several requirements and many others.

Fraud and forgery is an issue that plagues paper documents. Document fraud is

a major concern for governments and enterprises around the world. For example, a

KPMG study (KPMG (2006) India Fraud Survey Report) which polled senior managers

across 1000 companies in India came up with the following findings:

* 39% of the respondents acknowledged that their enterprises had been subject

to fraud in the last year



* Forged documents was among the top 3 reasons for fraud encountered by these
companies



* 13% of the respondents identified forged documents as the major reason for
fraud related losses in their business (in rupee terms)

Fraud prevention makes processes overly complex, increases the transaction

costs, and makes due diligence of transactions cumbersome and time consuming.

However incidents of forgery and fraud using paper documents has increased with

the availability of cheaper printing and copying technologies.

Determining the authenticity of the document is not just a technical

challenge, but also a logistic one. In some countries there are as many as

20,000 authorities issuing birth certificates alone. Other agencies issue

driver's licenses, degree certificates, etc. Tens of thousands of verifiers

dealing with tens of thousands of issuing authorities is not a practical

solution. Creating a dedicated online infrastructure for these agencies would be

extremely expensive or in some cases even infeasible.

Existing authentication methods are complex, incur large transaction costs

and are time consuming. Hence, the need for a system that can provide speedy,

reliable and cost-effective verification of paper documents.

Our innovation addresses the problem of document fraud and forgery by

allowing enterprises to continue to use their existing methods of generating

paper documents with the addition of secure machine readable data that can be

printed along with the documents.

The Solution: Document Authentication System



The Document Authentication System (DAS) can be used to verify paper documents
requiring authentication. It can either be a stand alone system to verify

documents issued by an enterprise or be a centralized system that can verify

documents issued by a set of enterprises.

Machine readability of data from paper can be enabled through symbologies

such as 2D barcodes. 2D barcodes are capable of storing multilingual information

and images subject to size limitations. All such content can be recovered

reliably on scanning and decoding of the barcode.

The integrity of the document is validated using the content decoded from the

barcode. The DAS incorporates security features to ensure that the contents of

the barcode are not tampered with. The client side software prints out a

verification statement which contains the information decoded from the barcode

along with a statement from the server indicating that the barcode's contents

are authentic. Comparison of this information with the content on the original

document can be used to detect forgery or manipulation very early in an

attempted fraud. The verification statement, containing full information, can be

processed by itself without even comparing it with the original human-readable

text. It is also often desirable that a centralized system should protect the

privacy of the end users whose documents are being verified. The DAS system

ensures privacy of the individual by neither storing nor seeing the contents of

the documents being verified.

DAS helps in bridging the paper world with the digital world. A majority of

businesses in the new economies like India and China still use paper based

systems and processes. Paper documents have issues of fraud associated with

them. Prevention and detection of fraud is time consuming and expensive slowing

down business transactions substantially. Correspondingly, this also has an

economic impact on the overall society. HP Labs India is currently in

discussions with business groups of HP to get them to adopt this solution to

sell to customers.

A pilot DAS is running with the International Institute of Information

Technology (http://www.iiitb.ac.in) where they have issued the grade transcripts

for their students using our technology as a pilot.

Use case



A citizen could get an authenticated government document printed at an Internet
kiosk or even in the comfort of his house. The request for a document is

transmitted over a network from the kiosk to a centralized document issuing

authority. This request is processed and the digitally signed barcoded document

is returned to the kiosk over the network, where it is printed. Since the

document is essentially generated at a secure central location and also

authenticated by the digital signature it can be trusted.

This has widespread relevance for e-Governance initiatives worldwide since

currently the document issue is slowed down due to the need for physical

signatures.

Government entities, public offices and companies issue a whole variety of

documents and certificates. For instance, the legal possession of agricultural

land or urban property is ensured by registering their acquisition at a

government office and obtaining registration documents. Such documents need to

be preserved and validated as they are valuable to the recipient, for purposes

such as raising loans from banks. By authenticating these documents with digital

signatures, we can ensure that they can be printed remotely and issued.

Products by Microsoft Development Center, India (Contd...)

Visual Studio for Devices



A component of Visual Studio 2008 that provides all the features and support

that developers need to develop rich applications for Windows Mobile and Windows

CE platforms.

Microsoft BizTalk RFID



The Microsoft RFID platform was developed by the Connected Systems Division

(CSD) Edge Team at MSIDC. The team is responsible for the overall development of

Microsoft BizTalk RFID 2006 R2.

Data Protection Manager 2007



This product is expected to be the new standard for Windows data protection.

It's been designed to protect Microsoft apps and Windows Server, by using

seamlessly integrated disk and tape media. It was released to manufacturing in

September 2007.

nVidia GEFORCE 9400M

nVidia has been spreading its wings and moving beyond providing graphics

chips to provide motherboard chipsets. Their latest chipset, called the GEFORCE

9400M is an integrated platform for intel CPUs, which combines the Northbridge,

Southbridge, and GPU into a single chip. 100 engineers worked on designing the

chip, who took about 18 months to complete it. Apart from having been designed

completely out of India, the chip's claim to fame is Apple's decision to move

its complete notebooks range to it. In India, HCL was the first Indian OEM to

have used it.