Microsoft opens research facility in Bangalore

Wednesday, 12 January 2005, 20:30 IST
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BANGALORE: Microsoft, the global major in software, services and solutions, Wednesday launched its research facility in Bangalore. The Microsoft Research India (MSRI), is the third such facility outside the US and sixth of its kind in the world by Microsoft. The state-of-the-art facility will initially focus in areas of geographic information systems (GIS), technologies for emerging markets, multilingual systems and sensor networks. MSRI and the ministry of science and technology signed on the occasion a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to partner in science and technology projects. The first collaborative project will be in GIS to bring in a variety of satellite imagery, remote sensing and other geographic data in a geographically indexed database. "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," said MSRI Managing Director P. Anandan. Research for this project will involve work from relevant fields of computer science, including GIS, graphics, user interfaces, spatial databases, image processing and computer vision. 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. MSRI plans to employ about 24 scientists, interns and support staff in the first year. "One of our key goals is to deepen our engagement with India. MSRI's funding of ICT projects is an example of our long-term commitment to collaborating with Indian academia. We see this engagement becoming even stronger in the future," said Microsoft India chairperson Ravi Venkatesan. MSRI is also initiating several projects in the information, communication and technology (ICT) space by funding several university research projects. "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 centres, sales and marketing offices.
Source: IANS