Coimbatore:  Microsoft Research India today announced its community research portal at the company’s flagship research symposium, TechVista. ACM India, the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, will be a key partner in Research Connector.

While initiated by Microsoft Research India, the long term goal of Research Connector is to become a ‘hub’ driven by the research community where students from diverse academic backgrounds and CS/ engineering fields can learn about Computer Science research, gain access to faculty from leading institutions, and importantly, work on real world problems to hone their skills. Research Connector will play an important part in enabling students to bridge the gap between aspiring to make a career in research and gaining the experience to actually doing it.

According to Tony Hey the Vice President of Microsoft Research Connections, “Research has always been critical to the advancement of technology in any field, and even more so in an area as dynamic as Computer Science. We hope researchconnector.net will play a role in helping India produce high quality researchers who will define the technologies of the future”.

Prof. P J Narayanan, President ACM India and Dean (R&D), IIIT, Hyderabad also emphasized on high end research and exposure towards bachelors students for higher quality jobs.

A key component of Research Connector will be the live projects that students can work on. These projects will typically be provided by faculty of participating institutions, and also evaluated by them. The portal will also feature forums for research discussions amongst researchers, scientists, faculty and students, as well as updates on the state-of-the-art in computer science.

Research Connector seeks to provide resources and experience that can spark the awareness and intent to take up higher education to engineering and Computer Science students for future research such as PHD, added Anandan, Scientist and Managing Director, Microsoft Research India.