1. Innovation: The Key to technology leadership
P. Anandan Managing Director Microsoft Research India

2. Long run growth in GDP is not so much due to capital investment as due to Technological progress
Robert Solow, Nobel Prize Winner Economics
Innovation leading to increased productivity is the fundamental source of increasing wealth in an economy.
Source: Wikepedia

3. Technological Progress and Innovation
Goal of innovation is make something new or do something better
Innovation is the process of enabling effective and efficient solutions to meet people’s needs
Innovation begins in the lab and ends at the hands of the customer
Innovation involves both R and D

4. Why R in Industry? Technology growth key to social development
Technology growth drives economic growth
Technology inventions central to quality of life
No technology was invented accidentally
No technology was developed overnight
Perfecting the technology requires decades of investment
Only industry can take ideas to completion

5. Microsoft’s Approach to Innovation
Innovation in and through our products
Microsoft Research
Ecosystem support of partner innovation

6. R in support of D in Microsoft
Every product group innovates during the course of the product development
Innovations include:
New designs, architectures, frameworks
Platform for software development
Features in specific products
Business innovations

7. The MSR Experience

8. MSR Mission Statement
Expand the state of the art in each of the areas in which we do research
Rapidly transfer innovative technologies into Microsoft products
Ensure that Microsoft products have a future

9. Microsoft Research Established 1991 ~1000 full-time staff
Over 60 computer-science research areas represented
Contributions to products at Microsoft
Inventing the future
Research is the creation of new knowledge or novel solutions to heretofore unsolved problems.
Characteristics of good research:
-- Novel
-- Rigorous (methodology is developed and approved by an international community of scientists and engineers)
-- Generalizable (some aspect of the research applies to an entire class of situations)
-- Applicable (the work has application in the real world, or is anticipated to do so in the future)
MSR is good at…
-- Prototypes and demos
-- Expertise in the state-of-the-art
-- Small-scale pilots
-- Rigorous analytical investigation
MSR does not typically…
-- Ship commercial products
-- Do large-scale deployments
-- Incubate businesses
-- Earn revenue

10. Microsoft Research locations :
Redmond, Washington, USA
(Sep, 1991)
Cambridge, United Kingdom
(July, 1997)
Beijing, China
(Nov, 1998)
Silicon Valley, California
(July, 2001)
Bangalore, India
(Jan, 2005)
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
(July, 2008)

11. Technology Transfer Impact
Critical support technologies.
Opt. Technology enabled sim-ship of Win95/Office95.
Automated bug detection in Windows 2000.
Almost every aspect of Windows 7
Key technologies that drive products.
E.G., MS audio 4.0, ClearType, collaborative filtering, intelligent search, etc.
Bing is continually evolving through research collaboration
Incubated major products.
Windows streaming media.
Windows CE, eBook.
Ecommerce, Datamining.
TabletPC
Surface
Speech processing

12. Why did we come to India Strong engineering education, talent pool
Growing economy and aspirations for R&D and innovation
Interesting research topics stimulated by the socio-economic-cultural environment

13. Microsoft Research India The First Five Years
P. Anandan
Distinguished Scientist
& Managing Director
MSR India

15. People & Place Full-time staff total: 56 Technical staff: 48
34 with PhD (69%)
Total interns (5 years): ~430
Indian universities: 60%
Foreign universities: 40%
PhD candidates: 43%
Bachelors/Masters: 57%
Universities include…
IISc, IITs, BITS, DAIICT, IIITs, MIT, CMU, UC Berkeley, UW, Yale, Cambridge, Chicago, Bristol, National University of Singapore, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Oxford, Georgia Institute of Technology, Princeton, New York University, University of Maryland, McGill University, U. Cape Town, UC Santa Barbara, U Michigan

16. Research Groups Algorithms and Search
Cryptography, Security, and Applied Mathematics
Mobility, Networks, and Systems
Multilingual Systems
Rigorous Software Engineering
Technology for Emerging Markets
Vision, Graphics, and Visualization

17. Publications Papers per year! Award winning research
ACM Eugene Lawler Award (Digital Study Hall)
Best-paper awards in
FSE
ICTD
COMSNETS
TED Award
First place in FIRE (Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation)
Joint winner in PASCAL VOC Object Detection Challenge 2009
Papers per year!
Total patents filed in FY09 was 18.  Total patents filed so far in FY10 is 14. 

18. Technology Transfers from MSRI in 2009
System Security
tools for diagnosing vulnerability to attacks
Developer support
tools to improve programmer productivity:
Program verification, debugging
Networking and cloud
efficient compression while protecting privacy for data transfers from data centers to clients
Search
Robust location of addresses in BING Maps
Machine translation
Community creation of multilingual content

19. INNOVATIONS FROM INDIA AT MSR

20. Multi-Mouse for Education
Problem: PCs in emerging-market schools are used in a one-to-many fashion.
Solution: Multiply the value of PCs by allowing multiple USB mice to be plugged into a PC, with each mouse having a cursor on-screen with a different color.
Children grasp the concept immediately and show greater engagement.
Deployed and distributed by Microsoft product teams
Before
Preliminary user tests included three groups of children. Each group was first asked to play a flash-card game for 20 minutes, single mouse; then, multiple mice were added, for at least another 20 minutes, longer if the children wanted.
Single mouse scenario:
Even with a dominant child, all children engage.
Engagement decreases with time for students without a mouse.
Sharing patterns differ between boys and girls (girls share more).
Everyone wants to interact with the mouse.
Multiple mouse scenario:
Children immediately understand the idea of multiple mice and cursors.
Children are not confused by multiple cursors on screen.
Children with mice remain engaged throughout.
Overall engagement increases, even for children without a mouse! (There is more opportunity to grab one.)
Other observations:
In interviews, student reactions were very much in favour of multiple mice.
One child did not like multiple mice because of its competitiveness.
There can be considerable difference in game-playing competence, especially with large variance in age.
Children rapidly pick up finer points of UI and game control.
After

21. Digital Green video screening
Problem: Agriculture extension (transfer of expert knowledge to farmers) is slow and difficult Solution: Locally recorded videos of good farming practices and ad hoc screenings in villages Stockholm Challenge Award 2008 Spun off as an independent non-profit organization Aiming to impact ~400,000 households in 3 years
Digital Green video screening
in rural Karnataka
Work by Rikin Gandhi, Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Vanaja Ramprasad, Randy Wang, Kentaro Toyama

22. Robust Location Search
Goal
Find regions on Earth that “best match” freeform textual input
Examples
2nd main, 10th cross, Indira Nagar 1st stage, near RTO office Bangalore
... in Madrid, somewhere near calle de arroyofresno and avenida de la llustracion
#67, विद्या अपार्टमन्ट्स, फॆस-3, डेली केन्टान्मन्ट
Now Deployed in BING MAPS in several countries, including parts of India
Spatial Data Reposi-tory
Search Engine
Region Index
Fuzzy Text Index

23. Debug Advisor
Allow user to search diverse repositories using a “fat query”
Fat query allows user to simply concatenate all the context for the current bug
Match fat query with all historical data from repositories
Deployed and actively used by various MS product development teams
Has this bug or a similar bug already been fixed or studied somewhere else?
What is already known about this kind of bug?
Where should I start?
Who would be able to help?

24. Partner with Academia, Industry and Government
External Research
Partner with Academia, Industry and Government
Strengthen CS Research Ecosystem
Capacity Building
Communitywide Research Initiatives
Address Societal Challenges
Community Engagement
Social Responsibility
Empower with Technologies
Help advance research process
Innovation

25. Innovation and R&D in the world

26. Next Few Slides from this document

29. Microsoft is the second highest R&D investor in the world: Euro 6
Microsoft is the second highest R&D investor in the world: Euro 6.48B (Toyota is number 1)
Microsoft has been in the top 3 for several years, was number 1 last year (Euro 5.58B)
No Indian company in Top 50 (surprised?)

33. Other Indian companies include: Polaris, Prithvi, Mindtree, Reliance, Ranbaxy, Infosys, BHEL, HCL, etc.

34. India and Innovation (in IT)

35. The Developed World Over 15,000 corporate labs in the US
Employ over 750,000 scientists and engineers
70% of the total number of such professionals
Total R&D investment USD 150B
Industry funds over 65% R&D conducted in US
Ctsy: “Engines of Tomorrow” – Bob Buderi

36. Many models for success
Bell Labs / AT&T GE
IBM HP
Xerox
Siemens
NEC
Intel
Microsoft
Google

37. India Today Booming economy Growing consumer sector
Large skilled labor population
Rich investors
Many Indian companies in Fortune 500
The place to be!

38. Challenges Not enough R&D, mostly service sector work
Very little basic research
Changing values, easy job opportunities, easy money, changing lifestyles
Corruption still endemic

39. Indian Economy at a Glance
Real GDP growth
Percentage,
Changing Composition of India’s GDP
Indian Economy at a Glance
India
100%
80%
63%
60%
Developing World Average
40%
19%
20%
18% 0%
FY80
FY90
FY02
FY08
India’s impressive GDP growth has been led by boom in Industry and Services. More than 50% of the GDP is being contributed by Services making it a primarily services economy compared to a primarily agrarian economy in the 80’s
Developed World Average
Agriculture
Industry
Services
Source: Usda.gov
Source: RBI
The Indian economy has experienced rapid growth buoyed by a shift from an agriculture to a services-led economy Source - NASSCOM

40. NASSCOM DATA

41. OCTOBER, 2008
Next few slides from:
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT STATISTICS AT A GLANCE: MAJOR HIGHLIGHTS
DEPARTMENT OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
MINISTRY OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY, Govt.of India, Technology Bhawan, New Mehrauli Road, New Delhi , (INDIA)

43. 4.5
4.0
3.5
3.0
2.5
2.0
1.5
1.0
0.5

46. Priorities Rapid upgrading of the college education system
Increase number of qualified college professors
Make academic careers rewarding
Make research a requirement
Get the industry into the R&D game
Convince parents to encourage children to go into research

47. THANK YOU!