Episode 013June 14, 2022 Road safety is a very serious public health issue across the world. Estimates put the traffic related death toll at approximately 1.35 million fatalities every year, and the World Health Organization ranks road injuries in the top 10 leading causes of death globally. This raises the question- can we do anything to improve road safety? In this podcast, I speak to Venkat Padmanabhan, Deputy Managing Director of Microsoft Research India and Akshay Nambi, Principal Researcher at MSR India. Venkat and Akshay talk about a research project called Harnessing Automobiles for S ..read more

Episode 012May 30, 2022 Neeraj Kayal: It’s just a matter of time before we figure out how computers can themselves learn like humans do. Just human babies, they have an amazing ability to learn by observing things around them. And currently, despite all the progress, computers don't have that much ability. But I just think it's a matter of time before we figure that out, some sort of general artificial intelligence. Sridhar Vedantham: Welcome to the MSR India podcast. In this podcast, Ravishankar Krishnaswamy, a researcher at the MSR India lab, speaks to Neeraj Kayal. Neeraj is also a researc ..read more

Episode 011January 18, 2022 Keratoconus is a severe eye disease that affects the cornea, causing it to become weak and develop a conical bulge. Keratoconus, if undiagnosed and entreated, can lead to partial or complete blindness in people affected by it. However, the equipment needed to diagnose keratoconus is expensive and non-portable, which makes early detection of keratoconus inaccessible to large populations in low and middle income countries. This makes it a leading cause for partial or complete blindness amongst such populations. Doctors from Sankara Eye Hospital, Bengaluru and researc ..read more

Episode 010September 28, 2021 Artificial intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Deep Neural Networks are today critical to the success of many industries. But they are also extremely compute intensive and expensive to run in terms of both time and cost, and resource constraints can even slow down the pace of innovation. Join us as we speak to Muthian Sivathanu, Partner Research Manager at Microsoft Research India, about the work he and his colleagues are doing to enable optimal utilization of existing infrastructure to significantly reduce the cost of AI. Muthian's interests lie br ..read more

Episode 009 | June 15, 2021 The Internet of Things has been around for a few years now and many businesses and organizations depend on data from these systems to make critical decisions. At the same time, it is also well recognized that this data- even up to 40% of it- can be spurious, and this obviously can have a tremendously negative impact on an organizations’ decision making. But is there a way to evaluate if the sensors in a network are actually working properly and that the data generated by them are above a defined quality threshold? Join us as we speak to Dr Akshay Nambi and Ajay Manc ..read more

  Episode 008April 20, 2021 Microsoft Research India is constantly exploring how research can enable new technologies that positively impact the lives of people while also opening new frontiers in computer science and technology itself. In this podcast we speak to Dr. Sriram Rajamani, distinguished scientist and Managing Director of the Microsoft Research India Lab. We talk about some of the projects in the lab that are making fundamental changes to the computing at Internet scale, computing at the edge and the role he thinks technology should play in the future to ensure digital fairness ..read more

Episode 007December 22, 2020 One of Microsoft Research India’s goals is to help strengthen the research ecosystem and encourage young students to look at research as a career. But it is not always easy for students to understand what research is all about and how to figure out if research is the right career for them. The Research Fellow program at Microsoft Research India enables bright young students to work on real-world research problems with top notch researchers across the research lifecycle, including ideation, implementation, evaluation, and deployment. Many of the students who have be ..read more

Episode 006 | October 20, 2020 At Microsoft Research India, research focused on societal impact is typically a very interdisciplinary exercise that pulls together social scientists, technology experts and designers. But how does one evaluate or validate the actual impact of research in the real world? Today, we talk to Tanuja Ganu who manages the Societal Impact through Cloud and AI (or SCAI) group in MSR India. SCAI focuses on deploying research findings at scale in the real world to validate them, often working with a wide variety of collaborators incl ..read more

Episode 005September 08, 2020 Podcast: Making cryptography accessible, efficient and scalable. With Dr. Divya Gupta and Dr. Rahul Sharma Ensuring security and privacy of data, both personal and institutional, is of paramount importance in today’s world where data itself is a highly precious commodity. Cryptography is a complex and specialized subject that not many people are familiar with, and developing and implementing cryptographic and security protocols such as Secure Multi-party Computation can be difficult and also add a lot of overhead to computational processes. But researchers at Micr ..read more

  Episode 004 | August 04, 2020 Podcast: Can we make better software by using ML and AI techniques? With Chandra Maddila and Chetan Bansal The process of software development is dramatically different today compared to even a few years ago. The shift to cloud computing has meant that companies need to develop and deploy software in ever shrinking timeframes while maintaining high quality of code. At the same time, developers can now get access to large amounts of data and telemetry from users. Is it possible for companies to use Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence techniques to s ..read more