Microsoft Research India Podcast

[Music] Sunayana Sitaram: Our ultimate goal is to build evaluation systems and also other kinds of systems in general where humans and LLMs can work together. We're really trying to get humans to do the evaluation, get LLM's to do the evaluation, use the human data in order to improve the LLM. And then just this continues in a cycle. And the ultimate goal is, send the things to the LLM that it's good at doing and send the rest of the things that the LLM can't do to humans who are like the ultimate authority on the evaluation. Sridhar Vedantham: Welcome to the Microsoft Research India podcast, where we explore cutting-edge research that’s impacting technology and society. I’m your host, Sridhar Vedantham. [Music] Sridhar Vedantham: LLM's are perhaps the hottest topic of discussion in the tech world today. And they're being deployed across domains, geographies, industries and applications. I have an extremely interesting conversation with Sunayana Sitaram, principal researcher at Microsoft Research about LLMs, where they work really well and also challenges that arise when trying to build models with languages that may be under resourced. We also talk about the critical work she and her team are doing in creating state-of-the-art methods to evaluate the performance of LLMs, including those LLMs that are based on Indic languages. Related Microsoft Research India Podcast: More podcasts from MSR IndiaiTunesAndroidRSS FeedSpotifyGoogle PodcastsEmail [Music] Sridhar Vedantham: Sunayana, welcome to the podcast. Sunayana Sitaram: Thank you. Sridhar Vedantham: And I'm very excited to have you here because we get to talk about a subject that seems to be top of mind for everybody right now. Which is obviously LLMs. And what excites me even more is I think, we're going to be talking about LLMs in a way that's slightly different from what the common discourse is today, right? Sunayana Sitaram: That's right. Sridhar Vedantham: OK. So before we jump into it, why don't you give us a little bit of background about yourself and how you came to be at MSR? Sunayana Sitaram: Sure. So it's been eight years now since I came to MSR. I came here as a postdoc after finishing my PhD at Carnegie Mellon. And so yeah, it's been around 15 years now for me in the field, and it's been super exciting, especially the last few years. Sridhar Vedantham: So, I'm guessing that these eight years have been interesting, otherwise we won't be having this conversation. What areas of research, I mean, have you changed course over the years and how is that progressed? Sunayana Sitaram: Yeah, actually, I've been working pretty much on the same thing for the last 15 years or so. So I'll describe how I got started. When I was an undergrad, I actually met the principal of a blind children's school who himself was visually impaired. And he was talking about some of the technologies that he uses in order to be independent. And one of those was using optical character recognition and text to speech in order to take documents or letters that people sent him and have them read out without having to depend on somebody. And he was in Ahmedabad, which is where I grew up. And his native language was Gujarati. And he was not able to do this for that language. Whereas for English, the tools that he required to be independent were available. And so, he told me like it would be really great if somebody could actually build this kind of system in Gujarati. And that is when it sort of it was like a, you know, aha moment for me. And I decided to take that up as my undergrad project. And ever since then, I've been trying to work on technologies trying to bridge that gap between English and other languages- under resourced languages. And so, since then, I've worked on very related areas. So, my PhD thesis was on text to speech systems for low resource languages. And after I came to MSR I started working on what is called code switching, which is a very common thing that...

Podcast- HyWay: Enabling Mingling in the Hybrid World Ajay Manchepalli: One thing we have learned is that, you know as they say, necessity is the mother of invention. This is a great example of that because it's not that we didn't have remote people before. And it's not that we didn't have technology to support something like this. But we have had this Black Swan moment with COVID, which required us to be not in the same physical location at all time and that accelerated the adoption of digital technologies. You can build all the technology you want. But having it at the right time and right place matters the most. [Music] Sridhar Vedantham: Welcome to the Microsoft Research India podcast, where we explore cutting-edge research that’s impacting technology and society. I’m your host, Sridhar Vedantham. [Music] Sridhar Vedantham: The COVID pandemic forced most of us into a new paradigm of work from home and a number of tools to cater to remote work became popular. However, the post pandemic environment has seen interesting scenarios with some people preferring to continue to work from home, some people preferring to return full time to work and a number of people adopting something in between. This hybrid work environment exists today in the workplace as well as in other scenarios such as events. While tools such as Microsoft Teams do extremely well in supporting scheduled and agenda driven work meetings, there is need for a tool that supports a mix of virtual and in-person gatherings in an informal or semi-structured work environment, such as in hallways or at water coolers. In this edition of the podcast, I speak to Venkat Padmanabhan, Deputy MD (Deputy Managing Director) of MSR India and Ajay Manchepalli. Principal Research Program Manager, about a project called HyWay. HyWay’s a system to support unstructured and semi structured hybrid and informal interactions between groups of in-person and remote participants. Venkat Padmanabhan is Deputy Managing Director at Microsoft Research India in Bengaluru. He was previously with Microsoft Research Redmond, USA for nearly 9 years. Venkat’s research interests are broadly in networked and mobile computing systems, and his work over the years has led to highly-cited papers and paper awards, technology transfers within Microsoft, and also industry impact. He has received several awards and recognitions, including the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in 2016, four test-of-time paper awards from ACM SIGMOBILE, ACM SIGMM, and ACM SenSys, and several best paper awards. He was also among those recognized with the SIGCOMM Networking Systems Award 2020, for contributions to the ns family of network simulators. Venkat holds a B.Tech. from IIT Delhi (from where he received the Distinguished Alumnus award in 2018) and an M.S. and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, all in Computer Science, and has been elected a Fellow of the INAE, the IEEE, and the ACM. He is an adjunct professor at the Indian Institute of Science and was previously an affiliate faculty member at the University of Washington. He can be reached online at http://research.microsoft.com/~padmanab/. Ajay Manchepalli, as a Research Program Manager, works with researchers across Microsoft Research India, bridging Research innovations to real-world scenarios. He received his Master’s degree in Computer Science from Temple University where he focused on Database Systems. After his Masters, Ajay spent his next 10 years shipping SQL Server products and managing their early adopter customer programs. For more information about the HyWay project, click HyWay - Microsoft Research. For more information about the Microsoft Research India click here. RelatedMicrosoft Research India Podcast: More podcasts from MSR IndiaiTunesAndroidRSS FeedSpotifyGoogle PodcastsEmail Transcript [Music] Sridhar Vedantham: So, Venkat and Ajay, welcome to the podcast. Venkat Padmanabhan: Good to be here again. Ajay Manchepalli: Yeah, likewise. Sridhar...

Episode 013 | June 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 Safety, or HAMS. The project seeks to use low-cost sensing devices to construct a virtual harness for vehicles that can help monitor the state of the driver and how the vehicle is being driven in the context of the road environment it is in. We talk about the motivation behind HAMS, its evolution, its deployment in the real world and the impact it is already having, as well as their future plans. Venkat Padmanabhan is Deputy Managing Director at Microsoft Research India in Bengaluru. He was previously with Microsoft Research Redmond, USA for nearly 9 years. Venkat’s research interests are broadly in networked and mobile computing systems, and his work over the years has led to highly-cited papers and paper awards, technology transfers within Microsoft, and also industry impact. He has received several awards and recognitions, including the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in 2016, four test-of-time paper awards from ACM SIGMOBILE, ACM SIGMM, and ACM SenSys, and several best paper awards. He was also among those recognized with the SIGCOMM Networking Systems Award 2020, for contributions to the ns family of network simulators. Venkat holds a B.Tech. from IIT Delhi (from where he received the Distinguished Alumnus award in 2018) and an M.S. and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, all in Computer Science, and has been elected a Fellow of the INAE, the IEEE, and the ACM. He is an adjunct professor at the Indian Institute of Science and was previously an affiliate faculty member at the University of Washington. He can be reached online at http://research.microsoft.com/~padmanab/. Akshay Nambi is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India. His research interests lie at the intersection of Systems and Technology for Emerging Markets broadly in the areas of AI, IoT, and Edge Computing. He is particularly interested in building affordable, reliable, and scalable IoT devices to address various societal challenges. His recent projects are focused on improving data quality in low-cost IoT sensors and enhancing performance of DNNs on resource-constrained edge devices. Previously, he spent two years at Microsoft Research as a post-doctoral scholar and he has completed his PhD from the Delft University of Technology (TUDelft) in the Netherlands. More information on the HAMS project is here: HAMS: Harnessing AutoMobiles for Safety - Microsoft Research For more information about the Microsoft Research India click here. Related Microsoft Research India Podcast: More podcasts from MSR IndiaiTunesAndroidRSS FeedSpotifyGoogle PodcastsEmail Transcript Venkat Padmanabhan: There's hundreds of thousands of deaths and many more injuries happening in the country every year because of road accidents. And of course it's a global problem and the global problem is even bigger. The state of license testing is as that by some estimates of public reports, over 50% of license are issued without a test or a proper test. So we believe a system like HAMS that improves the integrity of the testing process has huge potential to make a positive difference. [Music] Sridhar Vedantham: Welcome to the Microsoft Research India podcast, where we explore cutting-edge research that’s impacting technology and society. I’m your host, Sridhar Vedantham. [Music] Sridhar Vedantham: Venkat and Akshay welcome to the podcast. I think this is going to be quite an interesting...

Episode 012 | May 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 researcher at MSR India and works on problems related to or at the intersection of Computational Complexity and Algebra, Number Theory and Geometry. He has received multiple recognitions through his career, including the Distinguished Alumnus award from IIT Kanpur, the Gödel prize and the Fulkerson Prize. Neeraj received the Young Scientist Award from the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) in 2012 and the Infosys Prize in Mathematical Sciences in 2021. Ravi talks to Neeraj about how he became interested in this area of computer science and his journey till now. For more information about the Microsoft Research India click here. Related Microsoft Research India Podcast: More podcasts from MSR IndiaiTunesAndroidRSS FeedSpotifyGoogle PodcastsEmail Transcript Ravi Krishnaswamy: Hi Neeraj, how are you doing? It's great to see you after two years of working from home. Neeraj Kayal: Hi Ravi, yeah thank you. Thank you for having me here and it's great to be back with all the colleagues in office. Ravi Krishnaswamy: First of all, congratulations on the Infosys prize and it's an amazing achievement. And it's a great privilege for all of us to have you as a colleague here. So, congratulations on that. Neeraj Kayal: Thank you. Ravi Krishnaswamy: Yeah, so maybe we can get started on the podcast. So, you work in complexity theory, which is I guess one extreme of, I mean, it's very theoretical end of the spectrum in computer science almost bordering mathematics. So hopefully by the end of this podcast we can, uh, I mean, convince the audience that there's more to it than intellectual curiosity. Before that right, let me ask you about how you got into theoretical computer science and the kind of problems that you work on. So, could you maybe tell us a bit about your background and how you got interested into this subject? Neeraj Kayal: Yeah, so in high school I was doing well in maths in general and I also wrote some computer programs to play some board games, like a generalized version of Tic Tac Toe where you have a bigger board, say 20 by 20, and you try to place five things in the row, column, or diagonal continuously and then I started thinking about how could a computer learn to play or improve itself in such a game? So, I tried some things and didn't get very far with that, but at that time I was pretty convinced that one day computers will be able to really learn like humans do. I didn't see how that will happen, but I was sure of it and I just wanted to be in computer science to eventually work on such things. But in college in the second year of my undergrad, I enrolled for a course in cryptography taught by Manindra Agrawal at IIT Kanpur and then the course started off with some initial things which are like fairly predictable that something called symmetric key cryptosystems where, essentially it says that let's say we two want to have a private conversation, but anyone else can listen to us. So how do we have a private conversation? Well, if we knew a language, a secret language which no one else did, then we could easily just converse in that language, and no one will understand this. And so, this is made a little more formal in this symmetric key cryptosystem. And then, one day, Manindra ended one of the lectures with the following problem: but now suppose we did not know a secret language. Then we just know English, and...

Episode 011 | January 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 researchers from Microsoft Research India have been working together to develop SmartKC, a low-cost and portable diagnostic system that can enable early detection and mitigation of keratoconus. Join us as we speak to Dr. Kaushik Murali from Sankara Eye Hospital and Dr. Mohit Jain from Microsoft Research India. Dr. Kaushik Murali, President Medical Administration, Quality & Education, Sankara Eye Foundation India (Sri Kanchi Kamakoti Medical Trust) which is among the largest structured community eye hospital network in India, (www.sankaraeye.com) with an objective of providing world class eye care with a social impact. A paediatric ophthalmologist, Dr. Kaushik has completed a General Management Programme and is an alumnus of Insead. He has done a course on Strategic Management of Non Profits at the Harvard Business School. He has been certified in infection control, risk management for health care and digital disruption. He is a member of Scalabl, a global community promoting entrepreneurship. Dr. Kaushik is a member of the Scientific Committee of Vision 2020, the Right to Sight India. He is currently involved in collaborative research projects among others with the University of Bonn & Microsoft. Dr. Kaushik has received many recognitions, key among them being the Bernadotte Foundation for Children's Eyecare Travel Grant, Mother Teresa Social Leadership Scholarship ,International Eye Health Hero, All India Ophthalmological Society best research, International Association for Prevention of Blindness (IAPB) Eye Health Hero, Indian Journal of Ophthalmology Certificate of Merit. Beyond the medical world, he is part of the National Management Team of Young Indians – Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). He represented India at G20 Young Entrepreneur Alliance 2018 at Argentina and led the Indian delegation for the Inaugural India- Israel Young Leaders Forum in 2019. More recently, he led the first citizen’s cohort for a workshop on Strategic Leadership at LBSNAA (Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration). Mohit Jain is a Senior Researcher in the Technology and Empowerment (TEM) group at Microsoft Research India. His research interests lie at the intersection of Human Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence. Currently, he focuses on developing end-to-end systems providing low-cost smartphone-based patient diagnostic solutions for critical diseases. Over the past decade, he has worked on technological solutions for the developing regions focusing on health, accessibility, education, sustainability, and agriculture. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of Washington, focusing on extending interactivity, accessibility and security of conversational systems. While pursuing his Ph.D., he also worked as a Senior Research Engineer in the Cognitive IoT team at IBM Research India. Prior to that, he graduated with a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, and a Bachelors in Information and Communication Technology from DA-IICT. For more information about the SmartKC project, and for project related code, click here. For more information about the Microsoft Research India click here. Related Microsoft Research India Podcast: More podcasts from MSR IndiaiTunesAndroidRSS FeedSpotifyGoogle PodcastsEmail Transcript Dr. Murali Kaushik: Sitting in an eye hospital,...

Episode 010 | September 28, 2021Artificial 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 broadly in the space of large-scale distributed systems, storage, and systems for deep learning, blockchains, and information retrieval. Prior to joining Microsoft Research, he worked at Google for about 10 years, with a large part of the work focused on building key infrastructure powering Google web search — in particular, the query engine for web search. Muthian obtained his Ph.D from University of Wisconsin Madison in 2005 in the area of file and storage systems, and a B.E. from CEG, Anna University, in 2000. For more information about the Microsoft Research India click here. Related Microsoft Research India Podcast: More podcasts from MSR IndiaiTunesAndroidRSS FeedSpotifyGoogle PodcastsEmail TranscriptMuthian Sivathanu: Continued innovation in systems and efficiency and costs are going to be crucial to drive the next generation of AI advances, right. And the last 10 years have been huge for deep learning and AI and primary reason for that has been the significant advance in both hardware in terms of emergence of GPUs and so on, as well as software infrastructure to actually parallelize jobs, run large distributed jobs efficiently and so on. And if you think about the theory of deep learning, people knew about backpropagation about neural networks 25 years ago. And we largely use very similar techniques today. But why have they really taken off in the last 10 years? The main catalyst has been sort of advancement in systems. And if you look at the trajectory of current deep learning models, the rate at which they are growing larger and larger, systems innovation will continue to be the bottleneck in sort of determining the next generation of advancement in AI. [Music] Sridhar Vedantham: Welcome to the Microsoft Research India podcast, where we explore cutting-edge research that’s impacting technology and society. I’m your host, Sridhar Vedantham. [Music] Sridhar Vedantham: 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. [Music] Sridhar Vedantham: So Muthian, welcome to the podcast and thanks for making the time for this. Muthian Sivathanu: Thanks Sridhar, pleasure to be here. Sridhar Vedantham: And what I'm really looking forward to, given that we seem to be in some kind of final stages of the pandemic, is to actually be able to meet you face to face again after a long time. Unfortunately, we've had to again do a remote podcast which isn't all that much fun. Muthian Sivathanu: Right, right. Yeah, I'm looking forward to the time when we can actually do this again in office. Sridhar Vedantham: Yeah. Ok, so let me jump right into this. You know we keep hearing about things like AI and deep learning and deep neural networks and so on and so forth. What's very interesting in all of this is that we kind of tend to hear about the end product of all this, which is kind of, you know, what actually impacts businesses, what impacts consumers,...

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 Manchepalli, both from Microsoft Research India, about their innovative work on making sure that IoT data is dependable and verified, truly enabling organizations to make the right decisions. Akshay Nambi is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research India. His research interests lie at the intersection of Systems and Technology for Emerging Markets broadly in the areas of AI, IoT, and Edge Computing. He is particularly interested in building affordable, reliable, and scalable IoT devices to address various societal challenges. His recent projects are focused on improving data quality in low-cost IoT sensors and enhancing performance of DNNs on resource-constrained edge devices. Previously, he spent two years at Microsoft Research as a post-doctoral scholar and he has completed his PhD from the Delft University of Technology (TUDelft) in the Netherlands. Ajay Manchepalli, as a Research Program Manager, works with researchers across Microsoft Research India, bridging Research innovations to real-world scenarios. He received his Master’s degree in Computer Science from Temple University where he focused on Database Systems. After his Masters, Ajay spent his next 10 years shipping SQL Server products and managing their early adopter customer programs. For more information about the Microsoft Research India click here. Related Microsoft Research India Podcast: More podcasts from MSR IndiaiTunesAndroidRSS FeedSpotifyGoogle PodcastsEmail Transcript Ajay Manchepalli: The interesting thing that we observed in all these scenarios is how the entire industry is trusting data, and using this data to make business decisions, and they don't have a reliable way to say whether the data is valid or not. That was mind boggling. You're calling data as the new oil, we are deploying these things, and we're collecting the data and making business decisions, and you're not even sure if that data that you've made your decision on is valid. To us it came as a surprise that there wasn't enough already done to solve these challenges and that in some sense was the inspiration to go figure out what it is that we can do to empower these people, because at the end of the day, your decision is only as good as the data. [Music] Sridhar Vedantham: Welcome to the Microsoft Research India podcast, where we explore cutting-edge research that’s impacting technology and society. I’m your host, Sridhar Vedantham. [Music] 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 Manchepalli, both from Microsoft Research India, about their innovative work on making sure that IoT data is dependable and verified, truly enabling organizations to make the right decisions. [Music] Sridhar Vedantham: So, Akshay and Ajay, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you guys here. Akshay Nambi: Good evening Sridhar. Thank you for having me here. Ajay Manchepalli: Oh, I'm...

Episode 008 | April 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 and inclusion. Sriram also talks to us about a variety of things his own journey as a researcher, how the lab has changed from the time he joined it years ago, and his vision for the lab. Sriram’s research interests are in designing, building and analyzing computer systems in a principled manner. Over the years he has worked on various topics including Hardware and Software Verification, Type Systems, Language Design, Distributed Systems, Security and Privacy. His current research interest is in combining Program Synthesis and Machine Learning. Together with Tom Ball, he was awarded the CAV 2011 Award for “contributions to software model checking, specifically the development of the SLAM/SDV software model checker that successfully demonstrated computer-aided verification techniques on real programs.” Sriram was elected ACM Fellow in 2015 for contributions to software analysis and defect detection, and Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering in 2016. Sriram was general chair for POPL 2015 in India, and was program Co-Chair for CAV 2005. He co-founded the Mysore Park Series, and the ISEC conference series in India. He serves on the CACM editorial board as co-chair for special regional sections, to bring computing innovations from around the world to CACM. Sriram has a PhD from UC Berkeley, MS from University of Virginia and BEng from College of Engineering, Guindy, all with specialization in Computer Science. In 2020, he was named as a Distinguished Alumnus by College of Engineering, Guindy. For more information about the Microsoft Research India click here. Related Microsoft Research India Podcast: More podcasts from MSR IndiaiTunesAndroidRSS FeedSpotifyGoogle PodcastsEmail Transcript Sriram Rajamani: We are not like an ivory tower lab. You know we are not a lab that just writes papers. We are a lab that has our hands and feet, dirty, we sort of get ourselves dirty sort of get in there, you know, we test our assumptions, see whether it works, learn from them and in that sense actually the problems that we work on are a lot more real than a purely academic environment. [Music] Sridhar Vedantham: Welcome to the Microsoft Research India podcast, where we explore cutting-edge research that’s impacting technology and society. I’m your host, Sridhar Vedantham. [Music] Sridhar Vedantham: 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 computing at Internet scale, computing at the edge and the role he thinks technology should play in the future to ensure digital fairness and inclusion. Sriram also talks to us about a variety of things his own journey as a researcher, how the lab has changed from the time he joined it many years ago and his vision for the lab. Sridhar Vedantham: So today we have a very special guest on the podcast, and he is none other than Dr. Sriram Rajamani, who is the Managing Director of the Microsoft Research Lab in India. So Sriram welcome to the podcast. Sriram Rajamani: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me here,...

Episode 007 | December 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 been part of the program have gone on to become researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs. Today, we speak to Shruti Rijhwani, a graduate of MSR India’s Research Fellow program who is currently doing her PhD at the Carnegie Mellon University, and joining us is Dr. Vivek Seshadri, a researcher at MSR India who also heads the Research Fellow program at the lab. Shruti was a research fellow at MSR India in 2016, working on natural language processing models for code-switched text. She is currently PhD student at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Stemming from her work at MSR India, she has continued research in multilingual NLP, with a focus on low-resource and endangered languages. Vivek primarily works with the Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India. He received his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from IIT Madras, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University where he worked on problems related to Computer Architecture and Systems. After his Ph.D., Vivek decided to work on problems that directly impact people, particularly in developing economies like India. Vivek is also the Director for the Research Fellow program at MSR India. For more information about the Research Fellow program, click here. Related Microsoft Research India Podcast: More podcasts from MSR IndiaiTunesAndroidRSS FeedSpotifyGoogle PodcastsEmail Transcript Shruti Rijhwani: I think I credit my whole graduate school decision-making process, the application process, and even the way I do research in grad school to my experience as a Research Fellow in MSR India. Of course, the first thing was that I wasn't even sure whether I wanted to go to grad school, but after going through the Research Fellow program and with my amazing mentors and collaborators at MSR India, I took the decision to apply to grad school. [Music] Sridhar Vedantham: Welcome to the Microsoft Research India podcast, where we explore cutting-edge research that’s impacting technology and society. I’m your host, Sridhar Vedantham. [Music] 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 been part of the program have gone on to become researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs. Today, we speak to Shruti Rijhwani, a graduate of MSR India’s Research Fellow program who is currently doing her PhD at the Carnegie Mellon University, and joining us is Dr. Vivek Seshadri, a researcher at MSR India who also heads the Research Fellow program at the lab. [Music] Sridhar Vedantham: OK, so I'm looking forward to this podcast because it's going to be a little different from what we've done in the past, in the sense that this is not a podcast about research projects or technologies, but it's something much more human, and we're going to be talking about the Research Fellow program that we have at MSR India. And...

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 including academia, social enterprises and startups. Tanuja is a Research SDE Manager at Microsoft Research, India. She is currently part of MSR’s new center for Societal impact through Cloud and Artificial Intelligence (SCAI). Prior to joining MSR, she was a Co-Founder and CTO of DataGlen Technologies, a B2B startup that focuses on AI for renewable energy and sustainability technologies. Prior to this, she has worked as Research Engineer at IBM Research, India. Tanuja has completed MS in Computer Science (Machine Learning) from Indian Institute of Science (IISc, Bangalore). She has been recognized as MIT Technology Review’s Innovator Under 35 (MIT TR 35) in 2014 and IEEE Bangalore Woman Technologist of the Year in 2018. Her work was covered by top technical media (IEEE Spectrum, MIT Technology Review, CISCO Women Rock IT TV series, IBM Research blog and Innovation 26X26: 26 innovations by 26 IBM women). Click here to go to the SCAI website. Related Microsoft Research India Podcast: More podcasts from MSR IndiaiTunesAndroidRSS FeedSpotifyGoogle PodcastsEmail Transcript Tanuja Ganu: As the name suggests, SCAI, that is Societal Impact through Cloud and Artificial Intelligence, it is an incubation platform within MSR for us to ideate on such research ideas, work with our collaborators like academia, NGOs, social enterprises, startups, and to test or validate our hypothesis through very well defined real world deployments. At SCAI, it's an interdisciplinary team of social scientists, computer scientists, software engineers, designers, and program managers from the lab who come together for creating, nurturing and evaluating our research ideas through real world deployments and validations. [Music] Sridhar: Welcome to the Microsoft Research India podcast, where we explore cutting-edge research that’s impacting technology and society. I’m your host, Sridhar Vedantham. [Music] 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 including academia, social enterprises and startups. Tanuja has been recognized as one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 (MIT TR 35) in 2014 and by IEEE Bangalore as a Woman Technologist of the Year in 2018, and her work has been covered by top technical media. [Music] Sridhar Vedantham: Tanuja, welcome to the podcast. I'm really looking forward to this particular edition of what we do here. Because, I know that you manage SCAI and it's quite an intriguing part of the lab. Now before we get into that, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tanuja Ganu: First of all, thanks Sridhar for having me on the podcast today. And uh, yes, uh, I'm not a full-time researcher, but I'm engineer by training and I have done my Master’s in Computer Science. Over the last decade or so, my work is primarily at the intersection of research and engineering, and it's on the applied research side. So throughout my experience and journey, working at research labs and start up, I'm very much...

Episode 005 | September 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 Microsoft Research have now been able to develop cryptographic protocols that are developer-friendly, efficient and that work at scale with acceptable impact on performance. Join us as we talk to Dr. Divya Gupta and Dr. Rahul Sharma about their work in making cryptography easy to use and deploy. Dr. Divya Gupta is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Lab. Her primary research interests are cryptography and security. Currently, she is working on secure machine learning, using secure multi-party computation (MPC), and lightweight blockchains. Earlier she received her B.Tech and M.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Delhi and PhD in Computer Science from University of California at Los Angeles where she worked on secure computation, coding theory and program obfuscation. Dr. Rahul Sharma is a senior researcher in Microsoft Research Lab India since 2016. His research lies in the intersection of Machine Learning (ML) and Programming Languages (PL), which can be classified into the two broad themes of “ML for PL” and “PL for ML”. In the former, he has used ML to improve reliability and efficiency of software. Whereas, in the latter, he has built compilers to run ML on exotic hardware like tiny IoT devices and cryptographic protocols. Rahul holds a B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Delhi and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. Click here for more information in Microsoft Research’s work in Secure Multi-party Computation and here to go to the GitHub page for the project. Related Microsoft Research India Podcast: More podcasts from MSR IndiaiTunesAndroidRSS FeedSpotifyGoogle PodcastsEmail Transcript Divya Gupta: We not only make existing Crypto out there more programmable and developer friendly, but we have developed super-duper efficient cryptographic protocols which are tailored to ML, like secure machine learning inference task and work for large machine learning benchmarks. So before our work, the prior work had three shortcomings I would say. They were slow. They only did small machine learning benchmarks and the accuracy of the secure implementations was lower than the original models. And we solved all three challenges. So our new protocols are at least 10 times faster than what existed out there. [Music] Sridhar: Welcome to the Microsoft Research India podcast, where we explore cutting-edge research that’s impacting technology and society. I’m your host, Sridhar Vedantham. [Music] 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 Microsoft Research have now been able to develop cryptographic protocols that are developer-friendly, efficient and that work at scale with acceptable impact on performance. Join us as we talk to Dr. Divya Gupta and Dr. Rahul Sharma about their work in making cryptography easy to use and deploy. Sridhar Vedantham: Alright, so Divya and Rahul, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you guys on the show and thank you so much. I know this is really late in the night so thank...

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 shorten the Software Development Life Cycle while ensuring production of robust, cloud-scale software? We talk about this and more with Chandra Maddila and Chetan Bansal, who are Research Software Development Engineers at Microsoft Research India. Click here for more information on Project Sankie. Related Microsoft Research India Podcast: More podcasts from MSR IndiaiTunesAndroidRSS FeedSpotifyGoogle PodcastsEmail Transcript Chandra Maddila: One of the biggest disconnects we used to have in boxed product world where we used to ship software as a standalone product and give it to customers is, once customer takes the product, it is in their environment, we don’t have any idea about how it is being used and what kind of issues people are facing unless they come back to Microsoft support and say, “Hey, we are using this product, we get into these issues, can you please help us?”. But with the advent of services, one of the beautiful things that happened is, now we have the ability to collect telemetry about various issues that are happening in the service. So, this helps us pro-actively fix issues and help customers mitigate outages and also join the telemetry data from deployment side of the world all the way into coding phase, which is the first phase of software development life cycle. [Music] Sridhar: Welcome to the Microsoft Research India podcast, where we explore cutting-edge research that’s impacting technology and society. I’m your host, Sridhar Vedantham. [Music] Sridhar: Chandra and Chetan, welcome to the podcast. And thank you for making the time for this. Chetan: Thanks, Sridhar, for hosting this. Chandra: Thanks Sridhar, thanks for having us. Sridhar: Great! Now, there is something that’s interested me when I decided to host this podcast with you guys. You are both research software development engineers and Microsoft research is known for being this hardcore computer science research lab. So, what does it mean to be a software developer in a research org like MSR? And how is it different than being a software developer in say, a product organization, if there is a difference? Chetan: Yeah, that’s a great question, Sridhar about the difference between the RSDE role which is research software developer engineer at MSR vs. the product groups at Microsoft. In my experience the RSDE role is sort of open ended. Because often times, research teams work on open ended research problems. So, the RSDE engineers often work on things like prototypes and building products from the ground up which are deployed internally and which are the pre-cursor for products which are shipped to our customers, so there’s a lot of flexibility and openness in terms of what the RSDEs work on, and it can range from open ended research to actually building products which are shipped to our customers. So, there’s a wide spectrum of things and roles which RSDE plays. Sridhar: Chandra, what’s your take on that? Chandra: I think Chetan summarized it pretty well. RSDE in general is much more flexible compared to a typical software engineer role in products groups. You can switch from areas to areas and products to products. I, for example was working on NLP for some time, then web applications, learning platforms for some time. Then, I switched to software engineering. So, we have this flexibility to move across different areas and...

Episode 003 | June 02, 2020 Many of us who speak multiple languages switch seamlessly between them in conversations and even mix multiple languages in one sentence. For us humans, this is something we do naturally, but it’s a nightmare for computing systems to understand mixed languages. On this podcast with Kalika Bali and Dr. Monojit Choudhury, we discuss codemixing and the challenges it poses, what makes codemixing so natural to people, some insights into the future of human-computer interaction and more. Kalika Bali is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India working broadly in the area of Speech and Language Technology especially in the use of linguistic models for building technology that offers a more natural Human-Computer as well as Computer-Mediated interactions, and technology for Low Resource Languages. She has studied linguistics and acoustic phonetics at JNU, New Delhi and the University of York, UK and believes that local language technology especially with speech interfaces, can help millions of people gain entry into a world that is till now almost inaccessible to them. Dr. Monojit Choudhury is a Principal Researcher in Microsoft Research Lab India since 2007. His research spans many areas of Artificial Intelligence, cognitive science and linguistics. In particular, Dr. Choudhury has been working on technologies for low resource languages, code-switching (mixing of multiple languages in a single conversation), computational sociolinguistics and conversational AI. He has more than 100 publications in international conferences and refereed journals. Dr. Choudhury is an adjunct faculty at International Institute of Technology Hyderabad and Ashoka University. He also organizes the Panini Linguistics Olympiad for high school children in India and is the founding chair of the Asia-Pacific Linguistics Olympiad. Dr. Choudhury holds a B.Tech and PhD degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kharagpur. Related Microsoft Research India Podcast: More podcasts from MSR IndiaiTunesAndroidRSS FeedSpotifyGoogle PodcastsEmail Transcript Monojit Choudhury: It is quite fascinating that when people become really familiar with a technology, and search engine is an excellent example of such a technology, people really don’t think of it as technology, people think of it as a fellow human and they try to interact with the technology as they would have done in natural circumstances with a fellow human. [Music plays] Host: Welcome to the Microsoft Research India podcast, where we explore cutting-edge research that’s impacting technology and society. I’m your host, Sridhar Vedantham. [Music plays] Host: Many of us who speak multiple languages switch seamlessly between them in conversations and even mix multiple languages in one sentence. For us humans, this is something we do naturally, but it’s a nightmare for computing systems to understand mixed languages. On this podcast with Kalika Bali and Monojit Choudhury, we discuss codemixing and the challenges it poses, what makes codemixing so natural to people, some insights into the future of human-computer interaction and more. [Music plays] Host: Kalika and Monojit, welcome to the podcast. And thank you so much. I know we’ve had trouble getting this thing together given the COVID-19 situation, we’re all in different spots. So, thank you so much for the effort and the time. Monojit: Thank you, Sridhar. Kalika: Thank you. Host: Ok, so, to kick this off, let me ask this question. How did the two of you get into linguistics? It’s a subject that interests me a lot because I just naturally like languages and I find the evolution of languages and anything to do with linguistics quite fascinating. How was it that both of you got into this field? Monojit: So, meri kahani mein twist hai (In Hindi- “there is a twist in my story”). I was in school, quite a geeky kind of a kid and my interests were the usual Mathematics, Science, Physics and I wanted to be a...

Episode 002 | March 20, 2020 Enabling Rural Communities to Participate in Crowdsourcing, with Dr. Vivek Seshadri Crowdsourcing platforms and the gig economy have been around for a while. But are they equally accessible to all communities? Dr. Vivek Seshadri, a researcher at Microsoft Research India, doesn’t think so, and is trying to change this. On this podcast, Vivek talks about what motivated him to focus on research that can help underserved communities, and in particular, about Project Karya, a new platform to provide digital work to rural communities. The word “Karya” literally means “work” in a number of India languages. Vivek primarily works with the Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India. He received his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from IIT Madras, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University where he worked on problems related to Computer Architecture and Systems. After his Ph.D., Vivek decided to work on problems that directly impact people, particularly in developing economies like India. Related · Microsoft Research India Podcast: More podcasts from MSR India · iTunes: Subscribe and listen to new podcasts on iTunes · Android · RSS Feed · Spotify · Google Podcasts · Email Transcript Vivek Seshadri: If you look at crowdsourcing platforms today, there are a number of challenges that actually prevent them from being accessible to people from rural communities. The first one is, most of these platforms contain tasks only in English. And all their task descriptions, everything, is in English which is completely inaccessible to rural communities. Secondly, if you go to rural India today, the notion of digital work is completely alien to them. And finally, there is a logistical challenge here. Most crowdsourcing platforms will assume that the end-user has a computer and constant access to internet. This is actually a luxury in many rural communities in India even today. (Music plays) Host: Welcome to the Microsoft Research India podcast, where we explore cutting-edge research that’s impacting technology and society. I’m your host, Sridhar Vedantham. Crowdsourcing platforms and the gig economy have been around for a while. But are they equally accessible to all communities? Dr. Vivek Seshadri, a researcher at Microsoft Research India, doesn’t think so, and is trying to change this. On this podcast, Vivek talks about what motivated him to focus on research that can help underserved communities, and in particular, about Project Karya, a new platform to provide digital work to rural communities. The word “Karya” literally means “work” in a number of India languages. Vivek primarily works with the Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India. He received his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from IIT Madras, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University where he worked on problems related to Computer Architecture and Systems. After his Ph.D., Vivek decided to work on problems that directly impact people, particularly in developing economies like India. (Music plays) HOST: Vivek, welcome to the podcast. Vivek: Thanks, Sridhar. This is the first time I am doing anything like this, so I am really excited and a little bit nervous. Host: Oh, I don't think there's anything to be nervous about really here. You guys are used to speaking in public all the time. So, I'm sure it'll be fine. Vivek, you are a computer scientist and you did your PhD in Computer Science in Systems, right? What made you gravitate towards research that helps underserved communities, typically the kind of research that one associates with the ICTD space? Vivek: So, Sridhar, when I finished my PhD in 2016, I sort of had two decisions to make- should I stay in the US or should I move back to India? Should I stay in the same area that I am doing research in or should I move to a different field? Both these questions were sort...

Episode 001 | March 06, 2020 Dr. Eric Horvitz is a technical fellow at Microsoft, and is director of Microsoft Research Labs, including research centers in Redmond, Washington, Cambridge, Massachusetts, New York, New York, Montreal, Canada, Cambridge, UK, and Bengaluru, India. He is one of the world’s leaders in AI, and a thought leader in the use of AI in the complexity of the real world. On this podcast, we talk to Dr. Horvitz about a wide range of topics, including his thought leadership in AI, his study of AI and its influence on society, the potential and pitfalls of AI, and how useful AI can be in a country like India. Transcript Eric Horvitz: Humans will always want to make connection with humans, sociologists, social workers, physicians, teachers, we’re always going to want to make human connections and have human contacts. I think they’ll be amplified in a world of richer automation so much so that even when machines can generate art and write music, even music with lyrics that might put tear in someone’s eye if they didn’t know it was a machine, that will lead us to say, “Is that written by a human. I want to hear a song sung by a human who experienced something, the way I would experience something, not a machine.” And so I think human touch, human experience, human connection will grow even more important in a world of rising automation and those kinds of tasks and abilities will be even more compensated than they are today. (music plays) Host: Welcome to the Microsoft Research India podcast, where we explore cutting-edge research that’s impacting technology and society. I’m your host, Sridhar Vedantham. Host: Our guest today is Dr. Eric Horvitz, Technical Fellow and director of the Microsoft Research Labs. It’s tremendously exciting to have him as the first guest on the MSR India podcast because of his stature as a leader in research and his deep understanding of the technical and societal impact of AI. Among the many honors and recognitions Eric has received over the course of his career are the Feigenbaum Prize and the Allen Newell Prize for contributions to AI, and the CHI Academy honor for his work at the intersection of AI and human-computer interaction. He has been elected fellow of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Association for the Advancement of AI , where he also served as president. Eric is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He has served on advisory committees for the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, DARPA, and the Allen Institute for AI. Eric has been deeply involved in studying the influences of AI on people and society, including issues around ethics, law, and safety. He chairs Microsoft’s Aether committee on AI, effects, and ethics in engineering and research. He established the One Hundred Year Study on AI at Stanford University and co-founded the Partnership on AI. Eric received his PhD and MD degrees at Stanford University. On this podcast, we talk to Eric about his journey in Microsoft Research, his own research, the potential and pitfalls he sees in AI, how AI can help in countries like India, and much more. Host: Eric, welcome to the podcast. Eric Horvitz: It’s an honor to be here. I just heard I am the first interviewee for this new series. Host: Yes, you are, and we are really excited about that. I can’t think of anyone better to do the first podcast of the series with! There’s something I’ve been curious about for a long time. Researchers at Microsoft Research come with extremely impressive academic credentials. It’s always intrigued me that you have a medical degree and also a degree in computer science. What was the thinking behind this and how does one complement the other in the work that you...