Podcast- HyWay: Enabling Mingling in the Hybrid WorldAjay 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/ (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

Episode 013 | June 14, 2022Road 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 y...

Episode 012 | May 30, 2022Neeraj 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 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_prize) and the Fulkerson Prize (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulkerson_Prize). Neeraj received the Young Scientist Award from the Indian National Science Academy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/lab/microsoft-research-india/).Related* Microsoft Research India Podcast: More podcasts from MSR India (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/lab/microsoft-research-india/articles/)* iTunes (https://feeds.blubrry.com/feeds/msrindiapodcast.xml): Subscribe and listen to new podcasts on iTunes* Android (https://subscribeonandroid.com/feeds.blubrry.com/feeds/msrindiapodcast.xml)* RSS Feed (https://feeds.blubrry.com/feeds/msrindiapodcast.xml)* Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/4z8l3ofB3tsL8i3JHxurkK)* Google Podcasts (https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ibHVicnJ5LmNvbS9mZWVkcy9tc3JpbmRpYXBvZGNhc3QueG1s)* Email (https://subscribebyemail.com/feeds.blubrry.com/feeds/msrindiapodcast.xml)TranscriptRavi 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,

Episode 011 | January 18, 2022Keratoconus is a severe eye disease that affects the cornea, causing it to become weak and develop a conical bulge. Keratoconus, if undiagnosed and entreat...

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 t...

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...

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 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/sriram/), 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 (http://i-cav.org/cav-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 (http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2015/fellows-2015)in 2015 for contributions to software analysis and defect detection, and Fellow of  Indian National Academy of Engineering (https://www.inae.in/) in 2016. Sriram was general chair for POPL 2015 (http://popl.mpi-sws.org/2015/)in India, and was program Co-Chair for CAV 2005 (http://www.cav2005.inf.ed.ac.uk/). He co-founded the Mysore Park Series, (http://www.mysorepark.org.in/)and the ISEC conference series (http://isoft.acm.org/)in India. He serves on the CACM editorial board (http://cacm.acm.org/about-communications/editorial-board/) as co-chair for special regional sections, to bring computing innovations from around the world to CACM (https://cacm.acm.org/). Sriram has a PhD from UC Berkeley (http://eecs.berkeley.edu/), MS from University of Virginia (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/)and BEng from College of Engineering, Guindy (http://cs.annauniv.edu/), all with specialization in Computer Science. In 2020, he was named as a Distinguished Alumnus (https://www.aaceg.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Distinguished-Alumni-2020-of-College-of-Engineering-Guindy.pdf) by College of Engineering, Guindy. For more information about the Microsoft Research India click here (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/lab/microsoft-research-india/). Related Microsoft Research India Podcast: More podcasts from MSR India (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/lab/microsoft-research-india/articles/) iTunes (https://feeds.blubrry.com/feeds/msrindiapodcast.xml): Subscribe and listen to new podcasts on iTunes Android (https://subscribeonandroid.com/feeds.blubrry.com/feeds/msrindiapodcast.xml)

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 (https://shrutirij.github.io/), 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 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/academic-program/research-fellows-program-at-microsoft-research-india/). Related Microsoft Research India Podcast: More podcasts from MSR India (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/lab/microsoft-research-india/articles/) iTunes (https://feeds.blubrry.com/feeds/msrindiapodcast.xml): Subscribe and listen to new podcasts on iTunes Android (https://subscribeonandroid.com/feeds.blubrry.com/feeds/msrindiapodcast.xml) RSS Feed (https://feeds.blubrry.com/feeds/msrindiapodcast.xml) Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/4z8l3ofB3tsL8i3JHxurkK) Google Podcasts (https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ibHVicnJ5LmNvbS9mZWVkcy9tc3JpbmRpYXBvZGNhc3QueG1s) Email (https://subscribebyemail.com/feeds.blubrry.com/feeds/msrindiapodcast.xml) Transcript Shruti Rijhwani: I think I credit my whole graduate school decision-making process, the application process,

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 India iTunes: Subscribe and listen to new podcasts on iTunes

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 India (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/lab/microsoft-research-india/articles/) iTunes (https://feeds.blubrry.com/feeds/msrindiapodcast.xml): Subscribe and listen to new podcasts on iTunes Android (https://subscribeonandroid.com/feeds.blubrry.com/feeds/msrindiapodcast.xml) RSS Feed (https://feeds.blubrry.com/feeds/msrindiapodcast.xml) Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/4z8l3ofB3tsL8i3JHxurkK) Google Podcasts (https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ibHVicnJ5LmNvbS9mZWVkcy9tc3JpbmRpYXBvZGNhc3QueG1s) Email (https://subscribebyemail.com/feeds.blubrry.com/feeds/msrindiapodcast.xml) Transcript