Algorithms are the latest research group in MSR India. Please tell us about this field.

We have 7 research groups at MSR India as of now. Last summer, Dr. Ravi Kannan, a Sr. Algorithms professor at Yale University joined us. An algorithm is an interesting area that has communities of Indian researchers working both within India and in the US. As a company, MS is moving into a lot of new areas, like search, wireless networking, etc that have some very interesting research problems, at the core of which are complex algorithms. Another reason for having an algorithms group is that they're undergoing transition. They used to be theoretically focused a few decades ago. Their researchers would hardly write any code, and were busy proving the correctness of algorithms, analyzing their complexity, etc. But as a community, they realized that there are big problems-billions of nodes in routing networks, billions of entries in databases, literally billions of web pages. In many of these cases, the data is not stored on a single computer. It's not available from a single source, and storing all the data and then processing it is virtually impossible. So, one has to rely on streaming algorithms, where data is processed as it comes in. There are also statistical algorithms, which use probabilistic methods to do things, giving probabilistic/ statistical answers instead of definite ones. That's a new and exciting research direction for the field itself.

India has many fields that require considerable research, e.g. power and utility sector, wherein data centers are coping with the problem of power consumption. What research is happening in this area?
In a certain sense, societal problems provide ideas and opportunities for you to explore. We've pursued many problems that other labs elsewhere would not have seen. Once you think of the problem, you'll think of its application in a different context for elsewhere in the world. Even if the problem is localized, the solution or technology that you develop almost always applies to every place in the world for many different kinds of problems that even you may not have thought of in the first place. Take our Robust Locations research for instance, which provides a new way of looking up an address in an online map. Existing maps like Google maps presume a certain format to your address, e.g. House number, street, city. They look at that structure and parse it. But the addresses in India are very different, e.g. in Bangalore, a typical address would be like 7th main and 6th cross, Sadashiv Nagar, Opposite RTO office. It has a bunch of queues and tokens, landmarks etc. Plus, it can be in so many different languages as well. So we developed an address geo-coder that doesn't assume any particular format. It works really well, and we've been pursuing it with the product groups at Microsoft. It works even when there are spelling errors. Finally, the addressing was a problem we thought of due to the environment we're in, but its solution could apply to any other country.

Is there any research related to social networking?
We have a social networking group, which is developing technologies for emerging markets. We did a project that we called Combine, which was inspired by the fact that in India, usage of cellphones for information sharing info is much more common than anywhere else. If people want to download a media file such as an image, audio, video, etc, it's very slow on the mobile phone. We've created a system that will automatically split the media source into smaller pieces and have several cellphones in the neighborhood download them. These would then all be send to one phone via Bluetooth and combined. There are challenges in this, e.g. we don't know how many cellphones are around, whether somebody would allow his/her cellphone to be used for this job, security and privacy issues, etc. But ultimately, the idea here is to use a mobile device for a collaborative and collective effort.