Microsoft is setting up a research lab in Bangalore,
India, that will focus on areas including computing technologies
for emerging markets.
The new lab, called Microsoft Research India, goes online in
January, and will be part of a network of five research labs that
Microsoft runs worldwide, said Padmanabhan Anandan, managing
director of Microsoft Research India.
Besides research labs in Redmond, Washington, Mountain View,
California, and San Francisco, Microsoft also operates labs in
Cambridge, England and Beijing. The company employs 700 staff in
its research labs, working in 55 different areas. The Bangalore lab
will initially have about 24 people.
"We will be doing basic research," Anandan said. "As we are not
so much concerned with immediate business goals, we have the
opportunity to think far ahead and look at new product
opportunities."
Besides computing technologies for emerging markets, the
Bangalore lab will also research multilingual systems, geographical
information systems (GIS) and sensors and sensor network
applications, Anandan said. The lab will also research new types of
hardware and software.
"We realised very quickly that the first thing we have to do is
to understand what people really need, and that requires social
sciences and ethnographic research," Anandan said. "Choosing the
right solution is not about price points alone, or about
accessibility, though that is also important, but it is about what
value the technology delivers."
Results from the research in India will be used in other
emerging markets, he added.
In multilingual systems, the Bangalore lab will work on user
interfaces and applications that handle multiple languages
seamlessly. The research's aim is to arrive at technologies that
allow people speaking different languages to use the same computer
to access content, Anandan said.
Research in the area of GIS will include using satellite
imagery, maps and other data, and then collating and indexing that
information geographically, and providing ways of visualising the
information for different requirements, according to Anandan.
GIS research will allow Microsoft to understand how to extend
its SQL (structured query language) database technology to become a
geographical database, he said.
Environmental applications of sensor networks, novel sensors for
rural communities and distributed computing in sensor networks will
be other research areas in the new lab. Although the research will
focus on back-end infrastructure, database and application software
for these networks, Bangalore researchers may also research the
front-ends of these networks, such as the sensors, according to
Anandan.
Some of Microsoft's Redmond-based researchers, for example, are
examining tools for programming and deploying the sensor units at
the front-end, he said.
In line with Microsoft's research strategy worldwide, the
Bangalore lab will collaborate with and fund research at key
educational institutions in India, such as the Indian Institutes of
Technology, Anandan said. Microsoft researchers will also work with
the Indian government and non-governmental organisations on
research and to field test technologies.
Several US and European technology companies run software and
product development operations in India, but only a few conduct
basic research in the country. Hewlett-Packard's Bangalore lab, for
example, researches new technologies for emerging markets.
Microsoft already has software development centers in Hyderabad,
India, working on product development and the company's information
systems. It also runs a tech support center in Bangalore, and
outsources some software development and support work to Indian
software and services companies.
John Ribeiro writes for IDG News Service