MSR, C-DAC to develop language computing

Microsoft Research (MSR) India, which opened its new 20,000 sq ft facility 'Scientia' in Bangalore on Friday, has collaborated with C-DAC to develop Indian language computing.

MSR India and C-DAC initially plan to work on multilingual web search, browsing and indexing, machine translation among Indian languages and English, multilingual user interface, handwriting and speech, said P Anandan, managing director of Microsoft Research India.

MSR India which came into being in January 2005 has so far collaborated with other institutes like IIT-Mumbai for landslide detection that applies distributed, wireless sensors to monitor landslide prone areas, and with IIIT-Bangalore and MIT to investigate the impact of computing technology in agriculture.

The research centre in Bangalore now joins the company's labs at Redmond, Silicon Valley, Cambridge and Beijing to build research capabilities for Microsoft.

Other projects taken up by MSR include multi-interface data synchronisation for mobile phones in collaboration with MSR Silicon Valley and MSR Redmond. Examination of rural kiosk projects in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Kerala in the area of technologies or emerging markets research are other projects.

According to Anandan, MSR India has grown to 45 people including full-time research scientists, interns and support staff.

Speaking on the occasion, Craig Mundie, CTO and senior vice president for advanced strategies and policies at Microsoft said "MSR India is a part of Microsoft which develops the technologies of the future. We believe that there is world class research talent in India."

PM told of city's needs

Bangalore's need for Rs 500 crore for infrastructure development has been communicated to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, said Union communications minister Dayanidhi Maran.

Speaking at the inaugural function here of Microsoft Research (MSR) India on Friday, Maran said this had been done in view of the grievances aired by a majority of IT companies which contribute nearly 28,000 crore to the national exchequer.

He further said, "Bangalore is growing at a phenomenal speed and hence the acceleration of infrastructure development is necessary."