HyWay: Enabling Mingling in the Hybrid World. With Dr. Venkat Padmanabahan and Ajay Manchepalli Microsoft Research India Podcast

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