Microsoft Research India Podcast Microsoft Research India

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...