>> Very good morning to
everybody assembled here
and welcome to IIT Madras.
We're very pleased and
delighted that Microsoft
is having their annual research,
India Research Summit
this time at IIT Madras.
We are very happy to host it.
We're doubly delighted that
the focus topic of this summit
is Data Science and AI.
Of course, it is
the flavor of the season,
you can not talk about
it but we are at
IIT Madras sort of
early movers on this.
We started with the
interdisciplinary laboratory
on Data Science about
three or four years ago,
where faculty from several
departments who were working on AI
or data analytics
related topics ranging
from chemical engineering to
transportation engineering
and civil engineering,
electrical engineering and
so on and business school.
They all got together and
formed this laboratory.
It was actually funded
internally by the Institute
through a challenge.
We have an annual
challenge where we fund
groups that get together
and create emerging areas.
The roots get caught and then
it grew very fast and we got
noticed and Robert Bosch
came forward and said
they would like to
support the center on
a long-term basis,
and that's how we have
the Robert Bosch Center
for Data Science and AI.
It's a center whose main focus is
research on AI, and
capacity building.
Of course, we do a lot of projects,
but that was already there
and the faculty involved
in this center continue
to do those projects,
work with various companies and
for the government and so on.
But the creation of the center
was aimed at fostering
academic research in
Data Science and AI and also
for creating capacity training model.
Research scholars,
creating new programs
for the undergraduate
and post-graduate level.
Also, we are a very active through
the PanIIT, IISc, NPTEL program.
The National Programme on
Technology Enhanced Learning,
which are running at
very large-scale.
Now we're running MOOCS courses
across the engineering and
science disciplines.
But in that program also,
there are substantial presence of
courses on Data Science and AI,
because we see one of
our responsibilities
is taking on this task of creating
the huge pool of
manpower who can work
on these exciting new areas
in large numbers.
We've also teamed up- NPTEL
has also teamed up with
NASCOM to create programs for
up-scaling in the IT industry.
So, our chatter is huge
and sky is the limit.
But the focus of
the RBC Center and of
the faculty from multiple
disciplines at IIT Madras,
involved in Data Science
and AI is research,
and we are therefore
very pleased that this summit
is being hosted here.
It'll benefit the large number of
students in various
departments here working
on topics related to this area.
I'm sure we're still waiting for
a large contingent to arrive,
I think the traffic is
pretty bad today because of
the Global Investors Summit
that the government is hosting,
not very far from here.
I'm very glad that a large contingent
of participants from
elsewhere who are involved
in research in this area have come to
this summit and this is
a fast-moving field,
I hope you make new connections,
new friends and discover new overlap,
discover people who are working
on similar things and then hope you
maintain connection,
start collaborating,
and I think the only thing
that's going to limit
the development of new ideas
and new techniques and
new algorithms and so on is
our ability to connect
and collaborate.
So, I thank Microsoft for
organizing this first and
organizing at IIT Madras second.
I hope we are a good host,
and if you have any difficulties,
please do reach out to
the local coordinators,
we'll do everything to make this
stay and this conference as
pleasant for you as possible.
So, once again, on behalf
of the Institute and
all my colleagues, Microsoft,
thank all of you for choosing
to attend the summit,
I hope it's really,
really memorable for you. Thank you.
>> Thank you professor, and again
once again very generous of
both the Robert Bosch Center
and IIT Madras to offer
us this very nice campus
and this lovely auditorium
to be part of it.
I'd now like to invite
Sriram Rajamani,
who's the Managing Director of
Microsoft Research India for
a few opening comments and also
to welcome all the attendees. Sriram.
>> Yes. Thank you
Bhaskar and thanks to
IIT Madras for hosting us here.
This is also a joint initiative
with the ACM India
and we have been
organizing this academic research
summit for a few years now.
Every year, we do it in
a different city and I'm really
glad we are able to do
it in Chennai this year.
I will take a few minutes to give you
an overview of
Microsoft Research India,
mainly to set context about
the kind of things that we do
and to foster more collaboration
with our organization, right?
This is a picture of our lab,
we are based in Bangalore.
Unlike many multinational
R&D laboratories,
we have significant research talent
in our organization.
So, this is a picture
of our entire team.
We have over 50 people with PhDs
in computer science
and related areas.
A lot of us have
deep academic backgrounds,
and we publish our research
openly in academia.
We are very proud to have
several stellar colleagues.
I wanted to give you some sense
of academic recognition that
our colleagues are one.
Bill Thies for example
a couple of years ago,
he won a MacArthur Prize.
Venkat Padmanabhan won
the Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar prize
a couple of years ago.
I think he's one of
the first person to win this award
while working for a multinational
laboratory in India.
We have four ACM
fellows in our roles,
Ravi Kannan who won
the Knuth prize in 2011.
We have people who won
the SIGCHI, Social Impact Award.
This gives you a sense for
the academic connection and
the deep academic
contributions that we
value in a laboratory like ours.
In addition to
the scientists we have,
we have really young crowd
and I want to say this
for the benefit of
young people in the audience,
we have a very interesting program
called Research Fellow Program,
where we take students after your
bachelor's or master's degree
and they come and
spend one to two years with
us as research trainees.
So, they are much like
graduate students.
We have 43 such students
in the lab right now,
and they come from
the best institutes
in India and increasingly
from abroad,
people from Stanford, and so on.
They finish their undergrad and
they come spend
one to two years with us,
more like research trainees,
and after they finish
their tenure with us,
they apply to graduate
school and they go to
the best graduate
schools in the world.
I did my PhD at Berkeley and I always
enjoyed the graduate
student atmosphere there.
There was a huge hall with
50 or 60 grad students and our lab,
I'm very proud we have
created the same environment.
We have created the same environment
about 50 people with PhDs
and about 40-45 people,
young students who bring
lot of freshness and
energy into the lab which
makes the lab very live.
Just like a university,
we have actually
a research fellow committee
of faculty that govern this program.
We recruit them, we get
about 1000 applications.
In addition to having
them as apprentices,
we have enrichment programs,
we teach them concepts and so on,
it gives a real vibrance
to this lab, right?
So, I wanted to make you aware of
that so that many of you who are
undergraduates might
want to make use of
this opportunity. You
could look online.
There's an application
process and so on,
and you could make use
of this opportunity.
In terms of work, our lab works in
four major areas in computer science.
We do work in algorithms,
we do work in machine learning
and artificial intelligence which
is specifically relevant to
the topic of this workshop.
We do work in systems.
We have a very
interesting group called
Technologies for Emerging Markets,
which studies the role of technology
in socioeconomic development.
During the course of this workshop,
we will discuss that as well.
We will discuss connections between
societal impact and
Data Science and Artificial
Intelligence as well.
But one of the interesting things
about our lab is that
many projects are interdisciplinary
across all of these disciplines,
which also makes for a very
vibrant collaborative environment.
I wanted to give you
a little bit of sense for.
I want to give a sample of
the kind of work we do.
This is not an exhaustive list,
but it gives you a sense for
kind of things that we do.
For example, I have
a list here and I'll go
through a couple of them.
Extreme classification is a paradigm
that was really
originated in our lab.
It was originated with Manik Varma,
and it is a paradigm where
you build classifiers,
machine learning classifiers, not
with five labels or 10 labels
of five classes or 10 classes,
but with millions of classes.
Now, you take an object
and you categorize
it into millions of categories,
and it has very many applications,
ranging from advertisements to
document tagging and so on.
To give you a sense, this
is an area that we started,
I think in 2013, and today,
if you go to top machine-learning
conferences like Nips or ICML,
there's actually a workshop on
extreme classification that
is held every year, right?
There's hundreds of
people attend and this
originated from our lab.
Another area where
we've done a lot of
work is in low resource
machine learning,
and machine learning is
very prevalent today.
An important area that
we've been investigating
for the past several years is
how to do machine learning
algorithms on really,
really small chips.
By really small chips I mean
things like a Cortex-M0,
which has only two kilobyte RAM
and maybe 30 bit kilobyte flash.
Can you actually run machine learning
algorithms on chips
that are that small.
Because if you could,
then you could actually,
because those chips
cost very less money,
like $2 you could buy a chip, right?
So, you could actually democratize
machine learning and use it in
far more scenarios in
a far more cost-effective manner,
and we have some of
the best algorithms that can
actually run in that form factor.
We do theory work. We do work
in unsupervised learning,
topic modelling, and
then we go all the way
and apply it to industrial
scale problems.
We work at the intersection of
machine learning and systems.
Today afternoon, there's
going to be a panel
that Chandu Thekkath
is going to moderate,
and you will see work from the lab on
deep neural networks
and systems to train
deep neural networks and systems
techniques to deal with the scale,
enormous scale that we
need with billions of
data points and what kinds
of techniques and
algorithms are needed,
systems optimizations
are needed to train
these humongous training workloads,
and so on and so forth.
I I'll call out 99Dots,
which is a societal impact work
that we've done for a long time now.
That's the work that got
built the mega enterprise,
where we have extremely
inexpensive sensing system
to determine if TB patients
are taking their medication,
and using a variety of techniques
to determine who is at the risk
of falling off from medication,
and intervening to ensure
that they complete the full course
of medication and hence get cured.
Interestingly, now that we
have been doing work
like this for some time,
we have a lot of data
from projects like
tuberculosis medication adherence and
we are able to use data science
and machine learning
to even and predict
which set of patients are at
risk of dropping from medication
and we can actually intervene.
So, and our work,
we think about our axis as
contributions to science.
We publish in every area.
We work and we publish in the
leading conferences and journals.
A lot of our work gets
applied to products,
products that Microsoft builds.
A lot of them we also deploy,
projects line and endorse, we deploy
in the community, we scale them.
So, unlike what you might perceive
a lab is academic, right?
A lot of our projects
we actually build them,
deploy them, and learn
from the experience.
That's the culture in our lab.
So we publish in every top countries
in every area in which we work in.
So this is actually
a Word Cloud of venues
where papers from our staff
appear in the last year.
There is about 6570 papers in Colt,
Neurips, and AISTATS, and OSDI,
and POPL, and PLDI, and STOC,
which are the premier conferences
in every area in which we work in,
and this is very
integral to our culture.
So I wanted to give you
one more slide on 99Dots.
I mentioned about this
tuberculosis medication adherence,
and I wanted to show this to
get a sense for how serious we
are about deploying
these things at scale.
99Dots for example now,
we spanned it of as
a startup called Everwell,
which is walking
distance from our lab.
It is a 18 percent company now
and 200,000 patients are
being treated using 99Dots.
Everwell has now scaled from
being a technology platform,
for not only just 99Dots,
but they provide
the IT infrastructure for
all TB treatment systems in India.
They touch over five
million patients today,
and $100 million of
TB eradication funds flows through
the system that was really
originated from our lab,
very proud about making
contributions this way.
Earlier in 2018,
99Dots was recognized
as an integral part of PM Modi's
TB eradication initiative.
It is part of
international coalitions
like Stop TB partnership with
millions of dollars of funding
being allocated to eradicate TB.
Which is the biggest
infectious disease killer
around the world and
in India today, right?
So we're very proud to work in
these kinds of crucial problems
with technology.
Because we are inherently
very academic in nature,
we interact with
academic institutions at
a far deeper and broader scale than
perhaps any multinational in India.
For example, because we have
such a high concentration of
PhDs in the organization,
several of us teach full semester
courses in institutions.
I think in IIT Madras
I think every year
there is somebody who is
teaching a full semester course.
I think last semester
Ravishankar Krishnaswamy
taught an approximation
algorithms course.
Satya Lokam has actually
taught a cryptography course.
Because of our physical proximity,
we teach perhaps
more courses than IAC.
Every year we teach I think
three to four courses at IAC.
We are part of
AAA Hyderabad and so on.
In addition to teaching courses,
we supervise PhD students.
There's about 10 pages to
students all over the world
that our staff are co-supervising.
We do several deep
collaborations with academia.
There are several relationships
where we have been collaborating
with both Indian academics
and academics abroad.
Multi-year relationships
where five papers,
six papers have come
out of collaborations.
We host faculty for sabbaticals,
for example Chiranjib Bhattacharyya
is doing his sabbatical
with us as we speak
right now this year.
We also do breadth programs.
We do summer workshops.
We organize the ACM-MSRI,
this event, every year.
We help with travel grants,
conference sponsorships.
We are here for the long haul and
we value the academic community
and we're in this together.
That's how we feel about
our work in this space.
There's another recent programs
that we have started
called collaborative efforts on
Cloud and AI for societal impact.
Particularly because
of our experience
in working in technologies
for emerging markets,
we have decided that
we wanted to support
not only societal impact initiatives
that start from our lab,
but societal impact opportunities
that are originated elsewhere.
So every year we are
going to do a call.
So anyone can submit ideas
where they're using Cloud,
AI, and other
technologies to help with
societal problems and
we will review them.
There is a committee
that selects them,
and last year we
selected four projects.
One on urban air pollution,
one on improving the efficiency
of crowd-source translations.
One you can see here on
technologies for mental health.
The other one is mass awareness
through financial incentives.
Couple of them are from
academic partners,
couple of them are from startups.
Each of them, they are
funded $50,000 each,
around 35 lakhs, and
each of them has a collaborator
in our lab as well.
We have also created physical space
for these people to come
collaborate with us.
This is a program that we intend
to continue year on year.
So that gives you a
sense for what we do.
I hope this gives you some sense
for the kind of ways in which
you can engage with us.
I again thank Basket and
IIT Madras for hosting us,
ACM India for collaborating with us,
and for all of you for
attending. Thank you.
>> Thank you Sriram.
Now I'd like to invite
the third co-organizer ACM India.
I'd like to invite Abhiram Ranade,
who is the President of
ACM India to again make
his opening remarks and talk a
little bit about ACM
India activities here.
>> So, I'm Abhiram Ranade.
I'm president of ACM India and
also faculty member at IT Bombay.
I'm really happy to be here
and on behalf of ACM India,
I would like to extend all
of you a very warm welcome.
I'm grateful to
IIT Madras and of course
NSR for working together
to accomplish this event.
My job here is to talk about
ACM India a little bit.
So, ACM India is an offshoot of ACM,
which is the parent body.
I'm I supposed to press
the play button here?
Okay. So ACM stands for Association
for Computing Machinery.
ACM is a fairly old society.
I guess it's as old as India,
founded in 1947 in the United States.
At this point, it has
about one lack members.
Fifty percent are in the US and
as high as 10 percent are in India.
It is the world's largest
educational and scientific
computing society.
Its tagline or motto is to
advance computing as
a science and a profession.
What does that mean? Well,
probably many of you are aware
and are actively using
journals and conference proceedings
that ACM publishes.
ACM has its digital library.
ACM is also involved in
developing the curriculum.
ACM puts a lot of effort into
the development surveys and
analysis of curricula
for computer science
and information technology and
all such related disciplines.
Perhaps the most well known aspect
of ACM's work is
the various awards it gives,
including the Turing Award,
which is considered in some sense to
be the Nobel Prize
of computer science.
So, ACM India as I said
is arm of ACM in India,
and it was established
about 10 years ago because it
was observed that there is a lot of
involvement in ACM work from India.
Our goals are similar.
We want to engage with academia
industry and the government.
Really we want to
provide a platform where
issues relating to education
and research can be discussed.
We want closer relationships
between industry and academia.
Also, we would like to affect
policy and engage the
government on that, okay.
In some sense, we would
like to become the voice
of the Indian Computing Community,
very similar goals to what ACM has.
Okay, so, let me speak
a little bit about
the kinds of initiatives
we have in the research.
So, first, one of
our major initiatives is
the Doctoral Dissertation
Award for India.
So this is being given for
the research which has been
done by students as a part of
their PhD in Indian universities,
and this has been happening
for about five-six years now.
We also bring leading
conferences to India.
So here are some of the conferences.
So the ICSE, POPL, VLDB,
MOBICON and we are
going to be bringing
the International Conference on
Performance Engineering in April.
One of our major activities is
to provide travel grants to
students who have got papers
into good conferences, good
international conferences.
For this, we partner
with IARCS which is
another body of Computer
Science Professionals.
We disburse about 35-40 lakhs
of grants every year, okay.
We also do a survey
of PhD Production.
You would like to know, we
would find out how well we
are doing in terms of how
many PhDs we are producing.
Of course, we would like to have
a very large number of PhDs
for a country of our size,
but this is our effort to
figure out exactly how much,
how far, where we are, okay.
Of course, this is one
of our flagship events,
the Academic Research Summit
with Microsoft Research.
We also have, our work
is done through
several Special
Interest Groups or SIGs
and there are Special Interest
Groups for Software Engineering,
Knowledge Discovery and Databases,
and also a more recent SIG for
Computer Science Education.
These are associated with
the respective conferences,
ISEC, CODS/COMAD, and Compute.
We also have an Eminent
Speakers Program
and we organize Summer Schools.
So a number of
Summer Schools have been
organized and will be
organized in this year.
These are for training students
in state-of-the-art
in various subjects.
So, yes, and of course
the ACM Academic Summit.
As far as education is concerned,
the delegate to worldwide
ACM committee for the,
we send delegates to
the worldwide ACM Committee
for their efforts on
curriculum design.
Then we also have
a liaison with AICTE,
All India Counsel for
Technical Education
to reform CS curriculums in India.
So one of our proposals was to say,
was to tell AICTE that look,
let us identify a few courses or
essentially really one course in
each discipline which we would
like to teach really well,
which we should teach really well.
So once we get
that one course really well,
then we can move on from
that and perhaps that might
be a self-sustaining effort, okay.
So we have got mandate
from AICTE to redesign
the Introductory Programming
Course and we are working on
it with full energy.
We have created
a massively open online course
for training teachers for
Introductory Programming
and we will create
an Introductory Programming
MOOC as well, okay.
Of course, we have initiatives for
other courses like
Algorithm Design as well.
So, we also organize Faculty
Development Programs on many topics,
standard topics as well as
state-of-the-art research,
emerging areas and one of
our big initiatives is
the CSPathshala Initiative
which aims to
develop the curriculum for
Computer Science in schools.
So, the curriculum for standards
one through eight has been
designed and has been
implemented in hundreds of
schools over the country.
We have had partnership, okay,
with Oxford University Press to
produce textbooks and
teaching material for this program.
ACM believes in women's issues
and we support and celebrate and
advocate engagement of women.
Traditionally, women have been
under-represented in computing
related areas but it is
changing and we are
actively working on it.
So we have a number
of events for that.
So there are a number of
conferences relating to
the Women in Computing where
we celebrate various women
who have played a major role.
So there is an all-India celebration,
there are also regional celebrations.
And then there are
technical symposia,
hackathons and coding competitions,
where the participants
are entirely women.
So, we believe that this is
turning out to be
a really good initiative.
I think women do tend to
come to these events much
more and they come and they are
much freer in these events.
Eventually, we hope that this will
lead to an increase and balance,
a gender balance in our workforce.
The Grace Hopper
Conference is organized
with the Anita Borg Institute and
we are the co-presenters of it.
We also engage with industry and
government and some of
our initiatives here are
the Deep Tech Summit with NASSCOM
and where our goal was to
connect startups and academia.
We have also participated in
the Smart India Hackathons.
Our efforts in this area tend
to be a bit in the weak side,
but we are actively engaging in
improving our efforts over here.
So we are attempting to enlist
industry partners and improve
these on with industry.
You will see some of these in
the ACM session at
the end of tomorrow.
All right, to conclude,
I would like to say that ACM India is
a volunteer body and it's a relatively
small volunteer body, okay.
However, it can serve
as a coordination body
and it can catalyze the interactions
between major players.
So the major players of
course are the government,
industry, academia.
We want to bring them together.
We want to figure
out what is lacking.
This is a role that ACM India,
I think would like to play
and we are already playing it
but we of course have
a lot more to do.
So to conclude, I would
like to say that we
are an enthusiastic and
a very open-minded group, okay.
There's a lot of work to do.
We have miles to go but we
hope that you will join us.
Okay. Thank you.
>> So, I really wanted to express
on behalf of all academics
our thanks to MSR India.
So more than any other corporate
players in the country,
I think you engage more in terms of
enabling higher-quality research
in academic institutions.
So thank you for that.
Taking an inspiration from
your post baccalaureate programs even
here at the RBC we have
launched a post-bacc program
where we invite students post
B.Tech to come and spend a
couple of years with us.
So thank you for giving us idea.
