Microsoft: “ TechVista, Microsoft Research (MSR) India’s annual research symposium, features some of the best recognized scientists from across the world as speakers. TechVista brings together the research community, academia and government onto a common platform.”

I recently got the opportunity to attend the “symposium” and it made me clear why such a “hype” was attached to the event (besides the poolside lunch at the five star hotel [intercontinental eros], it was good). As claimed by MS, it really did brought together the research community (plenty of Phd’s, abundance of people from good institutes), academia (many of them were able to inspire me(!)) and government (Kapil Sibal [Sci-Tech minister], Arun Shourie [ex-disinvestment minister], yeah and their speech was inspiring too). In addition there was a project poster exhibition and some Microsoft fellowship awards (which carry an astonishingly 20 grands(!), yeah you heard/read me right).

Session one : Dr. Rick Rashid (VP, MSR) spoke about new upcoming technologies Microsoft Surface (technology), Program Termination (research), Storage (Sky Server)(application), Streaming Model (predicting jams, tracking each persons movements [what was that? breach of privacy. huh?]).
This was followed by a presentation by Prof. Eric Grimson who talked about the role of computational application in image guided systems. Main focus was to ensure the robustness and reliability of the system (since it could cost a precious life).
Prof Krithi Ramamritham majorly talked about aAqua (which pretty much seemed like some general web forum until he introduced scalability [cross lingual archive], usability and availability[delay tolerance] issues).

Session (they named it “special session”) : Rick Rashid, Craig Mundie, Kapil Sibal, Sirini Koppolu. Rick gave a nice demo of PhotoSynth , which brain stormed Kapil Sibal and he came up with ideas of project collaboration with MS (3D views for Delhi’s historical monuments and for international museums and making it public)[huh?].

Session two : Who doesn’t get fascinated by robots especially when they can do things like this:

Note: They are not remotely controlled.

Prof Manuela M Veloso and her team (currently |team| = 16) have worked for over 10 years(!) for this.
This was followed by presentation by Dr. Tony Hey (time for a short nap). The session concluded by Dr. Michael Kass who spoke about the animation in general and the Clothing Animation at Pixar in particular (used in movies like ‘Incredibles’ and ‘Ratatouille’).

The day was concluded by Dr. Arun Shourie who gave a motivating lecture on “need for research in india”.
btw: did you knew that India produces 45 PhD’s a year as opposed to US’s 1500. (surprisingly pathetic. right?)