TechVista, Microsoft Research India's annual research symposium, was held on January 22, 2010 at the Leela Kempinski Palace hotel in Bangalore, India and coincided with the 5th anniversary of Microsoft Research India.
TechVista brings together the best minds from the scientific and academic worlds onto a common platform and provides an opportunity for the research community, government, and students to interact and exchange ideas on research and its future directions.
TechVista 2010 featured some of the technical and policy thought leaders from India and abroad as speakers.
Session 1 (0900-1430)
The inaugural session in the morning featured leading and influential personalities from the government, academia and industry as speakers, with Nandan Nilekani, Chairperson, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) as the Chief Guest. Other highlights of the morning session included:
- A talk by Dr. Richard F. Rashid, Senior Vice President, Microsoft Research, and the head of Microsoft Research worldwide.
- A Distinguished Address by Turing Award recipient Prof. Adi Shamir, The Paul and Marlene Borman Professor of Applied Mathematics, Weizmann Institute of S
cience. - A panel discussion on "The Future of Computing" with Turing award recipients Prof. Barbara Liskov, Sir Tony Hoare, and Dr. Butler Lampson, Dr. Tony Hey, Corporate Vice President, External Research Division, Microsoft Research also participated as a panelist. Prof. Maria Klawe, President, Harvey Mudd College, was the panel moderator.
- A talk by Dr. P. Anandan, Managing Director, Microsoft Research India, charting the progress of the lab since inception.
Session 2 (1430-1730)
The second session of TechVista 2010 featured a large number of cutting edge demos from the different Microsoft Research labs worldwide, talks by leading researchers and a poster session by Indian Ph.D. students.
The demos encompassed a large spectrum of fields in computer science, and represented some of the cutting edge research being conducted at Microsoft Research. The technical talks addressed some of the most challenging problems in computer science, and ways to approach them. The following researchers presented technical talks:
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Exploring New Horizons of Computing with Microsoft Research Asia Dr. Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Managing Director, Microsoft Research Asia. |
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Managing Structured Data: What’s New? Dr. Surajit Chaudhuri, Research Area Manager, Data Management, Exploration and Mining group, Microsoft Research. |
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Verification, Testing, and Statistics Dr. Sriram Rajamani, Assistant Managing Director, Microsoft Research India. |
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Embracing Uncertainty: The New Machine Intelligence Dr. Christopher M. Bishop, Chief Research Scientist, Microsoft Research Cambridge, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, Fellow of Darwin College Cambridge. |
This session also featured a Ph.D. poster session where Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Ph.D. students from India selected through a competitive process presented posters on their research work.
The results of the Ph.D. poster session are:
| First Prize |
Ant Colony Optimization: Analysis, Algorithms and Applications Sameena Shah - Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi |
| Second Prize |
Low power receiver architecture and algorithms for wireless personal area networks Satyam Dwivedi - Department of Electrical Communication Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore |
| Third Prize |
Equivalence Checking in Complex Embedded System Design Verification Chandan Karfa - Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur |
| Fourth Prize |
Horn-Ok-Please Rijurekha Sen & Prashima Sharma - Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay |
