overview

The Advanced Development and Prototyping (ADP) group charter is building systems that bring research ideas to life in realistic environments. The group helps research groups with prototyping and technology transfer, as well as initiates its own projects that have longer term scope and often span multiple research areas. Some of the longer term projects we are involved in are: (1) using combinations of static analysis and information retrieval to make it easier to understand and debug large, evolving software systems, and (2) robust techniques for determining the geographic locations given textual queries. We do publish, typically in collaboration with researchers, but our heart is in building real systems at near production quality and scale.

 people

B. Ashok	Ajay Manchepalli	Joseph Joy	Gopal Srinivasa
Pushkar Chitnis	Sandeep Karanth	Naren Datha	Rashmi KY
Tanuja Joshi	Krishna Mehra	Aditya Sankar	Sai Tetali
Udayan Khurana	Archana Prasad	Santhosh Kumar	Ritesh Nayak
Rahul Agarwal	Sanoop PS	Akhil Mathur	Apurva Joshi

projects

• Robust Location Search: A novel approach to doing geo-spatial search over semi-structured geographical data. Members:Joseph Joy, Vibhuti Sengar, Tanuja Joshi, Shalini Hada.
• wikiBabel: Using MSR's machine translation to automatically translate content from one language to another and to allow users to make corrections in a wiki like manner. Members: Naren Datha, Saravanan K. (MLS), A. Kumaran (MLS).
• Verification of Systems Software: Improving the process of verifying systems software, particularly device drivers using the Yogi approach. Members: Saideep Tetali, Aditya Nori (RSE), Sriram Rajamani (RSE).
• Web-based collaboration frameworks: Developing tools and frameworks to simplify the process of collaboration over the internet. Members:Joseph Joy, Gopal Srinivasa, Aditya Sankar, Ritesh Nayak.
• India Digital Heritage: Exploring ways to preserve and showcase the richness and detail of both tangible and intangible aspects of heritage. For example in the "Sri Andal Temple Narrative" project, we weave together multiple technologies into a single compelling narrative about the legend of Goddess Andal and Srivilliputhur temple complex. Members: Aditya Sankar, Ajay Manchepalli, Archana Prasad, A. Kumaran (MLS), Joseph Joy, Naren Datha, P. Anandan, Saravanan K. (MLS), Sridhar Vedantham, Vidya Natampally.
• Digital Green: We seek to disseminate targeted agricultural education to small and marginal farmers through digital video. The system sustains relevancy in a community by developing a framework for participatory learning. We digitally record progressive farmers and experts, train local extension staff, and motivate other farmers to improve their practices by narrowcasting relevant content. Members: Akhil Mathur, Kentaro Toyama (TEM), Naren Datha, Rikin Gandhi (TEM), Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Randolph Wang.
• CoCoNet: Efficient (increased bandwidth, reduced latency and energy) content compression techniques over Wide Area Networks. Members: Bhavish Aggarwal (MNS), Pushkar Chitnis, Ramachandran Ramjee (MNS), Rahul Agarwal
• NetPrints: Goal is to alleviate home user frustration by making the search for the correct configuration parameters automatic. The main idea of the project is to use shared knowledge to resolve misconfiguration issues in home networks. Members: Bhavish Aggarwal (MNS), Pushkar Chitnis, Rahul Agarwal, Ranjita Bhagwan (MNS), Tathagata Das (MNS), Venkat Padmanabhan (MNS) 

We are also working on a few other projects that are not publicly announced yet. Watch this space for updates.

former members

interns speak

Samarth Prakash

I worked at Microsoft Research India as a research intern from Jan to June 2007. They were perhaps the most fulfilling 6 months of my life. And, I had great fun too. I worked mostly on the Geocoder project and did get a feel of the Virtual India project.

What struck me was that the people at the lab were so passionate about what they were doing and were enjoying themselves thoroughly. And it surely did rub off on me. I had a really good time, in all respects. Joseph, Vibhuti, Tanuja and Gopal were great to work with and the environment in the lab was fantastic; everybody and everything was almost beyond expectation.

The experience at MSRI has helped immensely. Previously, I wasn't really inclined towards research, but MSRI ignited a spark somewhere, and pulled me towards research, even though I was in the Advanced Development and Prototyping Group. After that I cannot quite do any other routine work. I was also lucky to get the opportunity to co-author a paper with exceptional people.

Everyone in the lab somehow manages to combine great work and dedication with fun and enjoyment. This experience is something I will cherish all my life. Truly remarkable.

Prateeksha Uday Chandraghatgi

My 6 month stint at MSR was one of the most interesting, fun and informational periods of my life. Partly because it was my first job :-), but mostly because of the great atmosphere it provides for one to learn, work and party all at the same time. The people in MSR were extremely smart, friendly, interesting, fun loving and more than anything else, encouraging and accommodating. These are not just a bunch of adjectives I pulled from the dictionary. I mean every word of it.

I could not have kick started my career in a better fashion. I have profited from my encounter with every person in MSR, in more ways than one. And that's another great thing. In MSR, you don't just work with your team, you work with the whole lab. You have interesting talks, exciting discussions, fun filled outings and activities; and all this apart from the opportunity you are given to express yourself, go after your ideas, and follow exactly what you want. MSR will always have a warm place in my heart.

Robin Anil

To tell the truth, I was in a state of confusion when I got accepted at MSR India as an intern, as I had to decide whether I should take the internship offer from a University abroad or come to MSRI. And now, at the end of my second internship, here I am feeling that this was the best decision I made in my life. This has the same level of excitement working in a startup if not more.

I was given a concept that was broad and I had to abstract it out and create a proof of concept. On the way I faced number of challenges which required my learning of in depth knowledge of new concepts in .NET programming. I was given access to plethora of tools and utilities which made coding challenging and never tiring.

One cool part about the internship was how I could subscribe to many of the discussion groups where Microsoft Employees from around the world share their concepts and ideas and help each other. The informal nature of your day to day relationship with your manager adds to the charm of the place. If I keep on going into more details, I would have to write a 20 page report on why it is so cool to work here at MSRI.

publications

• Crosslingual Location Search: Tanuja Joshi, Joseph Joy, Tobias Kellner, Udayan Khurana, A. Kumaran, Vibhuti Sengar. ACM SIGIR '08: The 31st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference, July 2008.
• Robust Location Search from text queries: Vibhuti Sengar, Tanuja Joshi, Joseph Joy, Samarth Prakash, Kentaro Toyama. ACM GIS '07: 15th ACM International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, November 2007
• Programming Asynchronous layers with CLARITY: Prakash Chandrashekaran, Chris Conway, Joseph Joy and Sriram Rajamani. FSE '07: 15th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, September 2007
• Synergy - A new algorithm for property checking: Bhargav S. Gulavani, Thomas A. Henzinger, Yamini Kannan, Aditya Nori and Sriram Rajamani. FSE '06: 14th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, November 2006

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careers

Are you passionate about fundamentally improving software development at Microsoft? Are you excited by state of the art information retrieval, program analysis and distributed computing? Join the team at the very frontier of applying distributed information retrieval and analysis technology to radically improve the way software is built and sustained.

Large, long lived software projects have immense complexity. This complexity hinders an organization’s agility and ability to innovate. Much knowledge is implicit, and hard or impossible to transfer. Many potential insights remain unrealized due to the difficulty of extracting knowledge from the mass of data generated during the course of software development and customer deployment. MSR India’s Software Development Analytics project intends to tackle this problem head on, by building a scalable platform for data mining and analysis, as well as building and deploying services and tools based on this platform.

We are looking for an experienced engineer with a passion to improve the state of the art of how complex software is built. Join us now to help lead this effort through architecture, design, implementation and deployment. You will be responsible for defining the architecture for our project as well as to work jointly with others on our vision and long term strategy. You will be working closely with researchers, and delivering on our vision with a series of well executed releases. You will also be working with senior leadership throughout the company to evangelize the tools, services and prototypes that we build.

We are looking for an experienced engineer or architect with proven management, leadership and communications skills to deliver on the ambitious goals of the Software Development Analytics project as well as other projects in the Advanced Development & Prototyping team.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• Strong technical leadership
• Hands on experience architecting and implementing solutions, preferably on MS or equivalent technologies (.Net, SQL, Clustering)
• Track record of leading teams that consistently meet or exceed commitments and deliver high-quality software
• Effective communication, collaboration, and negotiation skills
  MS in CS or technical field
• 8 + years experience in software development with large, multi-discipline teams
• Deep understanding of development processes and has personally contributed to at least one of critical product ship cycle at a large software firm

Desired Skills & Qualifications

• Technical understanding of program analysis and software development tools
• Experience with large scale information retrieval or distributed computing technologies

If you are interested in applying for a job, please email bash-at-microsoft-dot-com.