people
 

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collaborators

Microsoft Research India
Joseph Joy
Sean Blagsvedt
Vibhore Goyal

Microsoft Research Redmond
Venkat Padmanabhan


IIT Bombay
Uday Desai (Electrical Engineering)
T. N. Singh (Earth Sciences)

Interns 2005
Anmol Sheth, Univ. of Colorado Boulder
Rohan Murthy, Cornell University


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projects

:: Senslide:  is aimed at predicting rockslides in the areas like the Konkan and the Himalyas. The project had its genesis in IIT Bombay when researchers in Earth Sciences and Electrical Engineering suggested the use of a wireless sensor field consisting of cheap sensors based on strain gauges to predict rockslides. Apart from interesting aspects in understanding rock behaviour, and in signal processing, there are significant problems to overcome in providing fault-tolerance, low power consumption, and reasonable accuracy of prediction in such a distributed system. Our initial work in this area is promising and is summarized in a poster paper that appeared at the last SenSys conference.

External Collaborators

• Uday Desai (IIT Bombay)
• T N Singh (IIT Bombay)

Project Members

• Chandu Thekkath
• Anmol Sheth

:: SPACE: Secure Protocol for Address-Book based Connection Establishment

The last decade has seen a huge increase in the number  of  consumer  devices  with  integrated wireless  communications  (Wireless  Local  Area Network – WLAN) such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi that  enable  users  to  connect  to  other  nearby devices  in  a  direct  peer-to-peer  fashion.    The potential  benefits  of  these  direct  connections were  once  heralded  as  significant  –  allowing users  to  engage  in  collaborative  applications.  We feel that the potential of peer-to-peer ad-hoc  networking  has  not  yet  been  achieved, especially  on  mobile  phones  and  laptop computers.   We  identify  two  particularly  weak points  in  the  connection  establishment  process viz.,  security  concerns  and  user  inconvenience. Existing connection-establishment protocols for Bluetooth  and  IEEE  802.11x  have  known security  flaws,  and  can  be  compromised  using well-known  techniques  and  off-the-shelf hardware.  In addition, these protocols require explicit user intervention, like entering a passkey. 

SPACE is a protocol for secure automatic ad-hoc connection-establishment between two devices based on their address book entries. Our  protocol  is  based  on  the  simple premise  that  if  two  people  have  each  other’s contact  details  in  their  address  books,  they probably  know  and  trust  each  other  in  some limited way and  this can form a basis for a  trust relationship  between  their  devices,  without additional  user  intervention.

Project Members

• Sean Blagsvedt
• Ramarathnam Venkatesan
• Ganesh Ananthanarayanan
• Prasad Naldurg
• Adithya Hemakumar
• Karthik Kambatla

:: COMBINE: Collaborative Download for Multi-homed Mobile Devices 

Mobile devices are increasingly equipped with multiple network interfaces – one set of interfaces for local connectivity (WLAN) and the other for external connectivity (WWAN). The absolute speeds of the WWAN interfaces are insufficient for many network intensive applications. Additionally, there is a large disparity in speeds between the WLAN and the WWAN interfaces with WLAN interfaces being at least an order of magnitude faster than WWAN interfaces. These two reasons suggest the formation of a collaborative community via the WLAN interfaces where nodes pool in their WWAN interfaces effectively to obtain higher bandwidths and hence superior network performances.

We propose a collaborative download mechanism where a group of nodes form a local community and split the download job among themselves in proportion to their WWAN capacities so that the effective time taken for the download process is reduced. We are in the process of building a prototype that addresses the difficult challenges of forming collaborative communities and distributing work to the members in an efficient and practical manner in a dynamic environment.

Project Members

• Ganesh Ananthanarayanan
• Venkat Padmanabhan
• Chandu Thekkath

:: OWeb: A Framework for Offline Web Browsing 

Internet browsing has traditionally been dependent on the real-time network availability and speed. This dependency becomes a significant constraint when accessing the web over slow and intermittent networks. Accessing large chunks of data, or streaming content across the web often incurs problems with latency, interruptions, and poor quality, at least where network connectivity is questionable. In this project, we explore ways in which the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds could be utilized for improving the Internet browsing experience.

Successful models for offline data access include SMS and E-mail synchronization over mobile phones. The important characteristic of this class of applications is that the end-user never needs to wait for access to data. The content is always available and offline. This results in a positive user experience as the user is insulated from the vagaries of the network. The essential point is to provide a “best-effort” guarantee to ensure that the latest content is always downloaded and present on the device.

The salient aspects that we address in the OWeB system are:

• Intelligent pre-fetching: The system queries the servers periodically for RSS feeds. The RSS feeds alleviate the problem of successfully predicting the importance of the new content since they are defined by the website authors and hence are accurate.
• Intermittent Network handling: The system handles intermittent networks by employing well-known techniques like opportunistically downloading the content when the network is available and queuing interrupted downloads for re-trials.
• Template Identifier and Page Stitching: We have developed an algorithm that automatically identifies the core content area of a homepage and extracts the template, and then locally stitches the feed items into the template. This enables our system to construct the homepage given only the RSS feed.

We also want to propose extensions to the RSS protocol so that they could be more effectively utilized by browsers operating over intermittent and slow networks.

Project Members

• Sean Blagsvedt
• Kentaro Toyama
• Ganesh Ananthanarayanan

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publications
Senslide poster abstract to SenSys05 conference

Ganesh Ananthanarayanan , Ramarathnam Venkatesan, Prasad Naldurg , Sean Blagsvedt and Adithya Hemakumar, “SPACE: Secure Protocol for Address-Book based Connection Establishment”, Fifth Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-V), Irvine, California, Nov. 2006.

Ganesh Ananthanarayanan , Sean Blagsvedt and Kentaro Toyama, “OWeB: A Framework for Offline Web Browsing”, 4th Latin American Web Congress (LA-WEB 06), Mexico , Oct. 2006.

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careers

Researcher (Hardware, Communications and Systems) 

Microsoft Research India’s threefold mission is to do recognized, world-class research, to contribute to Microsoft products and business groups, and to support the growth of advanced research education in India. MSR India will pursue these goals within the context of several research areas, including technology for emerging markets, multilingual systems, digital geographic, hardware, communications, systems, and software engineering.  

Researchers work independently or with a team to conduct high-quality academic research in their field. They work to enhance their presence in their field of research outside of Microsoft, through paper publication, conference attendance, and otherwise interacting with an international academic community. Researchers also engage with Microsoft product groups to find ways of making their work relevant to the company through technology transfer and influence on business strategy. And, they collaborate with universities and mentor research interns with whom they work. Senior researchers may lead a group of researchers in these efforts and take part in setting direction for the overall lab. 

The Hardware, Communications, and Systems (HCS) group will conduct research in computer hardware design with an emphasis on the architecture and implementation of low power and lightweight devices such as sensors nodes, in communications as it relates to wired, wireless, and sensor networks, and in software systems broadly defined to include operating systems and distributed systems. Researchers in the HCS area are expected to be broadly educated in computer design, networks, operating systems, and distributed systems. We expect that researchers will have a specialization in one of these topics but are eager and capable of doing research in one or more of the other topics.

We are looking for varying levels of experience: senior researchers with significant experience in the field, as well as recent (or soon-to-be) doctoral graduates. Qualified candidates will have a PhD, a record of publications appropriate for their experience, and a desire to grow their career in research. Strong communication skills are essential.

Full-Time Positions at Microsoft Research India

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