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| Sibal with Microsoft Research senior vice-president Rick Rashid in Bangalore on Wednesday. (PTI) |
Bangalore, Jan. 12: Microsoft Research today launched its operations in India. The Bangalore lab, the third such facility outside the US, will conduct long-term basic and applied research.
Microsoft Research India will initially start investigating the areas of geographic information systems (GIS), technologies for emerging markets, multilingual systems and sensor networks.
Microsoft Research India and the ministry of science and technology and ocean development also signed a memorandum of understanding to work on science and technology research projects.
The first collaborative project will be a geographic information systems project that will bring a variety of satellite imagery, remote sensing and geographic data together in an indexed database.
Microsoft Research India will make much of the government's non-sensitive geographic data available to the public in a format that is easy to browse and comprehend.
Eventually, such a system could enable people to exchange information, much like the Internet, but it would be indexed by region and geography. Research for this project will involve work from relevant fields of computer science, including GIS, graphics, user interfaces, spatial databases, image processing and computer vision.
As the project progresses, an Indian citizen can get a bird's-eye view of the country. Comprehensive digitisation of the terrain can support relief planning and monitoring in the wake of natural disasters.
The lab was inaugurated by Kapil Sibal, Union minister of state for science and technology and ocean development.