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(From left) Mr Craig Mundie, CTO and Senior Vice-President for Advanced Strategies and Policies, Microsoft; Mr Dayanidhi Maran, Union Minister for Communication and IT; and Mr P Anandan, Managing Director, Microsoft Research India, at the inauguration of the MSRI facility in Bangalore on Friday. - - G.R.N. Somashekar

Bangalore , Oct. 7

MICROSOFT Research India (MSRI), which opened its new facility in Bangalore on Friday, said that it has tied up with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) to carry out research on multi-lingual Web search, browsing and indexing, and machine translation among Indian languages and English.

Mr P. Anandan, Managing Director, MSR India, said both entities were in the process of identifying a framework to work together with a number of academic and scientific organisations, which are already in these areas.

Mr Anandan was speaking at the inaugural of MSRI's new facility.

MSRI, formally launched in January 2005, has 20 full-time researchers.

It is also working with IIT-Bombay on a project on landslide detection that applies distributed, wireless sensors to monitor landslide-prone areas.

"We are also working with IIT-Bangalore to investigate the impact of computing technology in agriculture," he said.

The company is focussing its research on technology for emerging markets, multi-lingual systems, digital geographics, hardware and communication and rigorous software engineering.

Computer literacy in schools

Inaugurating the new facility, the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Mr Dayanidhi Maran, said Microsoft would soon take up experimental programme in extending computer literacy to schools.

The company is providing 5,000 computers, besides the necessary interactive software for the pilot scheme of `computers in classrooms' that would cover six States, he said.

Mr Maran said the Microsoft Chairman, Mr Bill Gates, had promised to provide Rs 10 crore for an e-governance project.

A Cabinet note on the e-governance project was being prepared and would be taken up shortly. Microsoft, Mr Maran said, would launch its starter edition of Windows XP in eight Indian languages along with English, which would give a further boost to the low-cost computer initiative.

Gates may visit Chennai in December

THE Microsoft Chairman, Mr Bill Gates, scheduled to visit India in December, may skip the country's tech capital Bangalore.

"I'll be taking him to Chennai," said the Union Communications and IT Minister, Mr Dayanidhi Maran, on Friday.

Mr Maran said with Bangalore growing at an `unimaginable speed', global IT firms should look beyond Bangalore to set up their operations, especially in secondary cities such as Mangalore, Hubli among other locations.

On Bangalore's infrastructure issue, he said the recent steps taken by the Chief Minister, Mr Dharam Singh, to set up a high-power committee to monitor the situation on a weekly-basis had led to tangible results.

"There are visible changes," he said.

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