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Our Bureau

Hyderabad, Dec. 12 Microsoft India Development Center (MSIDC) here has demonstrated a handful of connectivity features developed by it for the upcoming Windows 7, the next version of the operating system slated for release next year.

Microsoft Research India (MSRI), Bangalore has come up with a unique solution that aims to harness people’s mobile phones for road and traffic monitoring.

These were two of the 20 research projects showcased at TechXchange 2008, held at the MSIDC campus here on Friday.

TechXchange is an annual collaboration between MSIDC and MSRI that aims to ‘enable deep integration between the Microsoft’s research and product teams in India’ and is into its second year of functioning.

Pointing out that the company develops technologies and products that ‘impact millions of customers across the world’, Mr Srini Koppulu, Corporate Vice-President and Managing Director of MSIDC, told newspersons that the event was an opportunity to bring out research ideas as features of next generation products.

One such project demonstrated at the event was called Robust Location Search.

This innovation seeks to solve the difficulty of searching for locations in places such as India where the address patterns are often unstructured, incomplete or inconsistent.

For example, searching on an Internet mapping service for a hospital that one remembers to be ‘off Mount Road’ and ‘near a hotel’ may not throw up any relevant results at present. But with RLS, the chances are that one may locate the hospital, or, two, if there’s another one that answers the description.

The RLS project is nearing completion and may be available as a feature of Microsoft’s Live Search Maps service soon. Connectivity features that are going to be part of Windows 7, named ‘Mobile Broadband’, providing the users with Internet connectivity through cellular networks, ‘Agile VPN’, giving the users seamless VPN connectivity by jumping to new networks when the present network drops, and ‘Direct Access’, allowing users to connect to VPN from anyplace with Internet access, were also demonstrated.

A project named ‘Nericell’ seeks to monitor road and traffic conditions using Smart Phones that people carry with them. The software being developed by MSRI, when installed on the phone, senses the conditions along the drive (speed breakers, potholes, congestion etc.) and sends the information to the ‘Nericell’ service which processes the aggregate data (coming in from various phones in various locations) and creates a complete ‘traffic picture’.

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