Chandu Thekkath

"An overview of MSR-I"

(Vortrag im Rahmen der "MPI Distinguished Lecture Series" in Kooperation mit dem Fachbereich Informatik)

This talk will briefly cover the overall research agenda of the MSR Lab in Bangalore. We work in many broad areas that of CS including Algorithms, Crypto, Systems, ML, and ICT4D among others. The talk will cover three ongoing projects to give you a sense of the breadth of our work: The Trusted Cloud, Green Spaces, and 99DOTS.
The goal of the Trusted Cloud project is to explore the challenges of keeping client data stored in the Cloud secure without trusting the Cloud operator, and involves research in the disciplines of computer security, programming languages and verification, and hardware.
The Green Spaces project attempts to understand the implications of using TV spectrum to provide ubiquitous internet access in countries like India or Brazil where, unlike the US, there is plenty of unused spectrum that can be tapped. This project involves both questions in CS research as well as policy issues at the national level on spectrum allocation.
The 99DOTS project address the problem that arises when patients do not adhere to medications as prescribed by the doctors. Such non-adherence has severe health consequences to large population of patients in all parts of the world. 99DOTS proposes a novel solution to ensure medication adherence in a very cost way, and is used by the Indian Government for Tuberculosis in all its treatment centers in the country.

Bio: Chandu Thekkath, currently head of Microsoft Research India, joined Microsoft in 2001. Microsoft Research India, which began operating in January 2005, conducts basic research in computing and engineering sciences relevant to Microsoft’s business and the global IT community, with a special focus on algorithms, cryptography, security, mobility, networks and systems, multilingual systems, software engineering, machine learning, and the role of technology in socioeconomic development.
Thekkath began his career at Microsoft as a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, where he did research in multiple areas: mobile devices, distributed data intensive computing, and large-scale storage systems. He also worked with the Hotmail team as chief architect for the Blue project. Blue went into production use within MSN in mid-2006 and was an early example within Microsoft of a large scale distributed storage system that provided strict read/write guarantees in the presence of disk, machine, and network failures.