{"id":698989,"date":"2020-10-19T11:34:10","date_gmt":"2020-10-19T18:34:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-blog-post&#038;p=698989"},"modified":"2025-10-29T13:45:22","modified_gmt":"2025-10-29T20:45:22","slug":"podcast-evaluating-and-validating-research-that-aspires-to-societal-impact-in-real-world-scenarios-with-tanuja-ganu","status":"publish","type":"msr-blog-post","link":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/articles\/podcast-evaluating-and-validating-research-that-aspires-to-societal-impact-in-real-world-scenarios-with-tanuja-ganu\/","title":{"rendered":"Podcast: Evaluating and validating research that aspires to societal impact in real world scenarios. With Tanuja Ganu"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1536\" height=\"864\" src=\"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Tanuja-pc.png\" alt=\"a woman standing in front of a building\" class=\"wp-image-698995\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Tanuja-pc.png 1536w, https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Tanuja-pc-300x169.png 300w, https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Tanuja-pc-1024x576.png 1024w, https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Tanuja-pc-768x432.png 768w, https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Tanuja-pc-1066x600.png 1066w, https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Tanuja-pc-655x368.png 655w, https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Tanuja-pc-343x193.png 343w, https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Tanuja-pc-640x360.png 640w, https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Tanuja-pc-960x540.png 960w, https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Tanuja-pc-1280x720.png 1280w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1536px) 100vw, 1536px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-msr-podcast-container my-4\">\n\t<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.blubrry.com\/?podcast_id=69145704&modern=1\" class=\"podcast-player\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"164px\" width=\"100%\" scrolling=\"no\" title=\"Podcast Player\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"episode-006-october-20-2020\">Episode 006&nbsp;|&nbsp;October 20, 2020<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>At Microsoft Research India, research&nbsp;focused on&nbsp;societal impact&nbsp;is typically a very interdisciplinary exercise that pulls together social scientists,&nbsp;technology experts&nbsp;and designers.&nbsp;But how does one evaluate&nbsp;or validate&nbsp;the actual impact of research&nbsp;in&nbsp;the real world? Today, we&nbsp;talk&nbsp;to Tanuja Ganu who manages the&nbsp;Societal Impact through Cloud and AI&nbsp;(or SCAI)&nbsp;group&nbsp;in MSR India.&nbsp;SCAI focuses on&nbsp;deploying&nbsp;research findings&nbsp;at&nbsp;scale in the real world to validate&nbsp;them, often working with a wide variety of&nbsp;collaborators&nbsp;including&nbsp;academia, social enterprises and startups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tanuja is a Research SDE Manager at Microsoft Research, India. She is currently part of MSR\u2019s new center for Societal impact through\u202fCloud and\u202fArtificial\u202fIntelligence (SCAI).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Prior to joining MSR, she was a Co-Founder and CTO of&nbsp;DataGlen&nbsp;Technologies, a B2B startup that focuses on AI for renewable energy and sustainability technologies. Prior to this, she has worked as&nbsp;Research&nbsp;Engineer at IBM Research, India.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tanuja has completed\u00a0MS\u00a0in Computer Science (Machine Learning) from\u00a0Indian\u00a0Institute of Science (IISc, Bangalore). She\u202fhas been recognized as MIT Technology Review\u2019s Innovator Under 35 (MIT TR 35) in 2014 and IEEE Bangalore Woman Technologist of the Year in 2018.\u202fHer work was covered by top technical media (IEEE Spectrum, MIT Technology Review, CISCO Women Rock IT TV series, IBM Research blog and Innovation 26X26: 26 innovations by 26 IBM women).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Click\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/collaboration\/scai\/\">here<\/a>\u00a0to go to the SCAI website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"subscribe-and-listen-to-the-microsoft-research-india-podcast\">Subscribe and listen to the <a href=\"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/lab\/microsoft-research-india\/articles\/\">Microsoft Research India Podcast<\/a>:<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p><a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/feeds.blubrry.com\/feeds\/msrindiapodcast.xml\">iTunes<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> | <a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/subscribeonandroid.com\/feeds.blubrry.com\/feeds\/msrindiapodcast.xml\">Android<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> | <a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/feeds.blubrry.com\/feeds\/msrindiapodcast.xml\">RSS Feed<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> | <a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/show\/4z8l3ofB3tsL8i3JHxurkK\">Spotify<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> | <a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.google.com\/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ibHVicnJ5LmNvbS9mZWVkcy9tc3JpbmRpYXBvZGNhc3QueG1s\">Google Podcasts<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> | <a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/subscribebyemail.com\/feeds.blubrry.com\/feeds\/msrindiapodcast.xml\">Email<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-msr-show-more\">\n\t<div class=\"bg-neutral-100 p-5\">\n\t\t<div class=\"show-more-show-less\">\n\t\t\t<div>\n\t\t\t\t<span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"transcript\">Transcript<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Tanuja Ganu: As the name suggests, SCAI, that is Societal Impact through Cloud and Artificial Intelligence, it is an incubation platform within MSR for us to ideate on such research ideas, work with our collaborators like academia, NGOs, social enterprises, startups, and to test or validate our hypothesis through very well defined real world deployments. At&nbsp;SCAI, it&#8217;s&nbsp;an interdisciplinary team of social scientists, computer scientists, software engineers, designers, and program managers from the lab who&nbsp;come&nbsp;together for creating, nurturing and evaluating our research ideas through real world deployments and validations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>[Music]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Sridhar: Welcome to the Microsoft Research India podcast, where we explore cutting-edge research that\u2019s impacting technology and society. I\u2019m your host, Sridhar Vedantham.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t<span id=\"show-more-show-less-toggle-1\" class=\"show-more-show-less-toggleable-content\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\n\n\n<p>[Music]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>At Microsoft Research India, research focused on societal impact is typically a very interdisciplinary exercise that pulls together social scientists, technology experts and designers. But how does one evaluate or validate the actual impact of research in the real world? Today, we talk to Tanuja Ganu who manages the Societal Impact through Cloud and AI (or SCAI) group in MSR India. SCAI focuses on deploying research findings at scale in the real world to validate them, often working with a wide variety of collaborators including academia, social enterprises and startups.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Tanuja has been recognized as one of MIT Technology Review\u2019s Innovators Under 35 (MIT TR 35) in 2014 and by IEEE Bangalore as a Woman Technologist of the Year in 2018, and her work has been covered by top technical media.&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>[Music]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><b>Sridhar&nbsp;Vedantham<\/b><b>:&nbsp;<\/b><b>Tanuja<\/b><b>, welcome&nbsp;<\/b><b>to the podcast. I&#8217;m really looking forward to this&nbsp;particular edition&nbsp;of what we do here.&nbsp;Becaus<\/b><b>e<\/b><b>,&nbsp;I know that you manage&nbsp;<\/b><b>SCAI&nbsp;<\/b><b>and it&#8217;s quite an intriguing part of the lab.<\/b><b>&nbsp;<\/b><b>Now before we get into that, tell us a little bit about yourself.<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tanuja Ganu:&nbsp;First of all, thanks&nbsp;Sridhar&nbsp;for having me on the podcast today.&nbsp;And uh, yes, uh, I&#8217;m not a&nbsp;full-time&nbsp;researcher, but I&#8217;m engineer by training and I have done my Master\u2019s in&nbsp;Computer Science. Over&nbsp;the last decade or so, my&nbsp;work&nbsp;is&nbsp;primarily at the intersection of research and engineering, and it&#8217;s&nbsp;on the&nbsp;applied research side.&nbsp;So&nbsp;throughout my experience and journey, working at research labs and start up,&nbsp;I&#8217;m very much interested in taking a research idea through the entire incubation phase to validate its applicability in&nbsp;real world&nbsp;problem settings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><b>Sridhar&nbsp;Vedantham<\/b><b>:&nbsp;<\/b><b>So, Tanuja,&nbsp;<\/b><b>I know you manage this thing called&nbsp;<\/b><b>SCAI<\/b><b>&nbsp;within the lab and I think it&#8217;s a very interesting part of the lab. Talk to us a little bit about that, and especially expand upon what&nbsp;<\/b><b>SCAI-<\/b><b>&nbsp;the term&nbsp;<\/b><b>SCAI-<\/b><b>&nbsp;itself stands for, because I myself keep tripping up on it whenever I try to explain it.<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tanuja Ganu:&nbsp;Yes, Sridhar.&nbsp;So&nbsp;since the inception of our lab, the lab has been doing very interesting work in the&nbsp;societal&nbsp;impact space. Additionally, with the advances in artificial&nbsp;intelligence&nbsp;and&nbsp;cloud-based&nbsp;technologies in recent years there are increased opportunities to address some of these&nbsp;societal&nbsp;problems through technology and amplify its positive effect.&nbsp;So as the name suggests,&nbsp;SCAI,&nbsp;that is&nbsp;Societal&nbsp;Impact&nbsp;through&nbsp;Cloud&nbsp;and Artificial Intelligence, it is an incubation platform within MSR for us to&nbsp;ideate&nbsp;on such research ideas, work with our collaborators like academia, NGOs, social enterprises, startups, and to test or validate our hypothesis through very&nbsp;well defined real world&nbsp;deployments.&nbsp;Also&nbsp;our location in India allows us to witness and carefully analyze various socio-economic challenges.&nbsp;So&nbsp;the solutions that we ideate are inspired by Indian settings and in many cases equally applicable to different parts of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><b>Sridhar&nbsp;Vedantham<\/b><b>:&nbsp;<\/b><b>Interesting, so it sounds like there&#8217;s a fair amount of difference between the kind of work that&nbsp;<\/b><b>SCAI<\/b><b>&nbsp;does and between what the rest of the lab&nbsp;actually does&nbsp;in terms of research.<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tanuja Ganu:&nbsp;So&nbsp;at&nbsp;MSR India, where research work is mainly along three different axes, firstly advancing the state of the art in science and technology,&nbsp;second is inspiring the direction for technology advances, and the third important&nbsp;axis&nbsp;is building the technology for driving societal impact.&nbsp;So&nbsp;SCAI&nbsp;is primarily focused on social impact access and many of our projects also&nbsp;do&nbsp;have very strong academic and technological impact.&nbsp;At&nbsp;SCAI, it&#8217;s&nbsp;an interdisciplinary team of social scientists, computer scientists, software engineers, designers, and program managers from the lab who&nbsp;come&nbsp;together for creating, nurturing and evaluating our research ideas through real world deployments and validations.&nbsp;So&nbsp;that&#8217;s really&nbsp;the difference in terms of the other type of research that we do at&nbsp;lab&nbsp;and what we do at&nbsp;SCAI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><b>Sridhar&nbsp;Vedantham<\/b><b>:&nbsp;<\/b><b>So&nbsp;when you decide to take up a project or accept it under the&nbsp;<\/b><b>SCAI<\/b><b>&nbsp;<\/b><b>umbrella, what do&nbsp;<\/b><b>you&nbsp;actually look&nbsp;for?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tanuja Ganu:&nbsp;Yeah, we&nbsp;look&nbsp;for a few things for defining&nbsp;a&nbsp;SCAI&nbsp;project. So&nbsp;firstly,&nbsp;it should address a significant&nbsp;real-world&nbsp;problem and should have a potential to scale.&nbsp;The second thing is the problem should offer interesting research challenges for our team.&nbsp;The next thing is whether we have credible partners or collaborators with domain expertise to deploy, evaluate and&nbsp;validate of&nbsp;our research.&nbsp;We also look for how we can define rigorous impact evaluation plan for a project. And&nbsp;lastly,&nbsp;we look&nbsp;for what are&nbsp;the feasible graduation paths for the project within two to three years of time horizon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><b>Sridhar&nbsp;Vedantham<\/b><b>:&nbsp;<\/b><b>What do you mean by graduation?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tanuja Ganu:&nbsp;So, um, there are different ways in which a particular project can complete its successful execution at&nbsp;SCAI&nbsp;center, and that&#8217;s what we&#8217;re really terming it as a graduation. And there could be&nbsp;really different&nbsp;types of graduation&nbsp;path&nbsp;depending upon each type of project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><b>Sridhar&nbsp;Vedantham<\/b><b>:&nbsp;<\/b><b>OK, let&#8217;s talk a little bit about some of the projects that you are currently doing under the&nbsp;<\/b><b>SCAI<\/b><b>&nbsp;<\/b><b>umbrella<\/b><b>.<\/b><b>&nbsp;<\/b><b>Becaus<\/b><b>e<\/b><b>&nbsp;to me from what you&#8217;ve said so far, it sounds like there&#8217;s probably going to be a&nbsp;fairly wide<\/b><b>&nbsp;<\/b><b>spread of types of projects, and quite a large variety&nbsp;in&nbsp;the type of things that you&#8217;re doing there.<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tanuja Ganu:&nbsp;So yes, Sridhar,&nbsp;that&#8217;s very true. We are working on a very diverse set of projects right now.&nbsp;And, um, so to give a flavor of our work,&nbsp;I would&nbsp;discuss about&nbsp;two or three&nbsp;projects briefly.&nbsp;The first project is called&nbsp;HAMS&nbsp;that is&nbsp;Harnessing Automobiles for Safety.&nbsp;We all know that&nbsp;road&nbsp;safety is&nbsp;very&nbsp;critical issue and according to&nbsp;World&nbsp;Bank Report globally there are 1.25 million&nbsp;road&nbsp;traffic deaths every year.&nbsp;In India there is one death every 4 minutes. That&nbsp;happens&nbsp;due to&nbsp;road&nbsp;accidents.&nbsp;So,&nbsp;to understand and address this very critical issue&nbsp;of road safety,&nbsp;HAMS&nbsp;project was initiated by our team at MSR, including Venkat&nbsp;Padmanabhan,&nbsp;Akshay Nambi&nbsp;and Satish Sangameswaran.&nbsp;HAMS&nbsp;provides&nbsp;a&nbsp;low cost&nbsp;solution which is being evaluated for automated driver&nbsp;license testing.&nbsp;HAMS&nbsp;includes&nbsp;a smartphone with its associated sensors like camera, accelerometer,&nbsp;etc&nbsp;that is fitted inside a car. It monitors a driver and the driving environment and using AI&nbsp;and&nbsp;edge intelligence, it&nbsp;provides effective feedback on&nbsp;the safe&nbsp;driving practices.&nbsp;So&nbsp;at present,&nbsp;HAMS&nbsp;has been deployed at regional transport office in Dehradun, India for conducting dozens of driver license tests a day,&nbsp;and the feedback from this deployment is very encouraging,&nbsp;since it provides transparency and objectivity to the overall license&nbsp;testing&nbsp;and evaluation process.&nbsp;The&nbsp;second&nbsp;project is in the domain of natural language processing, called Interactive Neural Machine Translation, which was initiated by&nbsp;Kalika Bali&nbsp;and&nbsp;Monojit Choudhury&nbsp;in our NLP team.&nbsp;So,&nbsp;when we look at this problem, there are 7000 plus spoken languages worldwide, and for many&nbsp;many&nbsp;use cases, we often need to translate content from one language to another.&nbsp;Though there are many commercial machine translation tools available today, those are applicable to a very small subset of languages, say 100, which have sufficiently large digital datasets available to train machine learning models.&nbsp;So&nbsp;to aid human translation process as well&nbsp;as for creating digital data set for many low resource or underserved languages, we combine innovations from deep learning and human computer interactions and bring&nbsp;human&nbsp;in&nbsp;the&nbsp;loop.&nbsp;So&nbsp;when we talk about&nbsp;INMT, the initial translation model is bootstrapped using&nbsp;small&nbsp;data set that is available for these languages. And then INMT&nbsp;provides quick suggestions for human translators while they are performing translations.&nbsp;And over&nbsp;time it also helps in creating larger digital datasets which would help in increasing accuracy of translation for such underserved languages.&nbsp;So&nbsp;in&nbsp;INMT&nbsp;we&#8217;re currently working with three external collaborators called Pratham Books, Translators Without Borders and&nbsp;CGNet&nbsp;Swara&nbsp;to&nbsp;evaluate and enhance INMT.&nbsp;So just to give&nbsp;few&nbsp;examples, Pratham Books is&nbsp;a nonprofit publisher who would like to translate children story books&nbsp;in&nbsp;as many languages as possible.&nbsp;Translators Without Borders is a nonprofit who is working in the areas of crisis relief, health and education, and they would like to evaluate&nbsp;IN&MT for an Ethiopian language called&nbsp;Tigrinya.&nbsp;Our&nbsp;other&nbsp;collaborator&nbsp;CGNet&nbsp;Swara&nbsp;is working with&nbsp;INMT&nbsp;for&nbsp;collecting&nbsp;Hindi Gondi&nbsp;data set.&nbsp;And just to give you one last flavor of one more project\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><b>Sridhar&nbsp;Vedantham<\/b><b>:&nbsp;<\/b><b>So&nbsp;I&#8217;m sorry, sorry to interrupt, but I was curious, how do you&nbsp;actually go&nbsp;around selecting or identifying partners and collaborators for these projects?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tanuja Ganu:&nbsp;So when we started thinking about&nbsp;SCAI&nbsp;projects last year, we had initiated a call for proposals where we invited external partners and collaborators to submit various ideas that they do have and the process that they have in addressing some of the societal impact projects&nbsp;and&nbsp;we Interestingly received a huge pool of applications through this call for proposals we received more than 150 applications through that. And&nbsp;through&nbsp;careful&nbsp;evaluation process, as&nbsp;we discussed earlier, we finally selected a few projects to start under&nbsp;SCAI&nbsp;umbrella.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><b>Sridhar&nbsp;Vedantham<\/b><b>:&nbsp;<\/b><b>OK, so I&#8217;m sorry I interrupted<\/b><b>.<\/b><b>&nbsp;<\/b><b>You&nbsp;<\/b><b>wanted to<\/b><b>\u2026<\/b><b>you<\/b><b>&nbsp;were<\/b><b>&nbsp;speaking about another project.<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tanuja Ganu:&nbsp;Yeah, so just to give one more flavor of the project that we are currently doing which is addressing another important issue of air pollution.&nbsp;So&nbsp;air pollution is another major concern worldwide, with an estimated 7 million deaths every year, and when we look&nbsp;in&nbsp;India, it&#8217;s&nbsp;even&nbsp;more serious problem since&nbsp;13 out of 20 most&nbsp;polluted&nbsp;cities in the world are in India.&nbsp;So&nbsp;to solve the air pollution problem, it is important to get correct monitoring of pollution levels, their timely and seasonal patterns in&nbsp;more&nbsp;granular manner,&nbsp;that is,&nbsp;from multiple locations inside the city. So apart from sophisticated and expensive air pollution monitoring stations feature already available, there are low-cost air pollution sensors which are being&nbsp;deployed&nbsp;for this purpose.&nbsp;But the local sensors tend to drift or develop fault overtime and the entire monitoring and analytical insights are dependent on reliability and correctness of this IoT data.&nbsp;So&nbsp;taking these things into account, we are now evaluating our research project called&nbsp;Dependable&nbsp;IoT for these low-cost air pollution sensors.&nbsp;Dependable IoT helps in automatically identifying and&nbsp;validating&nbsp;the drift or malfunction in the sensors and notifies for recalibration or replacement.&nbsp;So currently we are working with a few startups in this space to evaluate dependable&nbsp;IoT Technology and&nbsp;as the project name such as this is not only limited to air pollution sensing, but this technology is applicable for many other use cases for IoT sensing-&nbsp;in agriculture, food technology or in&nbsp;healthcare.&nbsp;So&nbsp;I guess this gives you a view on some of the diverse projects that&nbsp;now&nbsp;we are&nbsp;doing and working on at present in&nbsp;SCAI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><b>Sridhar&nbsp;Vedantham<\/b><b>:&nbsp;<\/b><b>Yeah, so this&nbsp;<\/b><b>Dependable&nbsp;<\/b><b>IoT thing sounds quite interesting. So correct me if I&#8217;m wrong, but<\/b><b>&nbsp;essentially<\/b><b>, what we&#8217;re saying is that we&#8217;re trying to figure out ways in which we can ensure that the data that we&#8217;re receiving in order to extract information from it and make decisions<\/b><b>&#8211; we&#8217;re&nbsp;<\/b><b>actually trying to figure out our trying to make sure that the data itself is solid.<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tanuja Ganu:&nbsp;Absolutely.&nbsp;That&#8217;s correct,&nbsp;Sridhar, and it&#8217;s like monitoring the monitor, right?&nbsp;So&nbsp;while we&#8217;re doing the IoT monitoring and sensing, we need to make sure that the technology that we&#8217;re putting in place is being monitored and it&#8217;s giving us reliable and correct data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><b>Sridhar&nbsp;Vedantham<\/b><b>:&nbsp;<\/b><b>Great.<\/b><b>&nbsp;<\/b><b>Now what&#8217;s also coming across to me throughout this conversation is that<\/b><b>&nbsp;given&nbsp;<\/b><b>the variety of projects and the variety of collaborators that you&#8217;re looking at in&nbsp;<\/b><b>SCAI<\/b><b>&#8211; would&nbsp;<\/b><b>I be right in saying that the kind of people that you have in&nbsp;<\/b><b>SCAI<\/b><b>&nbsp;in addition to the researchers<\/b><b>,<\/b><b>&nbsp;<\/b><b>obviously<\/b><b>&nbsp;who are your internal collaborators<\/b><b>, the&nbsp;<\/b><b>people who are part of&nbsp;<\/b><b>SCAI<\/b><b>, are they a very diverse and varied set of people?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tanuja Ganu:&nbsp;Yes,&nbsp;absolutely true, Sridhar. As we discussed earlier,&nbsp;SCAI\u2019s&nbsp;an interdisciplinary team that consists of social scientists, CS researchers, solid software engineers and designers.&nbsp;And we also have a program called&nbsp;SCAI&nbsp;Fellows where&nbsp;fresh under&nbsp;graduates or the candidates who are already working in the industry can&nbsp;join on&nbsp;the specific&nbsp;SCAI&nbsp;project for a fixed time period and contribute towards the development of&nbsp;SCAI&nbsp;project. So particularly in&nbsp;SCAI, in addition to all these technical&nbsp;or&nbsp;academic&nbsp;skills,&nbsp;we&#8217;re&nbsp;also looking for people who have passion for societal impact and willingness to do the field work and deployment to scale a research idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><b>Sridhar&nbsp;Vedantham<\/b><b>:&nbsp;<\/b><b>OK, and you know<\/b><b>,<\/b><b>&nbsp;you might at any point&nbsp;of&nbsp;time be working on say,&nbsp;<\/b><b>four<\/b><b>, five or six projects.<\/b><b>&nbsp;<\/b><b>Uh, what happens to these projects once they are completed?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tanuja Ganu:&nbsp;Yeah, so I would say each project would have a different graduation plan.&nbsp;So&nbsp;whenever a project is complete from the&nbsp;SCAI&nbsp;perspective, we call&nbsp;it as&nbsp;a graduation plan where we would define how this project would then sustainably grow further internally or externally.&nbsp;And&nbsp;this graduation plan would be different for different projects depending upon the nature of the project.&nbsp;So&nbsp;for some of the projects, the graduation plan could be an independent entity that is spun off to take the journey of the project forward by scaling the initial idea to more people, more geographies, or for more use cases.&nbsp;A very good example of this type of graduation plan is&nbsp;a&nbsp;MSR project called 99&nbsp;DOTS, where researchers like Bill Thies&nbsp;and others at Microsoft Research started this project to address medical adherence for tuberculosis.&nbsp;Over the years, this work has significantly grown and there is an independent entity spun&nbsp;off called&nbsp;Everwell&nbsp;to take the 99&nbsp;DOTS&nbsp;journey forward. The other type of graduation plan can be putting up&nbsp;a work&nbsp;and technology in the open source wherein the external social enterprises, NGOs&nbsp;or&nbsp;our&nbsp;collaborators can build on top of it&nbsp;and&nbsp;take the solution forward&nbsp;at&nbsp;larger scale.&nbsp;The&nbsp;example of this&nbsp;is&nbsp;our&nbsp;work on interactive machine translation, where we have open sourced our initial work and various collaborators are now using, validating and building&nbsp;on&nbsp;top of this technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><b>Sridhar&nbsp;<\/b><b>Vedantham<\/b><b>:&nbsp;<\/b><b>OK, and does the work that you do in&nbsp;<\/b><b>SCAI<\/b><b>&nbsp;or say t<\/b><b>he validation that you&#8217;re looking for&nbsp;<\/b><b>from research projects or the validation you&#8217;re looking at of research projects<\/b><b>&nbsp;through&nbsp;<\/b><b>SCAI<\/b><b>&#8211; does that<\/b><b>&nbsp;<\/b><b>feed<\/b><b>&nbsp;<\/b><b>back<\/b><b>&nbsp;further into the research itself<\/b><b>,<\/b><b>&nbsp;<\/b><b>or&nbsp;<\/b><b>does&nbsp;<\/b><b>it<\/b><b>&nbsp;<\/b><b>kind of just stay at&nbsp;<\/b><b>SCAI<\/b><b>?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tanuja Ganu:&nbsp;So, it has two or I would say it would have multiple pathways, but primarily the first thing is certainly the work that we&#8217;re doing is&nbsp;validating&nbsp;certain research hypothesis that we do have.&nbsp;So&nbsp;some of the output or outcome of these&nbsp;SCAI&nbsp;projects is feeding back into the research areas&nbsp;and&nbsp;validating&nbsp;or invalidating the hypothesis to say how&nbsp;the technology&nbsp;is helping to solve a particular research problem or not. But&nbsp;also&nbsp;if the intervention is successful, it would be useful for external collaborators internally,&nbsp;externally for them to take up this idea forward&nbsp;and&nbsp;utilize the technology that we have built at&nbsp;SCAI&nbsp;to&nbsp;taking&nbsp;it to&nbsp;larger&nbsp;scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><b>Sridhar&nbsp;Vedantham<\/b><b>:&nbsp;<\/b><b>OK, so once again coming back to the fact that the<\/b><b>&nbsp;projects&nbsp;<\/b><b>that you do are of such&nbsp;different&nbsp;nature<\/b><b>,&nbsp;<\/b><b>how do you&nbsp;actually even&nbsp;define success metrics for&nbsp;<\/b><b>SCAI<\/b><b>&nbsp;projects?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tanuja Ganu:&nbsp;Yeah, this is&nbsp;a&nbsp;very interesting question, Sridhar.&nbsp;So,&nbsp;the whole purpose of&nbsp;SCAI, as the name suggests, is&nbsp;about&nbsp;bringing&nbsp;social impact through technology innovations.&nbsp;So&nbsp;there is no one fixed set of metrics that would be applicable for&nbsp;each and every&nbsp;project at&nbsp;SCAI.&nbsp;But our success metrics for these projects are geared towards&nbsp;validating&nbsp;whether technological interventions can support the people and ecosystem and&nbsp;actually help&nbsp;address a specific problem or not. And&nbsp;if it does help solve the problem, then how can we amplify the positive effect&nbsp;using&nbsp;technology? So those are really the&nbsp;metrics&nbsp;that we&#8217;re defining on each of the&nbsp;project&nbsp;depending upon&nbsp;nature&nbsp;of the project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><b>Sridhar&nbsp;Vedantham<\/b><b>:&nbsp;<\/b><b>So Tanuja, thank you so much for your time. This has been a great conversation and all the best&nbsp;for&nbsp;going&nbsp;forward in&nbsp;<\/b><b>SCAI<\/b><b>.<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tanuja Ganu:&nbsp;Thank you,&nbsp;Sridhar,&nbsp;for having me here and I really enjoyed discussing these projects and ideas with you. Thank you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>[Music Ends]<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<button\n\t\t\t\tclass=\"action-trigger glyph-prepend mt-2 mb-0 show-more-show-less-toggle\"\n\t\t\t\taria-expanded=\"false\"\n\t\t\t\tdata-show-less-text=\"Show less\"\n\t\t\t\ttype=\"button\"\n\t\t\t\taria-controls=\"show-more-show-less-toggle-1\"\n\t\t\t\taria-label=\"Show more content\"\n\t\t\t\tdata-alternate-aria-label=\"Show less content\">\n\t\t\t\tShow more\t\t\t<\/button>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At Microsoft Research India, research\u00a0focused on\u00a0societal impact\u00a0is typically a very interdisciplinary exercise that pulls together social scientists,\u00a0technology experts\u00a0and designers.\u00a0But how does one evaluate\u00a0or validate\u00a0the actual impact of research\u00a0in\u00a0the real world? Today, we\u00a0talk\u00a0to Tanuja Ganu who manages the\u00a0Societal Impact through Cloud and AI\u00a0(or SCAI)\u00a0group\u00a0in MSR India.\u00a0SCAI focuses on\u00a0deploying\u00a0research findings\u00a0at\u00a0scale in the real world to validate\u00a0them, often working with a wide variety of\u00a0collaborators\u00a0including\u00a0academia, social enterprises and startups.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33713,"featured_media":698995,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"https:\/\/player.blubrry.com\/id\/69145704\/","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-content-parent":199562,"msr_hide_image_in_river":null,"footnotes":""},"research-area":[13556,13559],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"class_list":["post-698989","msr-blog-post","type-msr-blog-post","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","msr-research-area-artificial-intelligence","msr-research-area-social-sciences","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_assoc_parent":{"id":199562,"type":"lab"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-blog-post\/698989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-blog-post"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-blog-post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33713"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-blog-post\/698989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1153963,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-blog-post\/698989\/revisions\/1153963"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/698995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=698989"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=698989"},{"taxonomy":"msr-post-option","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-post-option?post=698989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}