The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh / Hyderabad News : RLS to become a feature in ‘livemaps’ of Microsoft

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Saturday, Dec 13, 2008
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh - Hyderabad

RLS to become a feature in ‘livemaps’ of Microsoft

Special Correspondent

‘Various applications will be integrated to develop the final product’

Photo: MohD.Yousuf

Microsoft touch: An expert demonstrating new Paint with your fingers during the Tech Xchange 2008 held at the Microsoft Hyderabad Campus on Friday. .

HYDERABAD: Microsoft India Development Centre (MSIDC) and Microsoft Research India (MSRI) are collaborating to develop ‘Robust Location Search’ (RLS), a tool to locate a specified place through livemaps of Microsoft. “Whenever it is ready with features like multilingual applications, it will be rolled out into the market” said Srini Koppolu, Corporate vice-president and MD of MSIDC.

The MSIDC and MSRI jointly showcased their products – some of them are at various stages of development and some have been deployed in the market – as part of their TechXchange 2008 here on Friday. The product and research teams collaborated always, said P. Anandan, MD of MSRI.

He said that various applications like making languages accessible, the mechanisms for inputs, keywords, would be integrated to develop the final product. The business scenario and customer scenario given the population were being studied by a small team of researchers for developing the RLS exclusively for India.

Dr. Anandan said RSL is a good example of an area of collaboration between MSR India and MSIDC. Robust location search would solve two key problems when users searched for addresses: often the addresses were unstructured, incomplete or misspelled; and there was no single common address format.

For instance, if ‘near NIMS’ was typed for a building having a name in Hindi, the tool would provide the actual location. The RLS would come as a feature of livemaps.

Mr. Koppolu said: “From India, we develop technologies and products for Microsoft that impact millions of customers across the world. I am very excited about the opportunity that this collaboration presents in bringing out some of the research ideas as features of next generation products.”

In addition to Robust Location Search, MSIDC and MSRI are also collaborating on some key areas such as software engineering, multilingual systems and security.

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