Center for Societal impact through Cloud and Artificial Intelligence (SCAI)
Positively impacting society through technology
Our collaborators
We have been working in collaboration with a host of organizations to leverage Microsoft Research technologies and expertise to design, develop, and validate a range of potentially viable solutions.
CGNet Swara (opens in new tab)
CGnet Swara is an Indian voice-based online portal that allows people in the forests of Chhattisgarh to report local news in Gondi by making a phone call. They have been working in collaboration with the INMT (opens in new tab) team to build a Hindi-Gondi translation system that will allow them to make Hindi content available to the Gondi-speaking community.
Now a unique machine translation tool from Hindi to Gondi (opens in new tab)
Child Fund India (opens in new tab)
ChildFund is an NGO that provides comprehensive support to underprivileged and underserved children from birth until they reach 24 years of age through holistic interventions—integrating health, nutrition, gender, education, livelihoods, and child protection. We have been working in partnership with Child Fund India on Project Vishrambh to develop a platform that can help improve efficacy and transparency within the philanthropic sector.
Institute of Driving and Traffic Research (opens in new tab)
The Institute of Driving & Traffic Research (IDTR) is a joint venture between Transport department and Maruti Suzuki India Ltd. The focus of the IDTR is to train passenger and commercial vehicle drivers with the help of world-class training infrastructure and qualified trainers. We have been working in collaboration with IDTR on the project Harnessing AutoMobiles for Safety (HAMS) to pilot the technology for driver training. HAMS helps monitor the state of the driver and how the vehicle is being driven in the context o f a road environment that the vehicle is in.
Karya Inc aims to provide dignified work to people in rural India, wherever they are. As the world moves toward a digital future, there is an ever-growing amount of digital work. Their goal is to make this abundance of digital work available and accessible to everyone, including people in remote rural communities. Karya Inc has been working in collaboration to leverage Project Karya’s crowdsourcing platform to provide work and instructions in the regional language of the users. The Karya crowdsourcing platform allows anyone with a smartphone including those with no data connectivity to participate on the platform, receive work, and get paid.
National Institute of Mental Health and Sciences (opens in new tab)
The National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences is the apex center for mental health and neuroscience education in the country. In collaboration with NIMHANS, we developed an app that can help people better understand their distress and connect them to mental health professionals for support.
Navana Tech (opens in new tab)
Navana Tech enables last-mile access of digital services to low-literate smartphone users through the use of text-free, image-based and voice-assisted technologies and products.
Navana Tech has been working closely with researchers at Microsoft Research India. Navana have been leveraging the lab’s HCI expertise to design their product, Zabaan, a software development kit that enables applications to have voice annotations in any language. They have also leveraged the lab’s language model expertise to develop their models and have been using Project Karya’s crowdsourcing platform to collect speech data to develop language models for different Indic languages.
Ola Mobility Institute (opens in new tab)
Ola is India’s largest mobility platform, offering mobility solutions by connecting customers to drivers and a wide range of vehicles across bikes, auto-rickshaws, metered taxis, and cabs. In collaboration with Ola, we have worked on a drive-by sensing project to collect particulate matter data across Delhi using Ola cabs mounted with sensors.
Can hyper local air-quality data ensure a ‘Blue Sky’ future for Delhi?
Ola, Microsoft partner to collect air quality data in Delhi-NCR
Pratham Books (opens in new tab)
Pratham Books is a not-for-profit publisher that offers a range of story books for children at affordable prices and in multiple Indian languages. We have been working with Pratham Books to assist and improve the speed of the translation of children’s story books through the use of Interactive Neural Machine Translation (INMT) (opens in new tab) tool developed at the lab.
Respirer Living Sciences (opens in new tab)
Respirer Living Sciences is a climate science startup that builds low-cost, sensor-based air quality monitoring devices and uses IoT and big data to provide real-time air quality data analytics. Respirer has been working in collaboration with researchers at Microsoft Research India to leverage their expertise to ensure high fidelity sensor data capture, develop machine learning models, and visualize the data.
Democratizing air pollution data so India can clear its cities of choking smog
Three Wheels United (opens in new tab)
Three Wheels United (TWU) is a global tech-enhanced financier for light electric vehicles in emerging markets, starting with the auto rickshaws in India. TWU combines tailored financing solutions with innovative loan management and asset management technology to offer a competitive loan, removing barriers for uptake, while de-risking their lending. Researchers at Microsoft have been working with TWU to improve the financial inclusion of these communities and provide design input to TWU for their products and service.
We have also worked with TWU on a project called Turn2Earn that incentivizes auto-drivers to take specific routes to collect ground-level pollution data. Through this partnership we have identified low-cost methods to collect pollution data while providing the auto-drivers an additional source of income.
Translators without Borders (opens in new tab)
Translators without Borders (TwB) is a non-profit organization set up to provide translation services in the areas of crisis relief, health, and education for humanitarian non-profits. TwB has been working on providing Congolese Swahili and French translations to make health information available to the people of the strife-ridden region in an appropriate language. TwB is using INMT (opens in new tab) for their translation efforts to create appropriate healthcare information in Congolese Swahili.
Vision Empower (opens in new tab)
Vision Empower (VE) is a not-for-profit enterprise which empowers children with visual impairment through inclusive education. VE, in collaboration with Microsoft Research, has been working on designing methods to develop computational thinking in visually impaired children using play based or Ludic design approaches.
Voicedeck Technologies (opens in new tab)
Voicedeck Technologies is a company that seeks to develop end-to-end technologies to help the lives of the poorest people around the world. Voicedeck’s current offerings is a service that enables access to information to people in rural and remote areas through IVR systems and WhatsApp bots and provides incentives to learn. This service was built on top of Learn2Earn, a solution developed and open sourced by researchers at Microsoft Research India. Our researchers continue to closely collaborate with and advise the Voicedeck team on developing their technology and services.
Strategic partnerships
In partnership with Accenture, we have been successfully running the Amplify Program (opens in new tab) to help deepen the reach of entrepreneurs and startups that are focused on social impact and sustainability.