Tanuja Ganu
Director of Research Engineering
About
Hello! I am a Director of Research Engineering at Microsoft Research, India. I lead MSR’s center for Societal impact through Cloud and Artificial Intelligence (SCAI) (opens in new tab). SCAI focuses on creating, nurturing and deploying technologies that will have large scale impact on society.
My research interests are in Applied AI and AI for Social Good. My current research work is focused on validating the use of GenAI technologies and understanding the gaps and new research directions for addressing important societal challenges in diverse domains like education, agriculture and healthcare. This includes the work on project VeLLM (opens in new tab) (UniVersal Empowerment with LLMs) and Shiksha copilot (opens in new tab) – a copilot for empowering teachers to generate engaging and personalized learning experiences.
Prior to joining MSR, I was the Co-Founder and CTO of DataGlen Technologies, a B2B startup that focuses on energy assets monitoring and optimisation, and rapid adaption of distributed and renewable energy resources using IoT and Machine Learning technologies.
Prior to this, I have worked as Research Engineer at IBM Research, India. At IBM, my work was focused on developing low cost innovative solutions like nPlug (opens in new tab), to address energy shortage and peak demand problems that are applicable for developing as well as developed countries.
I completed my MS in Computer Science (Machine Learning) from Indian Institute of Science (IISc, Bangalore).
Featured content
Podcast - Evaluating and validating research that aspires to societal impact in real world scenarios
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.
Shiksha copilot
Teachers in India help Microsoft Research design AI tool for creating great classroom content.
Research Forum 3 | Panel: Generative AI for Global Impact: Challenges and Opportunities
Microsoft researchers discuss the challenges and opportunities of making AI more inclusive and impactful for everyone—from data that represents a broader range of communities and cultures to novel use cases for AI that are globally relevant.