We're building the largest computing facility
Richard “Rick” Rashid runs Microsoft Research, the software giant’s crack 850-person unit, and has overseen breakthrough research in the areas of e-commerce, Internet and online products and its ubiquitous Office software. Microsoft was one of the earliest investors in such a research unit, but its investments have been overshadowed in recent times by Google’s rampant progress. However, Rashid, who has previously worked at the Computer Sciences Department of the Ivy League Carnegie Mellon University, says Microsoft continues to work at the farthest frontiers of computer science. An avid science fiction fan and Star Trejunkie, Rashid says that as the world starts to revolve around the Internet, new computer languages and business models will emerge. He met Business Today’s Rahul Sachitanand, for a wideranging discussion on his “baby” during a recent trip to Bangalore. Excerpts:
I came to Microsoft to build the equivalent of a computer sciences department within the context of a software company. Microsoft Research is really like that—it is very much patterned after the Computer Sciences Department at the Carnegie Mellon University in the mid-1980s. That’s where I grew up and learnt to do research. When I came to Microsoft, I tried to recreate that environment in a software company.
Why is your research critical to the performance of Microsoft as a company and the industry itself?
A huge number of technologies used by the company has come out of Microsoft Research. What became the Digital Media Division was a group I started in 1992-93 and we spun that out in 1996. I started the first e-commerce group in the company and all the data mining facilities in Sequel (a computer language) came out of this unit. Microsoft Search technologies, natural language and speech technologies, several Office and online products also came from Microsoft Research. The impact on the company has been dramatic. The real reason you want a basic research group in a company like Microsoft is to address the things that you don’t know will happen. It gives us the ability to survive. We started Microsoft Research in 1991 when the company was very small. Most of our peers at that time don’t exist anymore.
How difficult has it been to keep the feel of a small computer science lab in a multi-billion dollar company that Microsoft has become?
We have our own identity; we are a well-recognised entity within the academic community. In some sense, we’ve almost achieved the status of a university. We have almost as many PhD researchers as many universities—we have 850 PhD researchers. That’s more than the entire faculty of the Brown University. Microsoft has more members in the National Academy of Engineering than the University of Washington. We have maintained our focus by having the same approach and philosophy since the beginning.
And that is…?
To address the frontiers of computer science and develop next generation products for the company. We don’t look at the market as it is today, but try to see where technology will be several years from now.
How has your field of research evolved over the years?
The field of computer science has evolved and we have evolved with it. We cover a much broader field of research today than we did earlier. Increasingly, we are working in areas that fall between computer science and other fields. So, we do work in computational biology, statistical physics, statistics, sociology, medicine and environmental sciences. The role of computer science has been growing in those fields and as a result, we’ve grown into those areas, too. We’ve been doing work on the worldwide telescope; that’s a deep involvement between Microsoft Research and the astronomy community. We’re working on an AIDS vaccine with a number of partners in the academic world. Those are outcomes of the growth of the field of computer science.
Microsoft has pioneered the large-scale technologies used in client-server and businesses. That’s an area Google isn’t even involved in. If you look at the work we’re doing on building large-scale databases, you’ll see the success of products like SharePoint, which gives us over $1 billion (Rs 4,800 crore) in sales. We’ve had enormous success in providing tools to manage businesses in a networked environment. The challenge for us and other companies such as Google, Yahoo! and Amazon is to translate our successes with large companies to the individual consumer. People are still trying to find the right technologies and ways of making these technologies accessible to businesses.
What is the future direction of network-based computing? What are the challenges?
We’re building the largest computing facilities mankind has ever seen. The future opportunity is to do things we’ve never been able to do before. We’re applying these massive resources to complex medical and environmental problems. Some simple examples: in the medical area, we do a very poor job of personalising medicine, despite the large amounts of data doctors and hospitals collect. We ought to be doing a much better job tracking disease and predicting outbreaks.
But it will be a challenge to define the operating system of these systems. How do we programme these systems? How do we make them accessible to developers? There are physical limitations. How do we best use power? The way we build computers today, will not be how we do it in 20 years—I’m sure of that. There’s a huge opportunity in this space and we’re just scratching the surface.
Dell has recently spoken of trademarking the phrase “Cloud Computing”. Is this move by a single company to mark off a field for itself a positive development?
I think the whole field of computer sciences is a collaborative experience. We’re going to be talking publicly about our new initiatives in Cloud Computing and professional developers are a critical resource. This new world is an opportunity for them. This is something we have to build together and no one company can do it.
How closely do you work with the academic community?
When I started Microsoft Research, one of the first things I did was to set up a technical advisory board and we’ve re-created that everywhere. About 15 per cent of all our funding goes to academic institutions… we have several joint curricula and labs. In China, we have the status of an educational institution. We are authorised by the government to hand out a post-doctoral degrees in computer science. In India, we run summer school programmes. We also run the largest PhD internship programme globally. We have far in excess of 1,000 interns working with some part of Microsoft.
How much has Indian academia evolved over the years?
When we first built the labs here, one of the first areas we identified was the PhD system in computer science. India had, and still has, a relatively small system for producing PhDs in computer science. Last year, India produced only 50 such PhDs. The comparative figures for the US and China were 1,800 and 2,000, respectively.
Does the paucity of PhDs slow down your growth in India?
We’re hiring people from all over the world and bringing them here. But that’s true all over the world. At least half our researchers in the US were born outside that country. As India’s economy has grown and the country has become more of an economic power, it is attracting more people. It also gives us the opportunity to attract people who we may not have otherwise hired.
Are you also addressing the bottom of the pyramid? What are the challenges in this market?
Sure. We have a project called Digital Green, which won the Stockholm Award this year. We have been leading the effort to define research in this area and have well-refereed conferences in this area. We can use research breakthroughs from other areas and apply them to developing solutions for developing markets and evolve new products for this segment, too.
Finally, do you continue to be a big Star Trek fan?
I am a big Star Trek fan. I have always taken everyone who works with me in the US to new Star Trek movies. When the first movie was released, I was a professor at Carnegie Mellon and I had two graduate students—that was in 1980. When the last movie came out, over 500 employees and their families turned up at a screening at our Redmond (Virginia, US) campus… so, it was a lot more expensive. I’m also a big science fiction fan. I was the keynote speaker at the Science Fiction Nebula Awards in 2004. I’m even a character in a science fiction story. My favourite authors include Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear.
