Microsoft India to focus on machine learning and advanced analytics

Betting big on advanced analytics and machine learning on its Azure cloud, Microsoft is planning to ramp up its market reach through its existing clients across verticals and government initiatives in India.

According to Microsoft Bing Search and Advertisement India and R&D General Manager Russ Arun, with the emergence of a powerful distributed computing environment and on-demand cloud infrastructure, computing today is increasingly becoming affordable, scalable, and accessible.

“Big data analytics, coupled with machine-learning algorithms, holds immense potential in terms of driving fundamental changes in critical areas like education and health. To that extent, advances in computing can help governments and society create relevant interventions in pressing issues,” Arun said. “It is our next frontier, but we are in a nascent stage. We are working with multiple academies in the country and are organising hackathons to initiate the process of building the ecosystem for the country,” he said. Microsoft recently proved its talent in this space by predicting that NCAA basketball team will win the tournament. In India, it helped the Andhra Pradesh government and LV Prasad Eye Institute (LVPEI).

“Microsoft is working with over 10,000 schools to help predict dropouts. So far, more than six lakh predictions for post-grade Xth students have been generated from this initiative, using our advanced analytics and machine learning platform,” Arun said.

He said that the Microsoft platform engaged with LVPEI to derive insights from clinical data and tackle eye diseases more effectively. “Using Azure, we collected insights from millions of clinical data points from over 120 centres on patients suffering from eye diseases and mapped geographies where these occur. In a successful pilot, a team of LVPEI doctors worked closely with data scientists to build predictive models using cloud-based machine-learning,” he said.

Besides its intelligent personal assistant Cortana, Microsoft is using advanced analytics and machine-learning in its consumer facing products and search. Microsoft recently acquired Revolution Analytics, an advanced-analytics platform based on the open source R programming language.

Microsoft started availed these products for data preparation, statistics and machine-learning.