Machine Learning and AI | India

The ML and AI group at Microsoft Research India tackles some of the coolest, hardest, most fascinating and impactful research problems in AI, ranging from theory to advances in large-scale AI models. Our research has won best paper awards at premier conferences and has benefitted hundreds of millions of people worldwide. See our publications for examples of our work.

The group offers a warm and welcoming environment where diverse people and projects thrive. We work hard to provide support mechanisms which allow people the flexibility to explore different paths to success, including:

• Choosing to strive for excellence in individual projects vs collaborating in teams to achieve much more than what any individual could.
• Pursuing fundamental research in core areas vs working on highly interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, information retrieval, systems, theory and related areas.
• Studying the theoretical foundations of problems vs taking an empirical approach and tackling applications end-to-end.
• Choosing the ideal mix of academic, social and product impact that is appropriate for each person.  

Researchers, engineers and data scientists pursuing all these approaches have found success in our group at MSR India. In addition to exploring the frontiers of new research areas in a bottom-up fashion, we also provide top-down support for mature projects by facilitating research collaborations and providing strong engineering and data-science support.

To take just one example, the Extreme Classification project tackles the largest classification problems in the world involving millions to billions of categories. It started out as a bottom-up exploration by an individual researcher in a core area of machine learning. After a decade, the project is still going strong and has evolved into an interdisciplinary project with key contributions from researchers in diverse areas of computer science and strong engineering support from the lab. Along the way, the project has started a new area of machine learning research which is thriving in both academia and industry. The extreme classification group has published highly impactful papers in leading conferences including ICML, KDD, NeurIPS, WSDM & WWW where the quality of their research has been recognized by best paper awards. The group also maintains the Extreme Classification Repository which has become a vital resource for carrying out open and reproducible academic research. At the same time, the group has won multiple awards for their impact and engineering excellence. 

We are actively looking for exceptional researchers, engineers and data scientists in all areas of AI and ML. Please visit MSR India’s career opportunities page to see what positions are currently open.