(Corporate) Culture and Parathas

Revi had promised to show Mike, a frequent visitor to India who works in Redmond, this good paratha place on Commercial street, Jason needed to go to Commercial Street to check up on a gift he was getting for somebody, Udai was the person that initially told Revi about this paratha place, and I like food and entertainment. So we all went.

Revi worked at Microsoft both in project teams and at MSR (but not as a researcher) before she left for graduate school, and Mike has been at MSR since about 1996. They told some amazing stories about the pre-dot-com-bust (and immediately post-dot-com-bust) days at Microsoft; mostly stories I won't repeat here. One exception is that I had never heard the story of Bedlam DL3, which was a pretty wild story.

The Microsoft I work for - at Microsoft Research, in India - is not the Microsoft that these guys described, not even close. The company they described was incredibly intense in terms of lifestyle, time, and emotional impact - not quite investment-bank intense but definitely on the same level. Working for MSR India has been, well, notably less intense. We all worked crazy late hours on our conference submission to be sure, but all throughout my internship I've gotten in and been pretty much alone (except for my advisor, Aditya, who works a time-shifted schedule for his family's sake) and gone home after most everyone else (though rarely, if ever, have I been the last research employee to leave). Even so, I've spent much less time at "Scientia" (the name of our office building) than I do in Wean (CMU people know that this means little - I spend LOTS of time in Wean). I think most people here are pretty good at the "work/life" balancing act, which has been a nice to see on a large scale.

[Update: It makes sense that the day I write this entry I accidentally oversleep till just after 9 AM (rolls eyes)]

Badami, Etc.

Gave the first of two talks today on some CMU-related things (Twelf), it was well received by the MSRI crowd and I was happy about that.

Got profiled by Microsoft Research's PR team, and while that's really awesome I really hope they change the picture (I gave them a great picture of me in front of the Queen's Palace in Hampi that Jason took, but they made it a ridiculous-looking windswept sunglass-wearing headshot).

Going to Badami this weekend with five other people, and while I'm kind of exhausted after the talk and want to just lie down for a long time, it should be a fun and exciting trip!

[Update: They did fix my picture. And I'm back from Badami, and can't find my darn USB cord so that I can upload the pictures from the trip. So that will have to wait 'till at least tomorrow I'm afraid!]

Next Chance I Get

It's been an intense few weeks since the Fourth, as we were trying to get a paper on our project submitted to a pretty big conference, POPL. We got the paper submitted, it's nifty, and we won't know if it gets accepted until long after I'm out of India (the end of September, basically).

It's exactly halfway through my 12 week internship this weekend, and since it hasn't all been work for the past two weeks, I'll try to mention some of the interesting bits of July in the next few posts.

[Update: 12 week not 12 month]

Busy week into busy weekend

Gosh things have been busy! A couple of updates.

• Last weekend I reserved my copy of Harry Potter Book 7. I get it at 5 AM July 21st, which is to say 4.5 hours before it will be available for you Eastern Daylight Time suckers.


• I'm heading to Hampi this weekend with Prasad, Nels, and Jason - Christian got sick and Pavol got busy.


• My mentor, Aditya, has a new son! His wife had a baby a week ago, sorry I didn't blog about that!


• I got the Harry Potter reservation (pictured above) last weekend when we went down to the main drag (M-G Road). M-G stands for "Mahatma Gandhi," and some of us Americans think it's strange that it's not called "Ghandi Road," but coming from a city where Ponce is a road I suppose I have little room to complain. My Misc. India album now has pictures of us bowling, and of the aftermath of an apparently fatal windstorm near M-G road.

See Rock City

A delayed post about my trip to Mysore - work is pretty intense right now, and will be at least for the next week or so, so I have had less time to blog. I mentioned pictures of the trip two posts ago, but I will try to tell some stories now. No travel this weekend, but we have tickets to Hampi next weekend. Mysore was fun, though it seems to be more of a tourist destination for people who live in India - Pavol, Jason, Nels, and I may have been half the white guys some people saw all day there. It's not the place you need to spend more than a day at, according to everyone we've talked to (and I agree) - in short, I'd declare Mysore the Rock City of the metro-Bangalore region. That said, for a day trip, it was quite nice.

We saw the palace, which was interesting, and Jason and Pavol rode an elephant while Nels and I stridently did not ride an elephant. After that we took an autorickshaw up to the temple atop Chamundi hills, which was kind of a mistake in retrospect. See, these autorickshaw things, mechanically, are are like a cross between a decent motorcycle and a really awesome lawnmower, not the kind of thing you necessarily want to use to get three people up a large (say, Stone Mountain-sized) hill. Our lawnmower barely, barely made it up the mountain - we were getting passed by everything, including large farm equipment. It made me glad that we didn't haggle down the price (which was less than $5 equivalent already), as this driver probably melted his engine in the process of getting us up the mountain.

In general, and especially at the top of the hill, poverty was more evident than it usually is in Bangalore... it was at times quite striking, there were definitely a number of begging children that followed us around for some distances on occasion. However, the increased amount of obvious poverty in Mysore when compared to Bangalore was offset by a curious effect that in Mysore, everyone was following us around for some distance - people selling flutes would follow us playing the flute, kids would start up conversations any way possible and then try to direct us to particular markets or sell us drugs (one young guy just shouted "Marijuana!" out of nowhere). In this environment you quickly train yourself to ignore everyone that you're not explicitly interested in facilitating a commercial transaction with (say, an autorickshaw driver), and as a result of this effect you notice beggars less - you've already had to turn off your instinct to engage with people to avoid getting anywhere without being sold things. I was trying to get Pavol to teach me Slovak so that I could respond to people asking me questions/trying to sell me stuff in Slovak and they would go away - a similar strategy actually worked for me in France.

When we walked down the mountain, we were so in ignore-everyone mode that we (or at least I) had to consciously think about the need to re-engage with people, that the people we were encountering on the big staircase were either being friendly or wanted to practice English (or perhaps wanted to take a picture with us.)

That's all for Mysore, at least for now. Tonight I was invited randomly by Kentaro to go to dinner with a young full-time employee and a visiting professor from NYU at the Windsor Hotel, which is right next to my apartment. The food was north Indian - it was supposedly Lucknow cuisine but I was told it seemed more typical of Hyderabad. Whatever, it was wonderful, a much nicer restaurant than I'd been to since I got here, the food all smelled like perfume and tasted fantastic.

The Dream

I want to write something about how Micosoft Research, India got started, and I wasn't sure I wanted to write this story because I didn't hear the whole conversation. But a conversation with a friend made me want to write this down. I apologize if this is rushed, I'm trying to get to work. Anandan is the driving force behind the creation of this lab, and he was talking with another researcher during the retreat when I walked up. The conversation was along the lines of Anandan recalling having had a dream (as in hope, not as in I-was-sleeping) at some indeterminate time in the past - the dream basically was that someday there would be international students - American and Eurpoean students - studying in a lab in India under the mentorship of Indian researchers. Which is, of course, what I am doing.

Most of the interns here are undergraduates - this was a surprise to me, partially because I would never have thought to do this as an undergraduate. I didn't have the research focus at the time, and even if I had... well, at this point in my life going to MSR India only seemed a bit more unusual than going to MSR Cambridge (England) - but two years ago I wouldn't have been interested in eating Indian food, for instance, which I now love. I suppose in the past two years I've grown in ways that made the simple fact of traveling to India seem less unusual.

And then it occurs to me that two years ago, this lab didn't exist yet. Oh right. That dream of Anandan was only realized in the time since I've graduated from Princeton. It seems like two years ago we were only just getting worried about sending unskilled tech jobs to India. And while I realized, in the process of applying for this job, that it was a little odd for me to go to India just in terms of demographics (see the tagline for this blog), it was the partially overheard comment about Ananadan's dream that made me realize what didn't seem odd - it didn't seem strange to think of MSR in Bangalore, India as a place where research on par with other academic institutions around the world is done.

But while that is a truth, I suppose it's a recent truth. And that is wild. My world moves fast.

Visual Studio

I am at work waiting for Visual Studio to install so I can hopefully get some work done - today is a process of being very excited about starting and getting into the project, and being very frustrated and annoyed at the random hurdles needed to get there.

MSRI Angsana Retreat

However, the retreat was amazing - I have some pictures up on Picasa. I was pretty jet lagged, but I still managed to stay up until midnight Sunday night - some of the interns and a lot of the employees sat in a circle and sang beautiful songs in a wide array of beautiful Indian languages. I started learning about the various languages that existed in India before the English this weekend, but that is a post for the future.

Living in the Future

It is 9:30 PM here, and jet-lagged Rob is exhausted. Dad asked me to explain who Nels was and what "living in the future" meant, and this fits nicely with saying what I did today. The only order of business today was connecting with Nels, which I finally managed (Peerappa smiled knowingly and showed me I had to press "0" twice). There are three interesting things about Nels.

• Nels is one of a few American interns here this summer - there will be four or five total.
• We are working on the same project for the first half of the summer
• He happens to work two offices down from me at Carnegie Mellon

Nels decided to work for MSR India a few weeks before I did - his research interests are more directly aligned with this project - and knowing I would have a friend here was a contributing factor in me deciding to come as well. I got in touch with Nels through his cell phone, and it looks like I'll probably get one too. That will be convenient, because my internet connection isn't quite good enough to consistently do Skype well.

Nels also coined a phrase "living in the future" to describe the effect of the time difference between India and the United States. The idea is that, while it is 9:30 on Saturday here, it is only noon Saturday there. My day is done, and yours is only halfway over (or perhaps just beginning, if you sleep late). When you wake up Sunday morning, don't bother living Sunday - just call me. I'm already finished with Sunday, I'll let you know how it went. This thought is the basis of the joke that I'm "living in the future."

I went to a busy shopping district with Nels and Jason, another intern who is a rising senior at Harvey Mudd, to look around, buy a surge protector so I can plug in my laptop more conveniently, and eat dinner. It was busy but fun - there are lots of street vendors and more than a couple of beggars, but if you disregard the fact that they get right up in your face (Indians have a somewhat different idea of "personal space") they seemed friendlier and more polite than ones in most American cities.

Tomorrow I go on a two-day retreat with all the people I'm working with before actually starting any work. It's a pretty good deal!

Why The Heck Are You Going To India?

First, while I plan to mostly talk about my impressions of Bangalore and India on this blog, I wanted to start with why I'm having these impressions in the first place:

My role this summer is in the Rigorous Software Engineering group at Microsoft Research in Bangalore. If nothing else, I find it exciting that for the first time I can explain to even non-computer-scientists what I'm doing. The first thing I can explain to people is that I'm trying to make Windows crash less in the future. If their eyes haven't glazed over already, then I can explain that one of the reasons Windows locks up and becomes completely unresponsive is that a driver, one of the little pieces of software that helps all the hardware (iPod, printer, camera card reader, video recorder, hard drive, mouse...) work. Drivers are usually written by people and companies that really want to create hardware, not write drivers, so the drivers are often badly written and get stuck in loops that they can't get out of - when this happens, Windows will stop responding. If people are glazing over at this point, I explain that I'm trying to make that happen less. Otherwise, I can explain a little bit about how this is relates to software property checking, which is what I'm doing - the above is just my take on why Microsoft is particularly interested. That's the idea, anyway.

So in large part of why I am going to India because that is where I was able to find the most interesting internship. It is a risk, because my background is different than that of the project I'm working on - not to mention that, at this point in my career, it isn't like I have *that* much background period - but I hope it is a risk that will pay off.