June 9, 2026 –
June 10, 2026
Microsoft Research India Academic Research Summit 2026
Location: Bengaluru, India
Event programme
| Date | Time | Session title | Speaker(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tuesday, June 9 | 9:00 – 9:15 | Welcome Session (video) | Venkat Padmanabhan, Microsoft Research India Srinivasan Iyengar, Microsoft Research India |
| 9:15 – 10:00 | Plenary Talk 1: Navigating the AI Horizon: Promises, Perils, and the Power of Collaboration (video) | Ece Kamar, Microsoft Research AI Frontiers | |
| 10:00 – 10:30 | Tea break & Poster session | ||
| 10:30 – 12:00 | Session: Diffusion, Deployment & the Global Majority – Theme: Inclusive AI: Data, Models, Evaluation (video) – Bridging AI Divides Across languages, Cultures, and contexts for Global Diffusion (video (opens in new tab)) – Richer outputs for Richer countries? (video (opens in new tab)) – AI for Social Good: The case of Law and Accessibility (video (opens in new tab)) – Efficient Vocabulary Adaptation of General-purpose language Models (video (opens in new tab)) – Building Multilingual and Multimodal Datasets at Scale (video (opens in new tab)) | Sunayana Sitaram, Microsoft Research India Danish Pruthi (opens in new tab), IISc Bangalore Ashutosh Modi (opens in new tab), IIT Kanpur Niloy Ganguly (opens in new tab), IIT Kharagpur Anoop Kunchukuttan (opens in new tab), Bodhan AI | |
| 10:30 – 12:00 | Session: Retrieval and Reasoning (Theme: Retrieval) (video) – HOBIT: Hardness Optimized Batch Sampling for InfoNCE Training (video (opens in new tab)) – Retrieval in the LLM Era (video (opens in new tab)) | Lokesh Nagalapatti, Microsoft Research India Soumen Chakrabarti (opens in new tab), IIT Bombay | |
| 12:00 – 1:00 | Lunch | ||
| 1:05 – 1:50 | Plenary Talk 2: Reimagining Education and Skilling for the Age of AI: Challenges & Opportunities (video) | Manohar Swaminathan, Microsoft Research India | |
| 1:50 – 2:00 | Break | ||
| 2:00 – 3:30 | Session: Diffusion, Deployment & the Global Majority Theme: Human-Centered AI: Design, Deployment & Healthcare (video) Design & HCI: Anirudha Joshi, Aaditeshwar Seth Health & AI: Ashish Makani, Tavpritesh Sethi, Manik Gupta, Mohit Jain | Anirudha Joshi (opens in new tab), IIT Bombay Aaditeshwar Seth (opens in new tab), IIT Dehli Ashish Makani (opens in new tab), Ashoka University Tavpritesh Sethi (opens in new tab), IIT Delhi Manik Gupta (opens in new tab), BITS Hyderabad Mohit Jain, Microsoft Research India | |
| 2:00 – 3:30 | Session: Retrieval and Reasoning (Theme: Reasoning) (video) – A Cross-Stack Co-Design Pathway for Pushing the Efficiency Frontier of AI Reasoning (video (opens in new tab)) – Advancing Verified Reasoning (video (opens in new tab)) | Hongxiang Fan (opens in new tab), Imperial College London Nagarajan Natarajan, Microsoft Research India | |
| 3:30 – 4:00 | Tea break & Poster session | ||
| Wednesday, June 10 | 9:15 – 10:00 | Plenary Talk 3: Challenges and research opportunities for global hyperscale services (video) | Jim Kleewein (opens in new tab), Microsoft |
| 10:00 – 10:30 | Tea break & Poster session | ||
| 10:30 – 12:00 | Session: Compute & Trust (Theme: Security) (video) – Detecting AI-generated Text (video (opens in new tab)) – Private Text Generation with LLMs (video (opens in new tab)) | Danish Pruthi (opens in new tab), IISc Bangalore Krishna Pillutla (opens in new tab), IIT Madras | |
| 10:30 – 12:00 | Session: Multimodal & Embodied Intelligence (video) – Can AI subsume Classical Robotics (video (opens in new tab)) – Multimodal Intelligence (video (opens in new tab)) – The forgotten foundations of Multimodal Reasoning (video (opens in new tab)) Panel on Multimodal AI: Progress, Pitfalls, and Possibilities (video (opens in new tab)) Panelists: Sriram Ganapathy (opens in new tab), IISc Bangalore Makarand Tapaswi (opens in new tab), IIIT Hyderabad Vineeth NB, Microsoft Research India Moderator: Tanuja Ganu, Microsoft Research India | Madhava Krishna (opens in new tab), IIIT Hyderabad Sriram Ganapathy (opens in new tab), IISc Bangalore Somak Aditya (opens in new tab), IIT Kharagpur | |
| 12:00 – 1:00 | Lunch | ||
| 1:05 – 1:50 | Plenary Talk 4: Aging Brain Research: Challenges and Opportunities (video) | Prof. KVS Hari (opens in new tab), IISc and Director of Centre for Brain Research | |
| 1:50 – 2:00 | Break | ||
| 2:00 – 3:30 | Session: Compute & Trust (Theme: Systems) (video) – Inference Time Context Sparsity: Illusion or Opportunity? (video (opens in new tab)) – Cross-Stack Approaches for Efficient AI Systems (video (opens in new tab)) – Query Planning for ML Workflows (video (opens in new tab)) – Low-Contention SM-partitioning for Concurrent Prefill and Decode in Disaggregated Serving (video (opens in new tab)) | Aditya Desai (opens in new tab), IIT Bombay Sanchari Sen (opens in new tab), IISc Bangalore Abhilash Jindal (opens in new tab), IIT Delhi Pankaj Pansari (opens in new tab), Plaksha University | |
| 2:00 – 3:30 | Session 2: Multimodal & Embodied Intelligence (video) – Multimodal Intelligence (video (opens in new tab)) – Multimodal Reasoning and Verification (video (opens in new tab)) – Tackling Multimodal Challenges with AI (video (opens in new tab)) – Towards Empowering Small VLMs (video (opens in new tab)) – Seeing the Whole Picture: Grounding, Composition, Interpretability (video (opens in new tab)) – Multimodal AI for Radiology, built for the clinic (video (opens in new tab)) | Vineeth NB, Microsoft Research India Tanuja Ganu, Microsoft Research India Rajiv Ratn Shah (opens in new tab), IIIT Delhi Anand Mishra (opens in new tab), IIT Jodhpur Makarand Tapaswi (opens in new tab), IIIT Hyderabad Mercy Ranjit, Microsoft Research India |