Google coming to India

Prof. Sadagopan wonders whether Google R & D coming to Bangalore will give a boost to Computer Science Research in India?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are visiting India for the first time to formally launch their Indian R & D operations. In an informal talk with several key academics from IIIT-B, IIIT-H, IISc, IITB, IITG, IITK, IITKGP, IITM, and ISI on October 13, 2004, they talked of this center becoming part of their global R & D with technology focus and NOT cost focus. In fact, the personnel at Google R & D Bangalore will be free to move to other locations (Mountain View, New York, Zurich or Tokyo). With people like Krishna Bharat and Lalitesh - who are very key scientists responsible for some of the successful products (such as Google News) - getting re-located to Bangalore, Google India will not be an “outsourcing” center but an “extended arm”.
There are large research groups in India in several areas of computer science that are directly relevant to Google; this includes machine learning, information retrieval, automated reasoning, linguistics, grammar, classification and cataloguing; often, such expertise may be spilling over to departments of Linguistics and Library Science. If Google India could tap their potential, Google will benefit a lot; more important, Indian Research community will start to see the
unleashing of lots of their “lock-up” potential that went begging for years with
no one to use their skills.