MSR India Academic Outreach

Inspiring India’s technical student population to consider careers in research through travel grants and other opportunities.

Microsoft Research (MSR) India is involved in various efforts to make the research ecosystem in computer science in India more vibrant and to inspire our vast technical student population to consider careers in research. We believe that a robust research ecosystem can make significant contributions to the country’s development and also facilitate a healthy talent pipeline.

The following are a few of our outreach initiatives:

Student travel grants

MSR India’s Student Travel Grant Program has been supporting research students at Indian universities producing high quality research. The travel grant supports students to defray costs of travel, fees, accommodation, meals, and incidental expenses, when attending top-tier computer science research conferences outside India. We believe that the exposure that the students get by attending and presenting papers at these conferences enhances the quality of their own research effort, facilitates peer review/feedback, and enhances their research careers.

Over the past decade, through the Student Grant Program we have supported over 500 students travel and present their work in top-tier conference across the world.

Application notes

• Applications are evaluated on criteria like the quality of the conference, whether it’s a poster or full presentation/talk, collaboration with a Microsoft researcher, etc.
• We get a large number of applications, so we advise students to submit their applications at least 45 days in advance of the conference dates.

Conference and workshop sponsorships

MSR India offers sponsorships to conferences in the area of computer science. While sponsorship decisions are made on a case-to case basis, we typically consider top level conferences where researchers from MSR India are involved as committee members. For more information, please email travelgrants@microsoft.com.