Episode 014 | August 21, 2023
[Music]
Ajay Manchepalli: One thing we have learned is that, you know as they say, necessity is the mother of invention. This is a great example of that because it’s not that we didn’t have remote people before. And it’s not that we didn’t have technology to support something like this. But we have had this Black Swan moment with COVID, which required us to be not in the same physical location at all time and that accelerated the adoption of digital technologies. You can build all the technology you want. But having it at the right time and right place matters the most.
Sridhar Vedantham: Welcome to the Microsoft Research India podcast, where we explore cutting-edge research that’s impacting technology and society. I’m your host, Sridhar Vedantham.
[Music]
Sridhar Vedantham: The COVID pandemic forced most of us into a new paradigm of work from home and a number of tools to cater to remote work became popular. However, the post pandemic environment has seen interesting scenarios with some people preferring to continue to work from home, some people preferring to return full time to work and a number of people adopting something in between. This hybrid work environment exists today in the workplace as well as in other scenarios such as events. While tools such as Microsoft Teams do extremely well in supporting scheduled and agenda driven work meetings, there is need for a tool that supports a mix of virtual and in-person gatherings in an informal or semi-structured work environment, such as in hallways or at water coolers. In this edition of the podcast, I speak to Venkat Padmanabhan, Deputy MD (Deputy Managing Director) of MSR India and Ajay Manchepalli. Principal Research Program Manager, about a project called HyWay. HyWay’s a system to support unstructured and semi structured hybrid and informal interactions between groups of in-person and remote participants.
Venkat Padmanabhan is Deputy Managing Director at Microsoft Research India in Bengaluru. He was previously with Microsoft Research Redmond, USA for nearly 9 years. Venkat’s research interests are broadly in networked and mobile computing systems, and his work over the years has led to highly-cited papers and paper awards, technology transfers within Microsoft, and also industry impact. He has received several awards and recognitions, including the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in 2016, four test-of-time paper awards from ACM SIGMOBILE, ACM SIGMM, and ACM SenSys, and several best paper awards. He was also among those recognized with the SIGCOMM Networking Systems Award 2020, for contributions to the ns family of network simulators. Venkat holds a B.Tech. from IIT Delhi (from where he received the Distinguished Alumnus award in 2018) and an M.S. and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, all in Computer Science, and has been elected a Fellow of the INAE, the IEEE, and the ACM. He is an adjunct professor at the Indian Institute of Science and was previously an affiliate faculty member at the University of Washington. He can be reached online at http://research.microsoft.com/~padmanab/ (opens in new tab).
Ajay Manchepalli, as a Research Program Manager, works with researchers across Microsoft Research India, bridging Research innovations to real-world scenarios. He received his Master’s degree in Computer Science from Temple University where he focused on Database Systems. After his Masters, Ajay spent his next 10 years shipping SQL Server products and managing their early adopter customer programs.
For more information about the HyWay project, click HyWay – Microsoft Research (opens in new tab).
For more information about the Microsoft Research India click here.
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Transcript
[Music]
Sridhar Vedantham: So, Venkat and Ajay, welcome to the podcast.
Venkat Padmanabhan: Good to be here again.
Ajay Manchepalli: Yeah, likewise.
Sridhar Vedantham: Yeah, both of you guys have been here before, right?
Venkat Padmanabhan: Yeah, it’s my second time.
Sridhar Vedantham: OK.
Ajay Manchepalli: Same here.
Sridhar Vedantham: Great! So anyway, we wanted to talk today about this project called HyWay, which, unlike the way the name sounds, is not related to one of your earlier projects which was called HAMS, which actually had to do with road safety. So, tell us a bit about what HyWay is all about and especially where the name comes from?
Venkat Padmanabhan: Right. Yeah. So, HyWay, we spell it as H Y W A Y. It’s short for hybrid hallway. It’s really about hybrid interaction. What we mean by that is interaction between people who are physically present in a location- think of a conference venue or an office floor- and people who are remote. So that’s where hybrid comes from, and it’s really about sort of enabling informal mingling style, chitchat kind of interaction in such settings, which perhaps other platforms don’t quite support.
Sridhar Vedantham: OK. And why come up with this project at all? I mean there are plenty of other solutions and products and ways to talk to people that already are out there. So why do we really need something new?
Venkat Padmanabhan: Yeah, yeah. So maybe I can give you a little bit of background on this. I think in the very early days of the pandemic, I think in March or April of 2020, you know, all of us were locked up in our respective homes. And obviously there were tools like Teams at Microsoft and equivalent ones like Zoom and so on elsewhere, that allowed people to stay connected and participate in work meetings and so on. But it was very clear very soon that what’s missing is these informal interactions, bumping into someone in the hallway and just chatting with them. That kind of interaction was pretty much nonexistent because, you know, if you think of something like a Teams call or, you know, Zoom call, any of those, it’s a very sanitized environment, right? If, let’s say the three of us are on a Teams call, no one else in the world knows we are meeting, and no one else in the world can overhear us or be, you know, have an opportunity to join us unless they’re explicitly invited. So, we said, OK, you know, we want to sort of make these meeting porous, not have these hard boundaries. And that was the starting point. And then as the months went along, we realized that, hey, the world is not going to be just remote all the while. You know people are going to come back to the office and come back to having face-to-face meetings. And so how do you sort of marry the convenience of remote, with the richer experience of being in-person, and so that’s where hybrid comes in. And that’s something that in our experience, existing tools, including the new tools that came up in the pandemic, don’t support. There are tools that do all virtual experiences. But there is nothing that we have seen that does hybrid the way we are trying to do in HyWay.
Sridhar Vedantham: Right. So, I wanted to go back to something you just said earlier and basically, when you use the term porous, right, and what does that actually mean? Because like you said, the paradigm in which we are used to generally conducting meetings is that it’s a closed, sanitized environment. So, what exactly do we mean by porosity and if you are in a meeting environment, why do you even want porosity?
Venkat Padmanabhan: OK. Maybe I can give an initial answer then maybe Ajay can add. I think we’re not saying every meeting is going to be porous, just to be clear, right. You know when you have a closed-door meeting and you know, maybe you’re talking about sensitive things, you don’t want porosity, right? You want to sort of maintain the privacy and the sanctity of that environment, but when you are trying to enable mingling in a, say, conference setting where you’re sort of bumping into people, joining a conversation, and while you’re having the conversation, you overhear some other conversation or you see someone else and you want to go there. There we think something like porosity and other elements of the design of HyWay, which we can get to in a moment, allow for awareness, right? Essentially, allow you to be aware of what else is going on and give you that opportunity to potentially join other conversations. So that’s where we think porosity is really important. It’s not like it’s something that we are advocating for all meetings.
Ajay Manchepalli: One way to think about this is if you are in a physical space and you want to have a meeting with somebody on a specific topic. You pick a conference room, and you get together and it’s a closed-door conversation. However, when you’re at a workplace or any location for that matter, you tend to have informal conversations, right? So where you’re just standing by the water cooler or you’re standing in the hallway and you want to have discussions. And at that point in time, what you realize is that, even though you’re having conversations with people, there are people nearby that you can see, and you can overhear their conversations. It’s a very natural setting. However, if you’re remote and you’re missing out on those conversations, how do you bring them into play, right? And where it is not predefined or a planned conversation and you’re just gonna happen to see someone or happen to hear someone and join in. And what we talk about is a natural porous nature of air and we are trying to simulate something similar in our system.
Sridhar Vedantham: OK. So, it’s kind of trying to mimic an actual real life physical interaction kind of setting where you can kind of combine some degree of formality and informality.
Ajay Manchepalli: Correct! And many of these platforms like Teams or Zoom and things like that, it is built on this notion of virtual presence, so you could be anywhere, and you could join and have discussions. However, our concept is more aligned with, how do I get to participate in a physical space? So, our whole philosophy is anchored on a physical location, right? If I want to be in the office by a water cooler where we have interesting conversations, how do I get into those conversations? So that physical anchoring is a very critical aspect of our work.
Sridhar Vedantham: Interesting! Now, I’m assuming, given that you’re looking at quite a different paradigm from what existed earlier, you know Teams, for example, how do you go about figuring out what you want to do? What are the kind of design principles involved? How they actually figure out what people really want to participate in?
Venkat Padmanabhan: So, I think that’s a great question. I would say there’s not necessarily one right answer. But you know the way we thought about this, I think Ajay touched on this. You know HyWay is anchored in a physical space. So, at one level, we are just trying to recreate as best as possible that experience in a setting where some people are remote, right? So, what does that mean? Just imagine a physical hallway setting, right? You know, think of a conference, coffee break time, bunch of people out in the hallway in little groups, chatting and moving around. People are very comfortable in that setting because they have a very sort of surprise-free experience. What I mean by that is, I could be chatting with you and with the corner of my eye I can see someone else approaching, I can see Ajay approaching. So, I’m not surprised by his appearance. And so, if I’m talking something sensitive with respect to him, I have the opportunity to change subjects by the time he comes, right. So, we decided that, OK, you know, that’s really the core of what makes informal mingling work in the physical world. And we sort of thought about how we can recreate that in a hybrid setting and so awareness is a key principle, right? So, enabling the participants, both the people are physically present in the location as well as the people coming in remotely. I guess we have not really talked about how the setup is. The setup is very simple. We just have large screens with speaker, microphone, camera that are installed, multiple of them, maybe in the location of interest. And so, the remote people are on these screens, right? So whether you’re remotely present on a screen or physically there, you have awareness of who else is around, who’s approaching. You can overhear bits of other conversations. I mean, not that you can eavesdrop on people, but you know you can just like in the physical world, you can overhear some conversation, you may not know exactly what’s being said, but you know that, hey, there’s Sridhar there. He’s talking to someone, let me go and join him, right? The second principle is this principle of reciprocity. You know, again with video conferencing tools, often in a business context or in a classroom lecture, it’s perfectly fine to keep your video off and audio off right and just be listening, because there’s a dominant speaker who’s sort of running the show often.
Sridhar Vedantham: Right.
Venkat Padmanabhan: But if you’re enabling chitchat and informal mingling, we believe that doesn’t fly, right. And if I’m going to chit chat with someone and I can’t even see them, and I can’t hear them, that’s not going to go very far. So, we insist on this idea, that of sort of see and be seen and listen and be heard, right. So you know, that sort of two-way street. The third is the notion of agency, right? So, it’s great to have awareness, but then you need to be able to do something with awareness, right? And what do you do in a physical world? You see someone interesting, or you overhear something interesting, you go there if you want to and then if you lose interest, you come back, right? So the ability to move between conversations in a very fluid and natural way, and we do that with a map interface in our system. And we can talk a bit more about the map and how it is a little different from what other systems have done with the map in a bit. But maybe, Ajay, if you want to add anything to this?
Ajay Manchepalli: Yeah. The design principle is trying to ensure that the remote person has the same sort of an experience had they been in-person. And some of the aspects that Venkat just talked about, which is awareness and the aspect of reciprocity, and the ability to change or move to different conversations is very natural in a physical setting and we are trying to mimic what you enjoy in a physical setup even for someone who is remotely trying to participate in that conversation. And so it’s inspired by that.
Sridhar Vedantham: Right, so Venkat just referred to this thing about a map, right? So how is it different from what already exists out there? I mean, what really, how do I put this? I mean, how does the map contribute to the experience of a user?
Venkat Padmanabhan: So, I think the key point is that the map that we have in HyWay, is a representation of the actual physical space where the in-person users are, the physical users are. This is in contrast to, there’s a lot of spatial conversation tools that came up, especially in the pandemic that also have a map-based interface. But the map that is completely synthetic, right? So, by anchoring the map to the physical space, we can enable very interesting mingling scenarios across the physical and virtual divide. What I mean by that is, you know, I could be in a conversation, I could be physically present and I could then walk over to a different location. The virtual user can see where I went, and they can follow along. Just like they would be able to do if they were physically there, right. And the reverse can happen to, you know, as a physical user, I can say, hey, there’s this remote person I was talking to, now they have moved to a different location. Well, on the map, I’ll know where they’ve gone and I can sort of follow, right. So that correspondence between the virtual view and the physical reality is key, right? That’s what enables this kind of mingling across the physical and virtual divide.
Ajay Manchepalli: To follow up on that, the fact that we anchored to a physical space, I mean the whole premise is that we, a remote person, wants to participate in a particular location of interest implies there has to be some context, right? And so, if I want to go and participate in conversations happening in my office, and specifically, let’s say there is a book club that happens in a particular location. I can sort of contextualize myself, I mean, I have that spatial awareness to that space, right? So, if you give me a map-based experience, I can naturally navigate to the space that I’m interested in going to so that sort of one-on-one to one mapping between the physical space and the map helps us stay oriented.
Venkat Padmanabhan: I’ll add one more thing this. I just got reminded, as Ajay was talking. You know, this idea of creating a map that is anchored to the physical reality and tries to sort of portray that actually has worked out quite well. So, we’ve received feedback from users, but I think there was a user who’s actually a visitor to our lab. He’s professor at the University of Oregon, or, I think, Oregon State University, who had visited on HyWay remotely in 2022. And then when he came a year later, in 2023, in person his first remark was, “Hey, this place looks so familiar. I’ve already been here.” It was his first time, right.
Sridhar Vedantham: OK.
Venkat Padmanabhan: So, the fact that he was able to navigate around our space using this map that corresponded pretty well to the physical reality gave him familiarity in a way that a synthetic map will simply not give you, right. So, I think that’s really the point.
Sridhar Vedantham: Yeah.
[Music]
Sridhar Vedantham: It sounds like when you want to recreate the kind of a physical experience for someone who’s there virtually, and you’re saying that you’ll have multiple spaces where people might congregate or have informal meetings or even formal meetings and so on. I think it logically follows that you’re going to have multiple setups or instances of HyWay in various places right. Now, two questions that flow from that. One is, what is the kind of infrastructure that’s required to enable a HyWay kind of scenario? And I think equally important is how much does it actually cost? I mean, what kind of infrastructure is required for this?
Ajay Manchepalli: That is an extremely important question to think through before we deploy, and the way we thought about this is that, the world already has a lot of digital equipment, right? If you think in the context of an office, you have conference rooms which are set up with AV. And you have various, like if you think of cafeterias, you have screens and things of that nature. And so we wanted to use off the shelf equipment to flight HyWay, right. And so that means all we need is a screen so that people who are physically present can see the remote person participating. And we want an AV device, the camera and the microphone, and the speakers, so that the remote person can hear people as well as the in-person folks can hear the remote person. So, it’s a very standard AV setup that you can think of which is powered by a basic PC. This is a typical setup. The important thing here to note is that you need to place it in places where it doesn’t create blind spots and it’s a natural area for mingling. Those are the things that we have to think through when we set up such equipment. And as we iterate through this, we are learning different ways to set things up and make it surprise free. And make it more comfortable for people to not feel like they’re being, you know, watched over or something of that nature.
Sridhar Vedantham: It’s interesting you bring that up because my next question was going to be about privacy and letting people know that this thing is on and, you know, there might be someone virtually hanging out there, but how are people actually made aware of this?
Ajay Manchepalli: Right. I mean, there are there are different ways we can approach it. One, when we set up the space, we provide sufficient visual cues to let people know that this is an area where your colleagues can participate remotely, right. In other words, they have a reason to be there because they know that it’s their own colleagues who are going to be participating. #2, we also made a very conscious decision that these experiences have to be ephemeral, right? We do not record, we do not store this information. And if you are in that moment, you get to hear and see people. If you weren’t, you have missed it, just as it would have happened if you were in a physical location.
Sridhar Vedantham: In real life.
Ajay Manchepalli: In real life, right. So, these two are very important components. Now having said that, you still have cameras out there and you still have a microphone out there and the fact that we have now made it advertised, so to speak, makes them even more nervous, right. Even though people are living in a world with cameras everywhere, from a security standpoint. So, one of the things that we are continuing to work on is this notion of when do we have these systems up and running, right? We don’t just have it up and running all the time. You really need that system up and running only if there is a remote person joining in. And so, what we try to do is allow the physical users to have their natural conversations without a video feed of themselves on the screen, but at the same time, provide visual cues to the remote user saying that there are users present in that location so that, that motivates them to get to that point. And once they are in that location, we start the conversation or start the call, which enables the remote person to join in. But we also provide aural queues, right? We’ll give an audio chime, that gives an awareness to the people locally present saying that, uh, there’s a remote person joining in. This is a new experience. There will be reservations and there will be concerns and I think just as how we transition from, you know, having independent offices to an open desk environment, this is sort of another form of change that we are going through and so we have to be careful how we parse the feedback that we get and keep that in perspective.
Venkat Padmanabhan: I’ll also add just a few things to this, right. You know there are technical design elements in HyWay that try to address this. Ajay touched on no recording for example. We also, for example, don’t do any user recognition, right. So, in our map we represent users with face bubbles. But that’s just detecting a face. We don’t who it is. We don’t try to find out who it is, right we just detect the face, we put on the map at the appropriate location, right? So as when you glance at the map, you can see a face bubble of someone there. If you happen to know who that is, you’ll recognize them. Otherwise, you’ll see, there’s a person there, right? The other aspect is reciprocity, which I touched on earlier, so that also I think helps with privacy in the following sense. HyWay will not allow someone to hide themselves and be eavesdropping on a conversation, because they will not be able to hear anything unless they are seen and heard. So, the fact that they are on the screen in a big video tile will make the people who are physically present aware that, hey, there’s so and so on the screen. And so, you know, from a privacy viewpoint, it makes it more comfortable. The other thing I would say is, the deployment context, right? So, Ajay sort of talked about I think workspace setting where you have colleagues who know each other and so on. We’ve also deployed in events which are confined in space and time where people go to a trade show or a, you know, conference with the expectation that there’ll be other people around and they will see them, and they will hear them and so on. And you know, things like privacy haven’t really been, you know, front and center in those conversations because people are really about it’s really about.
Sridhar Vedantham: They are already in the public space anyway.
Venkat Padmanabhan: They’re in public space, there’s no expectation that they are going to be, you know, shielded from the view of others, right. And so, I think the context matters. I think, in a setting where this is running 24/7 and you know an interaction can happen at any time. Yes, you have to, you know, worry about some of the things that you know Ajay talked about but in other settings it’s a little easier.
Ajay Manchepalli: That’s an extremely important point. It really depends upon the purpose that people are there for, right, in an event you’re going there to learn about something or to meet certain people and you know in that context that there are many people that you’re not aware of and it’s OK. And yeah, so the context is super important.
Sridhar Vedantham: So, what kind of events have you deployed in and what’s been the user reaction? Has it been all positive or mixed reactions? How’s it been?
Ajay Manchepalli: One of the ethos that we have followed is we didn’t want to build a system and then think of where do we deploy. We have actually sort of taken an opposite approach. That is we have picked a particular event and we have decided that event needs, when we realize that there is a need for remote participation, then we go deploy the system based on the requirements that have been called out. And we built our system based on that. So, we have been deploying in events where people want to share information about the work that they have done. And you know, things like, let’s say your colleagues, all the researchers, they are working on various topics, and we want to let people be aware of what the work is. In that context, we have set up things like poster sessions where it is very natural for us to have booths and have topical presentations that’s happening. In this context, initially we decided that, OK, it makes sense to have the ability for a remote person to join in and participate in such events. But through the events, we realized that, once we set up such a system, there are remote presenters who would like to also participate. And so, then we basically modified the system to support not just remote attendees, but to also enable remote presentations, where in-person attendees would actually interact with a remote presenter over the screen. So, these are the things that we have learned through the events. And the surprising results from this is, once we deployed in such events, people experienced it and based on the experience we had the pull of having more events. We didn’t have to go and advertise, so to speak. The very experience made people realize the value that we were bringing to the table. In terms of user feedback, it has been overwhelmingly positive. But at the same time, it’s a research prototype. So, most of the sort of feedback we have been receiving is more about the system, the audio quality and things like that, which is a systemic improvement that we can do over time. And we also have received feedback which is more in the context of, “Oh, I’m able to do this. Can you also add this” right? You know it’s additional capabilities that they would like to see. And especially in the context of events, we haven’t really seen any hesitations in terms of the privacy aspect, so to speak. Apart from such events, we have also tried to put it in informal mingling type of events where, OK, there is end of your party and people are getting together and just talking about all the great moments they’ve had through the year. And people who are remote were able to also participate and mingle with people. And so those are the other type of setups where we have deployed these things. All in all, I would say we have had deployments every couple of months. And each deployment we learn something new and we improve upon the system. Initially, we used to just have their name initials showing up on the map. Then there was feedback that visual cues of who the person is there would be useful because they can recognize that person rather than having their initials and things like that.
Sridhar Vedantham: So, that’s where the face bubble came in.
Ajay Manchepalli: Face bubble came in, yeah.
Venkat Padmanabhan: I’ll also add one other use case. So far, we have one user for it, but a pretty important user, which is what I would call as remote visits, right? So think of a busy exec who has a global organization and they don’t have the time to fly all the way to the other location to visit. You know, obviously you can do remote visit on tools like Teams and Zoom and so on. But when our CEO Satya Nadella came in January of this year (2023), he was remote and he wanted to visit our lab. We decided to do it on HyWay, right. And that worked very well. Essentially, he got on HyWay and walked around the floor of the lab, you know, met with various people. And you know that gave him a sense of the place in a way that just presentations on a call would not have given, right. And that was his reaction, was very positive, and that also gave some sort of momentum to our efforts and sort of finding more use cases for this.
Ajay Manchepalli: Yeah, got people excited. There is one other scenario that we have been exploring in the recent past and that is in the context of workspace. That is, you have an open office sort of a structure where you have a large table where you have 6 to 8 employees, our colleagues sitting together and working, right. In this sort of a setting, if, with the flexible come into work sort of arrangement that we see these days, you invariably end up seeing only maybe 50-70% of the people showing up in person, and the rest of them working remotely on any given day. And so in order to ensure at the end of the day, we are all about increasing productivity for our for each person, right, on this planet. So. From that context, if we are able to enable the remote employees who are sitting at their home by themselves to sort of feel part of the team, how do we bring them into the context of their workspace? So here it’s not informal mingling, but it is more of being present along with your colleagues for a long duration of time where you have serendipitous moments of discussions that happens, which you would have missed if you were staying remote. And that is another scenario that is turning out to be an important scenario for us to look at. Because there is that need that exists and that requires a different way to enable the sort of interactions that we expect within the context of a team.
Sridhar Vedantham: OK.
Venkat Padmanabhan: It’s really unscheduled interactions that can happen anytime with colleagues.
Sridhar Vedantham: Right. Much like we keep doing in office actually.
Ajay Manchepalli, Venkat Padmanabhan: Yes, exactly right.
Sridhar Vedantham: OK, so where do you see this going in the future? I mean, do you have a road map in mind? Do you really have a, say, a longer-term plan?
Venkat Padmanabhan: I think we are very much in the phase where we are you know augmenting the system as we go along, right. So Ajay said, you know we’ve been in this habit of deploying and learning through deployment. So you know we’ve done a bunch of deployments, we’ve got feedback, we’ve had ideas. And so, at this stage we are just looking to, you know, make the system better. And you know, we’ve deployed a bunch of internal events. One day we might actually take it to external events, external conferences, academic conferences, and so on, and hopefully have a larger audience experience this. And then we’ll see where it takes us, right. You know the feedback, as Ajay said has been very positive and what’s been particularly satisfying is that it is very clear from the feedback both from users but also from the event organizers, that there’s an unmet need here. There is something that people want to do, but existing tools are not doing, which is why they’re coming to us. And as I said, we are a small team, we have not advertised ourselves, but people are coming and asking for it, right, internally at Microsoft so far. So that tells us there is unmet need here. So, we think if we do the right things and make the system even better than it is, good things will happen.
Ajay Manchepalli: And the fact that we are able to deploy and there is more ask for it in spite of the fact that you have microphones and cameras everywhere, tells us that the value that we are bringing outweighs the risks that people perceive, right. And that’s a very strong case for the unmet need that Venkat was referring to.
Sridhar Vedantham: People want to meet people.
Ajay Manchepalli: Yeah.
Venkat Padmanabhan: (Laughs) Well said.
Sridhar Vedantham: All right. So we are kind of coming to the end of this. Is there any last thoughts you want to leave the listeners with?
Venkat Padmanabhan: Maybe I’ll just go back to the earlier point- this is like a more of a specific point. I think when we were discussing hardware requirements and you know deployment models and so on, one of the things we decided early on is to of course keep things simple- low-cost commodity hardware and so on. But you know related to that is this idea that we don’t want to impose on the people who are physically present in any way, right. So they just show up and talk and mingle just the way they’ve done. The only difference is there is an additional screen, maybe in their vicinity, that allows remote people to join. And you know, the unexpected benefit of that really has been that, you know, our system allows bootstrapping for free. So the physical people vote with their feet, they are there regardless of HyWay. They would have been there anyway in the hallway, chatting with each other. But because HyWay is really about instrumenting the environment with these screens and not really imposing on the users, they’re automatically, you know, represented in the system. And so now there’s a strong incentive for me as a remote user to get on HyWay. And it’s not even an app. You just go to the web page, you get on HyWay, because there are other people to interact with. This is in contrast to an approach where you need everyone to do something like install an app or get some hardware or you know, have a wearable computer or whatever to participate. Because then you have the network effects sort of biting youthe wrong way, which is, you know, you start with a user base of zero and then you have to really get to a critical mass. We’re getting critical mass for free. And we didn’t really think of it that way on day one, but that realization has come as we have deployed and sort of learnt from that.
Sridhar Vedantham: OK.
Ajay Manchepalli: From HyWay one thing we have learned is that, you know as they say, necessity is the mother of invention. This is a great example of that because it’s not that we didn’t have remote people before. And it’s not that we didn’t have technology to support something like this. But we have had this Black Swan moment with COVID, which required us to be not in the same physical location at all time and that accelerated the adoption of digital technologies. That also accelerated the possibility of something like this. And it gave us that flexibility and that led to something that it almost became a no brainer to have such a system. And that has been a key aspect, is that you can build all the technology you want. But having it at the right time and right place matters the most.
Sridhar Vedantham: And you know, after seeing deployments of HyWay in the lab and stuff, right? I think one thing that kind of came home to me was the fact that you don’t have to invest in some extremely expensive infrastructure and fancy VR headsets. You don’t need an augmented reality, virtual reality and all that to actually create a kind of a hybrid workspace.
Venkat Padmanabhan: Yeah, there’s a spectrum here and you know, we are at the point where we are focusing on low cost so that we can scale. Obviously, you can do other things with more fancy hardware, but they may be harder to scale. And you know it’s sort of the philosophy of a lot of our work. If you remember the previous project, we talked about the HAMS project. Again just a smartphone, rather than instrumenting the vehicle, just put a smartphone and sort of it observes how you’re driving and gives you safety feedback, right? So it’s an approach that we think works well in many cases.
Ajay Manchepalli: And when you build something that you want to use every day, it’s super exciting to be in such a project. I think we have a bunch of motivated individuals to make this successful.
Venkat Padmanabhan: So I should say, yeah, you know, I think before we close, you know, I do want to give a huge shout out to a lot of people, but in particular to the team, the HyWay team, right from day one, they’ve really been the backbone of the project. Bunch of young people, you know, researchers, Research Fellows, RSDEs, that is research software development engineers, all pulled together to do this, and it’s a small team. I mean, it’s a pretty small team that’s done amazing things. So, I really want to call them out.
Sridhar Vedantham: Great! Thank you for yet another fascinating conversation, Venkat and Ajay.
Venkat Padmanabhan: Thanks, Sridhar. It was a real pleasure again.
Ajay Manchepalli: Pleasure is all ours. Thank you.
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