Request for Proposals: Microsoft Academic

Partnership Grant 2024

Data science research is central to a large variety of Microsoft products which we work on at Microsoft India
including Bing, Office, Windows and Azure. We strongly believe that academia and industry can collaborate
deeply to result in breakthrough innovations in search, cloud computing and data driven content creation.
Accordingly, we are pleased to announce the Microsoft Academic Partnership Grant 2024. The grant
continues to build on Microsoft’s focus on collaborating with academia to perform breakthrough work
resulting in real-world impact. The goal is to attract high quality students to work on novel research topics,
while advancing state-of-the-art.

Topics of interest include the following:

• Responsible AI
o Automated prompt tuning for Responsible AI
o Scalability in RAI
o Data mining pipeline for Responsible AI: multilingual multimodal corpus
• Document segmentation and understanding:
o SLMs for applications such as form-understanding, telemedicine
o Generating structured information from unstructured data
o Understanding and summarization of multi-modal documents
o Developing and fine-tuning multi-modal SLMs for document-images
o PDF Analytics for Edge PDF Viewer: PDF Document Structure Detection, PDF
conversion to Docx, PDF translate
• Travel domain
o Automatic location understanding with GPT prompt engineering
o Gauging URL credibility for Travel/flight-booking website
• Sports domain
o Fine-grained intent detection of sports queries on Bing
o Supporting sports conversations
o Designing personalized sports quizzes
• Small language models
o SLM fine-tuning and knowledge transfer
o Automated LLM/SLM evaluation and selection
• Large language models
o Personalized LLM Responses
o RLHF for LLMs
o LLM response evaluation
o On Edge inference for LLMs
o Fixing security and non-security issues in software using known patterns by
leveraging LLMs
o LLM induced taxonomy generation
• Dense Retrieval
o Personalized dense retrieval for search
o Generative retrieval for search
o Pre-training for dense retrieval
• Cloud computing
o Network Device Failure Prediction
 o Next action/steps recommendation during network failures.
o Detection and Prediction for Network health degradation and deviations in
Network traffic patterns
o Estimation of cost, reliability, uptime for services on-premises.
o Recommendation of network topology or an Azure network service during a
migration
• Others
o Video dubbing (Translate video from one language to another)
o Adoption of 5G technologies
o Distance computation between code repository versions
o Code rewrite; automatic version upgrade

We invite proposals from institutes across India working on above areas towards this grant. Each proposal
can have multiple principal investigators (PIs). However, all PIs on the proposal should be scientists/faculty
members working in a regular capacity at one of the Indian institutes. To optimize the chances of receiving
an award, we encourage researchers from the same university to consider submitting a single, joint
proposal (rather than multiple individual proposals) that leverages their various skills and interests to create
the strongest possible proposal. Besides PIs, the team should also include a final-year Masters students or
a PhD student who has finished his/her coursework, and a 4th year BTech/Dual Degree student. All students
should be enrolled as a full-time student at one of the institutes in India. The entire team should belong to
a single academic lab or institute.

The proposals should be innovative, novel and focused on creating possibilities for future new technologies,
products, services or processes. Proposals submitted in other research areas will not be considered.

All proposals will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

• Addresses an important research area identified above that, if answered, has the potential to have
a significant impact on that domain.
• Potential for wide dissemination and use of knowledge, including specific plans for scholarly
publications, public presentations, and white papers.
• Ability to complete the project based upon adequate available resources, reasonable timelines, and
the identified contributors’ qualifications.
• Qualifications of the research team, including previous history of work in the area, successful
completion of previous projects, research or teaching awards, and scholarly publications.
• Possible additional information as requested by the review panel, which might be requested via a
conference call.
• Relevance to the current areas of focus at Microsoft.

Teams representing the top few chosen proposals will be invited to make 15-30 min project pitches. Final
decisions will be made based on the submitted technical proposals as well as the presentations.

The grant amount for each selected project will be Rs. 15-20 lakhs for a one-year period. Multiple proposals
may be granted based on evaluation. The projects will be done in collaboration with a Microsoft employee
(a researcher in most cases, referred to as Microsoft Collaborator). It is expected that each supported
project would result in to at least 2-3 joint research publications at A/A* conferences/journals, besides
quarterly progress report submission and presentations.

Microsoft Collaborators, at no cost to the winning teams, may visit the university partners one or more times
to foster collaborative planning and research. These visits will be agreed upon and scheduled after an
award decision is made. Likewise, a cadence of meetings will be mutually agreed upon at the start of the
collaboration. Proposals are welcome to include other suggestions about how to foster an effective
collaborative research engagement.
All proposals should be supported with the following details in a single pdf. Please use size-10 font.

• Project title
• Project area (one of those mentioned above)
• Project summary (maximum 0.5 page) should include
o A nontechnical description of the project that states the problem to be studied and explains
the project’s broader significance and importance.
o A technical description of the project that states the goals and scope of the research, and
the methods and approaches to be used.
• Introduction (maximum 1 page):
o Definition of the problem
o Relevance to real world applications
o Relations to existing work. Please include references where appropriate.
o Why is the work novel?
• Is this project approved by your institute to fall under the CSR (Corporate social responsibility)
bucket?
• Work plan (maximum 1 page)
o Broad Methodology. Describe the methodological and theoretical approach that the
researchers will use. Explain exactly how the researchers will go about answering the
question. Describe how the researchers will handle the legal and ethical challenges of
doing work in this area.
o Public datasets to be used. Possibility of using datasets within Microsoft, if any. Datasets
within Microsoft can be used for project purpose via student internships at Microsoft.
o Duration of activities giving milestones. Please note that the overall project duration is 1
year.
• Biodata of PIs indicating their
o Affiliation
o Webpage
o Publications list
o Patent list
o Previous industry project experience
o Previous publications in the proposed project area.
o Highlights of academic and research activities / awards.
• CVs of students in the team
• Microsoft contact person. History of working with previous Microsoft employees, if any.
• Overheads charged by your organization across different modes of funding.
• Overall grant amount requested.
• Percentage split of the grant amount towards expenses such as equipment cost, PI time, student
stipends, organization overheads, travel grants, cloud time including GPU VMs, etc.

Submission of a proposal will be construed as acceptance of this RFP Rules by the Institute and the
members making the proposal.

Project proposals should be submitted in pdf format to this submission link:

https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/MAPG2024/
Timelines:

• Proposal submission: 20-Apr-2024 11:59pm IST

• Idea presentations: 8-May-2024 to 15-May-2024
• Acceptance Notification: 31-May-2024

(Dates subject to change)

Funding Renewal

MAPG 2024 winning proposals will be re-considered in Mar/Apr 2025 based on progress and outcomes in
this academic year, and some of the proposals may be granted a funding renewal. All funding decisions
will be at the sole discretion of Microsoft.

Conditions

• Before submission of any proposal, please go read and understand the RFP Rules. The submission
of a proposal will be construed as acceptance of the terms identified in this document and the RFP
Rules.
• Institutes representing the winning proposals will require to execute Microsoft’s detailed grant
agreement to accept the grant. The grant agreement would be shared with the Institute on its
selection for the award.
• The project will commence only on the receipt of the Institutes’ acceptance along with execution of
the grant-agreement.
• As a condition of accepting an award, principal investigators agree that Microsoft may use their
name and likeness to publicize their proposals (including all proposal content except detailed
budget information) in connection with the promotion of the research awards in all media now
known or later developed.
• Researchers will be willing to engage with Microsoft about their project and experience and provide
updates via monthly or quarterly calls.
• The review process is internal, and no review feedback will be given to submitters.
• Microsoft encourages researchers to publish their work in scholarly venues such as journals and
conferences. Researchers must provide Microsoft with a copy of any work prior to publication. So
long as accurate, such publications are not subject to Microsoft’s approval except that, at
Microsoft’s request, researchers will delete any Microsoft Confidential Information identified.
• Funded researchers must seek approval of their institution’s review board for any work that involves
human subjects.
• At the completion of the project, the funded researchers will be required to submit to Microsoft a
report describing project learnings.

Please feel free to email us at AcadGrants@service.microsoft.com if you have any questions.

 Microsoft Academic Partnership Grant RFP Rules
(“RFP Rules”)

1. To Enter. The Microsoft Academic Partnership Grant (the “Program”) is open to faculty and
students at an Indian academic institute. Grants will be awarded to teams selected by
Microsoft’s internal panel. Each team must consist of at least one faculty, one Masters or a
PhD student, one 4th year BTech/Dual Degree student (“Entrants”). The Masters students
should be final-year students or a PhD student who has finished his/her coursework. The
students should be enrolled full-time at the Electrical Engineering or Computer Science
department (or related department) for the entire 2024-2025 academic year in one of the
institutes in India. All the team members including the team’s faculty advisor(s) should be from
the same institute.
2. To apply for a grant, each team must submit the registration materials described in the request
for proposals by the submission deadline mentioned in the Request for Proposals (registration
will close at 11:59 pm India time) (“Proposal Submission Deadline”). The proposal should be
submitted through the online submission portal as mentioned in the request for proposals. No
other method of submission will be accepted. Microsoft reserves the right to extend the
Proposal Submission Deadline in its sole discretion for any reason.
Proposals should only contain Entrants’ original works and shall not violate or infringe the
rights, including, without limitation, copyrights, trademark rights or rights of publicity/privacy,
of any third party, and must only use pre-published material with proper citations. Any proposal
that violates this requirement would be disqualified at any stage of the grant.
3. The proposals will not be returned. Microsoft (“Sponsor”) reserves the right, but is not
obligated, to publish information about the winning proposals on its website or in any other
media.
4. Sponsor is not responsible for any technical, hardware or software malfunctions that result in
late, lost, incomplete or delayed proposals. Sponsor, in its sole discretion, reserves the right
to disqualify any Entrant who tampers with the entry process, or who otherwise violates these
RFP Rules.
5. Grant awardees. All proposals will be evaluated by a panel of experts consisting of Sponsor
researchers and leadership team whose decisions are final on all matters relating to the
awards. The project pitches will also be a part of the final evaluation. Awardees will be notified
within one month of submission deadline by email sent to the email addresses specified on
each winning team’s proposal.
6. Grant Awards. Institutes representing the winning proposals will require to execute Microsoft’s
detailed grant agreement to accept the grant. The grant agreement would be shared with the
Institute on its selection for the award. Funds will be awarded to the institute of each winning
team, not to the winning Entrants directly. The institute of each winning team will receive the
fund amount to pay the respective team members (students and faculty PIs) for conference
travel and research expenses within the 2024-2025 academic year in relation to the project.
Funds should be used in compliance with the laws of the land. At the end of the grant duration,
the organization is expected to submit a grant utilization certificate which lists out details
related to the utilization of the funds. The winning team will be solely responsible for any tax
incurred when the fund is disbursed to the winning team.
7. Funding Renewal. At the conclusion of the academic year, depending on the project results,
and in Microsoft’s sole discretion, winning teams may be offered a renewal of the fund. The
terms of any renewal will be shared in our grant-agreement prior to acceptance of the award
by the Institute.
8. Intellectual Property during the selection process. Any IP generated by the Entrants as part
of the preparation of their proposals as part of the 2024 Program will be retained by the
students and/or university according to the university policies. Sponsor, its affiliates and
authorized entities’ will, however, have the right to use/publish the proposals for the purposes
of conducting the Program.
Each Entrant further acknowledges and agrees that Sponsor may already be conducting, or
may in the future conduct, research that is similar to the research described in a proposal, and
that Sponsor's right or ability to sell, license, use, exploit, develop or otherwise deal anywhere
in any product, technology or service of any kind including those which may be similar to any
product, technology or service described in a proposal shall not be limited or restricted in any
way related to or resulting from the Program.
9. The IP will be open IP, i.e., the ideas, concepts and algorithms generated as part of the funded
project can be published as a part of academic publications. All forms of labeled data, code
and models generated as part of the collaboration between the funded team and the Sponsor
may be made available to a third party only after approval by the Sponsor per request.
Microsoft can make use of labeled data, code and models generated as part of the
collaboration without any restrictions at all time points. In no case can Microsoft proprietary
data (that was not generated as part of the funded project, but may have been used during
the project) can be made publicly available. Also, in no case, any Microsoft proprietary code
or pre-existing IP (that was not generated as part of the funded project but may have been
used during the project) can be made publicly available.
10. Branding. We expect that the collaboration will lead to at least 2/3 A/A* conference/journal
papers. Such papers must have a Microsoft co-author on the paper. Conference presentations
or any branding around such papers should display a clear Microsoft logo as per Microsoft’s
branding guidelines.
11. General Conditions. Sponsor has the right to modify or cancel this Program if it cannot be
completed as originally contemplated due to a lack of funding or conditions beyond Sponsor's
reasonable control. Sponsor reserves the right to not select any teams at its sole discretion
and judgment, including for reasons of any withdrawals or disqualifications. Sponsor is not
responsible for any policies, rules, or actions of the universities that may prevent any student
or faculty from entering, participating in and/or being selected at any stage of this Program.
12. By applying to the Program, each Entrants agrees: (i) to be bound by these Official RFP Rules
and the decisions of the Sponsor, (ii) to be contacted by Sponsor by telephone, mail or email
regarding this Program, (iii) that personal data submitted, including name, mailing address,
phone number, email address or any other data provided by the Entrant that can be used to
identify or locate a person (“Personal Information”), may be collected, processed, stored and
otherwise used by Sponsor for the purposes of conducting and/or administering the Program
and (iv) that the Personal Information may be transmitted, processed, disclosed and/or stored
by Sponsor and its affiliates and subcontractors. All personal information that is collected from
the Entrant is subject to Microsoft’s privacy policy at https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-
us/privacystatement.
13. The Sponsor reserves the right to require additional documentation to be executed or provided
by the Entrants at any stage of the process. Sponsor, including its parent corporation and
 other affiliates (collectively, “Sponsor Entities”) disclaim all liability that may arise from or in
connection with this Program or the participation of any Entrants in the Program, howsoever
arising. If the disclaimer is held invalid for any reason, the maximum liability of Sponsor
Entities in relation to the Program for any damages, loss or any other liability is limited to
Indian Rupees One Hundred Only. Entrants agree that this is an essential condition of the
Program and Official RFP Rules.
This Program and all matters relating thereto are governed by the laws of India. All matters or
disputes arising or related to these terms shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of courts in
Delhi, India.
The Sponsor will be solely responsible for all applicable taxes, including but not limited to sales
and use taxes, value added tax, excise tax, consumption tax, customs duties or similar charges
or fees with regard to the Program. The Entrants and/or Institute are responsible for their own
income taxes related to the Award.
Submission of proposal for this Program, shall be construed as acceptance of these RFP Rules.
If Entrants do not accept any of the terms of the Official Rules contained herein they should not
submit an Application.
 Microsoft Academic Partnership Grant (India) FAQs
Team Composition
1. Can students from different advisors or departments form a team?
Yes, if the students meet the criteria for participation. Note that the students forming the team
need to be from the same institute.
2. Can a student be part of multiple teams? Can a team submit multiple proposals?
Yes. A student may be part of multiple teams and a team may submit multiple proposals. But a
student can be a part of only one awarded grant.
Eligibility
1. Can students submit without faculty members?
No. The team needs to consist of at least one faculty PI.
2. Can newly admitted students be included in the team?
No. The team should have two students: (1) Last year Masters student who is beginning his/her
thesis work or PhD student who has finished their course work requirements (2) 4th year
BTech/Dual Degree student.
Awards
1. Is there an "award quota" for schools or regions?
No. This is an open program for all eligible schools. It is possible that two or more teams from
one school may each win a grant.
2. Do funds expire after 1 year?
No, the funds will be given to the relevant department in the Institute. The department can roll
the awarded funds over to the next year. Each winner’s department is allowed complete
flexibility on how to use the funds.
3. What will Microsoft provide to winners in addition to the financial awards?
One or more researchers from Microsoft will work closely with the team.
4. Can the grant money be used by the receiving institutions freely, e.g. to pay an expert
postdoc affiliated with one of the participating universities, however, residing in a different
country during the project?
There are no restrictions on how the funds are used. We do require your proposal to illustrate
how the funds will be used for the project.
5. Will I be provided with extra compute power (Azure credits, funds to buy GPUs) beyond the
grant amount?
No extra funds will be provided beyond the grant amount. No extra GPUs will be provided.
Proposal Process
1. Is there a template available for the proposal?
No specific template will be provided. The overall structure of the proposal is mentioned in the
request for proposals.
2. Can the project being proposed be a part of a BTech/Masters/PhD student thesis?
Yes.
Projects
1. To further improve and facilitate our research, would it be possible to access Microsoft's
internal corpus of enterprise and/or security relevant data?
We will not be able to provide access to any data that is not already publicly available. But such
data may be accessible via student internships during the internship duration and additional
details will be shared in the grant agreement.
2. Can the data and the results of the project be used for future research by the authors, as is
common in the context of commercial research grants?
Yes, the results of this research are meant to be open for all non-commercial use.
 Previous Grants
MAPG 2021

Title Faculty Institute

Zero-shot Multi-lingual Personalized Auto-suggest Maunendra Sankar IIT
Generation Desarkar Hyderabad
Spatio-Temporal Data Driven Approach for Network Venkata M Viswanath IIT Ropar
and Route Optimization in Azure Cloud Services Gunturi
Multilingual Dialogue Modeling Pawan Goyal IIT
Kharagpur
Preconditioned Quasi-Newton Methods for Large Pawan Kumar IIIT
Scale Optimization in Deep Learning Hyderabad
Inference and Reasoning Over Web-Scale Anand Mishra IIT Jodhpur
Multimodal Knowledge Graph

MAPG 2022

Title Faculty Institute

Non-Toxic Multi-lingual Maunendra Sankar Desarkar IIT
Personalized Auto-suggest Hyderabad
Generation
Robust Text Information Jayanta Mukhopadhyay, Prabir Kumar Biswas IIT
Extraction System for Kharagpur
Degraded and Deformed
Document Images
Adapting Dialog Systems to Pawan Goyal IIT
New Domains through Kharagpur
Natural Language
Interactions
Spatio-Temporal Data Driven Venkata M Viswanath Gunturi IIT Ropar,
Approaches for Improving Punjab
Latency in Azure Cloud
Services
Algorithmic Recourse for Vineeth Balasubramanian IIT
Actionable Explanations in AI Hyderabad
Models

MAPG 2023
Title Faculty Institute
Neural Networks at a Fraction Subhankar Mishra National Institute of
Science Education
and Research
(NISER)
Self-supervised Learning of Multi-Purpose Jayanta IIT Kharagpur
Feature Embeddings using Codistillation Mukhopadhyay,
between MobileViT and ConvNeXt for Partha Pratim Das
Document Segmentation and Classification
Identifying the Differences between the Large Koustav Rudra, Niloy IIT Kharagpur
Language Model and Human-Generated Texts Ganguly
to Facilitate Responsible AI
Self-Supervised Learning for Open-set Very- Anand Mishra IIT Jodhpur
Large-Scale Video Retrieval
AI for Developing Sign Language Technologies: Ashutosh Modi IIT Kanpur
Towards Empowering and Helping Hard of
Hearing People
Multimodal Dialog Systems for Synchronously Mausam IIT Delhi
Evolving Modalities
 Publications

• MAPG 2021
• Prajwal Gatti, Anand Mishra, Manish Gupta and Mithun Das Gupta. VisToT:
Vision-Augmented Table-to-Text Generation. The 2022 Conference on Empirical
Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). Dec 7–11, 2022. Abu Dhabi.
• Bishal Santra, Sumegh Roychowdhury, Aishik Mandal, Vasu Gurram, Atharva
Naik, Manish Gupta, Pawan Goyal. Representation Learning for Conversational
Data using Discourse Mutual Information Maximization. 2022 Annual Conference
of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
(NAACL). July 10–15, 2022. Seattle, Washington.
• Abhirama Subramanyam Penamakuri, Manish Gupta, Mithun Gupta, Anand
Mishra. Answer Mining from a Pool of Images: Towards Retrieval-Based Visual
Question Answering. The 32nd International Joint Conference on Artificial
Intelligence (IJCAI). Aug 19th-Aug 25, 2023. Macao, S.A.R.
• Prajwal Gatti, Kshitij Parikh, Dhriti Paul, Manish Gupta, Anand Mishra.
Composite Sketch+Text Queries for Retrieving Objects with Elusive Names and
Complex Interactions. Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
(AAAI). Feb 20-27, 2024. Vancouver, Canada.
• A. Han, B. Mishra, P. Jawanpuria, P. Kumar, and J. Gao. Riemannian
Hamiltonian methods for min-max optimization on manifolds. In SIAM Journal of
Optimization (SIOPT), 2023.
• I. Mishra, A. Dasgupta, P. Jawanpuria, B. Mishra, and P. Kumar. Light-weight
deep extreme multilabel classification. In IEEE International Joint Conference on
Neural Networks (IJCNN), 2023.
• N. Mishra and P. Kumar, “Angle based dynamic learning rate for gradient
descent,” IJCNN, 2023.
• MAPG 2022
• Venkata M. V. Gunturi, Vipul Bondre, Aaditya Barnwal, Rakesh Rajeev, Samir
Jain, Ashank Anshuman, Manish Gupta. A Case Study on Periodic Spatio-
Temporal Hotspot Detection in Azure Traffic Data. 17th International Workshop
on Spatial and Spatiotemporal Data Mining (SSTDM-22). In Cooperation with
IEEE ICDM 2022, Nov 28 - Dec 1 2022, Orlando, Florida, USA.
• A. Poddar, S. Dey, P. Jawanpuria, J. Mukhopadhyay, and P. K. Biswas. TBM-
GAN: Synthetic document generation with degraded background. In International
Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), 2023.
• Kaushal Kumar Maurya, Maunendra Sankar Desarkar, Manish Gupta and
Puneet Agrawal. Trie Context Augmentation to Improve Personalized Query
Auto-Completion for Short and Unseen Prefixes. ECML PKDD 2023.
• Bishal Santra, Sakya Basak, Abhinandan D., Manish Gupta, Pawan Goyal.
Frugal Prompting for Dialog Models. EMNLP Findings 2023.
• Kaushal Kumar Maurya, Aishwarya Maheswaran, Manish Gupta and Maunendra
Desarkar. DQAC: Detoxifying Query Auto-Completion with Adapters. PAKDD
2024.
• Aishwarya Maheswaran, Kaushal Kumar Maurya, Manish Gupta and Maunendra
Desarkar. DAC: Quantized Optimal Transport Reward-based Reinforcement
Learning Approach to Detoxify Query Auto-Completion. SIGIR 2024.
 • Santra, Bishal, Ravi Ghadia, Arpit Dwivedi, Manish Gupta, and Pawan Goyal.
"CORAL: Contextual Response Retrievability Loss Function for Training Dialog
Generation Models." arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.10558 (2022)
• MAPG 2023
o Harsh Agrawal, Aditya M. Mishra, Manish Gupta and Mausam. Multimodal
Persona Based Generation of Comic Dialogs. ACL 2023.
o Prajwal Gatti, Kshitij Parikh, Dhriti Paul, Manish Gupta, Anand Mishra.
Composite Sketch+Text Queries for Retrieving Objects with Elusive Names and
Complex Interactions. AAAI 2024.