NEW DELHI, INDIA: With a motto to encourage global engineering graduates, HP Labs established Open Innovation Office (OIO). OIO is also aimed to pursue and coordinate high-impact research collaborations with top researchers and entrepreneurs in academia, government and businesses around the world.

"Most of the firms look at innovation from within. There was no external funnel that they could deploy. But we at HP think that we need to work closely with communities, universities and other collaborations to work on better things for the better deployment of out resources," said Dr. Vinnie Jauhari, Regional Head, India, HP Labs Open Innovation Office.

HP has seven labs across the globe, the largest one being in Paulo Alto and the rest in St. Petersburg, Hafia, Bangalore, Tokyo, Bristol and Beijing. The company's Bangalore lab focuses on subject areas such as human machine interfaces, paper in digital enterprises, simplify mobile web, and technology for education.

Last year the company launched HP Labs Innovation Research Program. Under the program, the company invites request for proposals (RFPs) from global universities to participate in joint research with HP. The program represents a fine example of collaboration between public and private sector to encourage high-end innovation across the globe.

"In such programs, internal projects compete with external projects. In a closed model of innovation, we think that we have all smartest people associated with us. But in an open model of innovation, we work collaboratively," added Vinnie.

"In fact, the goal for high impact research is not about creating but it is also about commercializing. That's when the collaborative role of academia, government and industry comes in."

Yesterday, Neelam Dhawan, managing director, HP India had mentioned during EmTech that "In 2008 we had targeted 100 engineering institutes. In all 300 students had participated in the program. We have already announced the HP Innovation Program 2009. This time 600 students participated."

2009's invite for HP Labs Innovation Research Program is already out that invites innovative ideas for technology areas such as dynamic cloud services, content transformation, information management, digital commercial print, and intelligent infrastructure, and such. "All these research areas focus on sustainability," said Vinnie.

Best of 2008

Two of the awarded proposals last year — Fuzzy Logic Based Protection for Image Resizing by Seam Carving (by IIT Kharagpur) and Fair Meter: GPS Based Tamper-proof Auto Rickshaw/Taxi Fare Meters with Secure Fare Upgrades (by JIMS) — are now being embraced in tech forums as well.

Fuzzy Logic Based Protection for Image Resizing by Seam Carving: Typically, "seam carving used to be done by cropping and scaling that lose and distort the image respectively. In the recent methods seam carving is being done by algorithm alterations wherein we calculate the energy level," said Kundan Kumar, one of the three brilliant students behind the development of this innovative product.

The only limitation of this innovation was that it could not identify the object or the skin. "To solve the problem, we used fuzzy segmentation and neural network. These are all known as weak technologies but we used to build a robust and much stronger way to develop our product," said the other engineering student Debdutta Bhattacharya involved in the development of the product.

Fare Meter: GPS-based Tamper-proof Auto Rickshaw/Taxi Fare Meters with Secure Fare Upgrades: "Almost a year ago, I was standing at the bus stand. There I saw a lady scolding an auto driver for overcharging her," said Ashish Gupta, one of the developers of the GSP-based meter. The smart engineering students used GPS to make a tamper-proof meter with secure upgrades.

"That is when I decided to develop a fare meter. So our first objective was just to develop a fare meter and then to make it a secure fare meter with additional features."

However, the cost associated with the meter is quite high. Today, an electric meter costs around Rs 3,100, and the GPS-based tamper-proof meter costs near $3,500. "We feel that the price will come down to approximately Rs 2,500 when once the mass production gets started. In addition, GPS is the U.S-controlled system. So there can be challenges in terms of availability," added Ashish.

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