20 young Indians honoured at EmTech 2010

BANGALORE, INDIA: Technology Review honored 20 Indians below the age of 35, across sectors, for their technical innovations, at the ongoing two-day EmTech 2010 India Conference here today. The Indian edition of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Technology Review unveiled its first-ever TR35 India list, which recognizes the game-changing achievements of young Indian inventors.

The Humanitarian of the Year award-winner Dhananjaya Dendukuri, 32, CEO and co-founder, Achira Labs, Bangalore was chosen for his innovation in the field of biotechnology and medicine. He created a novel platform to perform low-cost medical diagnostic tests.

The Innovator of the Year was awarded to Kranthi Kiran Vistakula’s “heat exchange” technology. A postgraduate student at Mechanical Engineering and Technology Policy Program from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he developed the ClimaCon technology which has applications beyond the apparel space, in infant incubators and cooling large spaces such as auditoriums.

“The work of 20 individuals, under the age of 35, was chosen for superb technical innovations that holds great promise over the next few decades. This is part of the global listing of innovators called TR35, that MIT Technology Review has been identifying for over a decade,” says Pradeep Gupta, Chairman of CyberMedia group that added the Indian edition of Technology Review to its stable of 15 publications last March.

The awards span across a range of technologies from biotech, arts and entertainment, and software development to semiconductors, transportation, energy and new materials research.

Not surprisingly, while most of the winners came with background in engineering from the premier Indian engineering schools, the IITs, the diversity of their solutions and approach to innovation was fired by passion and imagination. The winners of the Innovator, Humanitarian and the Social Innovator had educational stints at the haloed engineering school in the world, the MIT in the USA.

Several of the young innovators have a connection with Bangalore, reinforcing the Silicon Valley of India tag.

Rikin B. Gandhi, 28, Founder of Digital Green, Bangalore was named the Social Innovator of the Year for finding a solution to help farmers adopt better farmer practices.

The most Interesting Innovation was from the energy field with Aravind A. Narayan’s solution for recovering oil for reuse. Aravind, 34, is the founder of Pure Tech India based in Tiruchirappalli. The youngest innovator on the list is the 23-year-old post graduate student of IIT Kharagpur, Manoj Kumar Mandelia. He developed a solution to deal with wastewater management thus producing electricity.

Computer & Electronics Hardware

The 26-year-old co-founder of Mumbai-based Ideaforge Technology, Ashish Bhat created the world’s smallest and lightest autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle that can be used for anti-terrorist operations, counter-insurgency in forests, hostage situations, border infiltration monitoring, local law enforcement operations, search and rescue operations, disaster management, aerial photography and more.

Indrani Medhi has created a text-free user interface for illiterate and semi-literate users. The 31-year old Associate Researcher works with the world’s largest software maker, Microsoft Research. Mayank Shrivastava, a 25-year-old student at IIT Mumbai’s Centre for Excellence in Nanoelectronics modified DeMOS devices that would be one of the key elements for modern system-on-chip designs.

Prajwal V. Kumar, 30, chief design engineer and co-founder of Mangalore Robotronics Technologies, was recognized for creating a remote controlled system for power tiller that will save farmers the drudgery of having to walk along with the power tiller to control its direction.

Medicine and Biotechnology, Energy

The 30-year-old co-founder of Consure Medical, Nishith Chasmawala created a solution for managing the issue of fecal incontinence in patients while Satyam Trivedi, 29, co-founder of Indrion Technologies, Bangalore will be part of this technology hall of fame for creating an intelligent system for optimizing electricity consumption.

Software

Sriram Kannan, 34, of 121 Telesolutions Bangalore, is part of the IndiaTR35 list for developing software for accessing medical images on mobile phones while Hardik Sanghvi, 31, founder, Vmukti Solutions, Ahmedabad created an algorithm to provide rich content on low bandwidth

Ram Prakash Hanumanthappa, 31, Developer of Quillpad, a phonetic transliteration software and Vishal Gupta, 32, Founder, Selcore Technology, Mumbai are on the list for their contribution to the field of software technology.

Telecom

Bhushan G. Jagyasi, 30, scientist, TCS Innovation Labs, Mumbai built a mobile-based agro advisory system for potato farmers. Gireesh Rajendran, 31, Texas Instruments, Bangalore developed an ultra-low-noise GPS receiver in standard CMOS process, which demonstrated that low noise RF receivers can be designed for mass production in low cost CMOS process.

Sharad Jaiswal of Bangalore-based Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, built a solution to deliver rich content at lower prices enabling users at the bottom end of the spectrum use data services. Another Bangalorean, Jaiganesh Balakrishnan, 33, senior systems engineer at Texas Instruments co-invented the multi-band OFDM UWB system for high-speed wireless communications in personal area networks.

Transportation

Shashikanth Suryanarayanan, 32, developed India's First Steer-by-wire vehicle, and has built a unique solution to improve driving experience.

At today's even each innovator in the TR35 India list also got two minutes each to present their innovation to the audience.