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Crowdsourcing catches Xerox's eye

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CIOL Bureau
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MUMBAI, INDIA: Xerox Corporation’s India Innovation Hub has launched three new projects aimed at exploring how new online techniques such as crowdsourcing can play a role in collaborative research and open innovation

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The Hub partnered with Indian universities to complete the projects, including the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Srishti International Labs and the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.

“Since its inception, the Xerox India Innovation Hub has continued to seek opportunities that enhance its ‘Open Innovation’ program as emerging markets are a key area of focus for the Hub’s research programs. The new projects will explore various new concepts of collaborative work, through on-line platforms, social networking and crowdsourcing,” says Meera Sampath, director of the Xerox India Innovation Hub.

The projects include 'Research and crowdsourcing'. Multilingual Resources and Technologies for Indian Languages is a project with the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay that is aimed at the development of linguistic databases to provide automated translation of documents. This project will explore crowdsourcing in the development of these resources.

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Next is 'Use of online marketplace portal'. The Creative Services Marketplace pilot study is a collaboration with Srishti International Labs, affiliated with the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology. Teams of students will experiment, evaluate and compete on creative design projects using Xerox’s experimental on-line marketplace portal.

Tracking behavior of mobile phone users is another one where Analytics of Dynamics of Mobile Phone Users is a project with the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur that will focus on technologies that provide targeted, personalized information and solutions to mobile phone users.

“These new partnerships further strengthen our vision of building a strong global innovation network and enable us to leverage the rich technical expertise, creative talent and the local knowledge of our collaborators in India and extend that expertise to our global initiatives,” adds Sampath.

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With the launch of the new initiatives, the India Innovation Hub has six partnerships with leading academic and research institutions in India, including the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras’ Rural Technology Business Incubator. All of the projects are carried out in close collaboration between Xerox research centers in the U.S., Europe and India.

The Xerox India Innovation Hub opened in March 2010 and is located in Chennai. It is Xerox’s fifth research location worldwide and is the most recent addition to the Xerox Innovation Group.