HP rewards creative ideas of young engineering students

BANGALORE, INDIA: Fostering its academic relationship with universities, Hewlett Packard India has gone a step ahead to recognize and reward outstanding young engineering graduates in India through its ‘HP Innovate 2008’ programme. 

HP India announced the winners of its annual flagship event ‘HP Innovate 2008’ at an awards ceremony held in Bangalore recently.  

The programme had received more then 380 submissions, of which 126 abstracts were slected and 90 approved. Finally, 10 teams made it to the winning battle of which three bagged the prizes.

The first prize was bagged by the IIT Kharagpur team for their research paper on - Fuzzy Logic Based Protection for Image Resizing by Seam Carving. The second prize went to Jagan Institute of Management Studies for their technical presentation on ‘Fair Meter : GPS Based Tamperproof Auto Rickshaw/Taxi Fare Meters with Secure Fare Upgrades’ and the third prize was awarded to Meenakshi Sundarajan Engineering College, Chennai for their work on ‘Embedded Haptic Eye’.

Speaking to CIOL,  Dr. Vinnie Jauhari, Region Lead - India, Open Innovation Office, HP Labs, said, " These awards provided an opportunity for these young engineering students to showcase their creativity and create opportunities for channeling their potential.” “Our aim is to tap the best of talents from the larger eco system and bring in a quality paradigm, create research collaboration and create technological collaborations locally and globally.”

“HP focuses on industry and academia relationships and HP Innovate sets the right forum to recognize this. The response we received at HP Innovate 2008 ascertains that students seek platforms to showcase their creative ideas and expertise,” Vinnie said. “HP’s University Relations manages HP technology programmes and fosters relationships with academia around the world. This emphasizes HP's aim to help universities drive innovation and create new models of success for integrating technology into learning.It’s a win-win situation for both of us,” she added.

“We tried to map out the requirements of premium institutions, Tier I colleges and private institutes. We learnt that they were all looking for research projects from industries,” informed Vinne. 

“By identifying the right talents across different areas, we have tried to enhance competency and bring them on board and to the next level of the platform,” she added. 

This year, HP Innovate witnessed participation from more than 382 students representing 52 institutions across the country. Students presented research papers in Nano Technology, Network Security, Cryptography, Image processing & printing, Multimedia & Gaming, Embedded technology and other disciplines. The 90 teams chose more than 17 different platforms for the technical paper submissions. 

The team that got the first prize has won a sponsored trip to Palo Alto, USA which is funded by Indo-US Science and Technology Forum and will have an opportunity to interact with eminent researchers at HP Labs, Vinnie said.

In India, the progarmme started in January 2007 to bring in capacity building and engineering education in India. "In the first year, we focused on technology related workshop in the digital space. We brought together the user community of digital space in India where challenges they faced and research directions required were dealt with," she said.

"With the conceptualization of HP Innovate, we wanted to share the range of opportunities with students. The focus of HP labs in India is to develop products for the next billion people," Vinnie said.

Elaborating further on the Open Innovate office (OIO), she said, "HP Labs' OIO pursues and coordinates research collaborations with top researchers and entrepreneurs in academia, government and business around the world. It ensures joint research endeavors result in high-impact research that meets HP and its partners' scientific and business objectives."

"Engineering education innovation is another dimension of Open Innovation Office. It's not about the numbers, but the quality emanating from it. Our idea is to contribute towards capacity development," Vinnie said.