MIT Tech Review's TR35 awards go to..

BANGALORE, INDIA: Bangalore has emerged as India’s hottest technology innovation city with five innovators from the city making it to the ‘India TR35 2012 list of young technology innovators’.

The India TR35 members from Bangalore include Shirish Goyal, 27, of LinkSmart Technologies for creating fool-proof security to prevent data theft; Sumeet Yamdagni, 29, of Instrumentation Scientific Technologies for inventing Optical instruments for Fiber Bragg Grating sensors and Vikas Malpani, 28, of MaxHeap Technologies for bringing communities on a common floor.

Bangalore’s Anirudh Sharma, 24, of Ducere Technologies was named the Innovator of the Year for creating Haptic shoe for the visually impaired. Animesh Nandi, 33, of Bell Labs India, Alcatel-Lucent for devising personalized privacy frameworks. Nandi  was the only India TR35 member from a Bangalore based multi-national while the rest were from local enterprises.

The list of 20 innovators from Biomedicine, Communications, Computing, Energy, Materials, Transportation and Web under the age of 35 for 2012 was announced by the India edition of MIT Technology Review, the world’s oldest technology publication, in Bangalore Sunday.

The Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, has emerged as India’s hottest technology innovation center with three of its researchers VSK Murthy Balijepalli, 26; Nitin Joshi, 28; and Vanteru Mahendra Reddy, 30, making it to the ‘India TR35 2012 list of young technology innovators’.

While VSK Murthy Balijepalli of IIT Mumbai was chosen to be part of the India TR35 list for developing a novel method to forecast electricity price, grid frequency and load which can assist in making power grids smarter, Nitin Joshi (also of IIT Mumbai) made to the list for developing dual compartment nanostructures which can encapsulate two anticancer drugs, paclitaxel and curcumin, and deliver them in combination to lung cancer patients. Conventional chemotherapy is limited due to its non specificity, poor pharmacokinetics and multi-drug resistance.

The only woman innovator in this year’s list is Priyanka Sharma, 28, from CSIR-run Institute of Microbial Technology in Chandigarh. She developed a plastic chip which uses simple assay techniques to detect toxic materials in the environment quickly and cost effectively.

Abhijeet Joshi, 28, from the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research, Ahmedabad, is the sixth public institute winner. Using nanotechnologies, Joshi has developed a multifunctional implantable platform to aid disease diagnosis and drug delivery simultaneously.

“Two decades of economic liberalization unleashed the innovative energies of Indians with the private sector firms in the technology sector garnering mind space in the innovation arena in recent years. Seeing the presence of technology innovators from country’s public institutions on the 2012 edition of Technology Review India’s TR35 list of young innovators is a matter of pride.” says Narayanan Suresh, Group Editor of Technology ReviewIndia.

These 20 technologists would present their innovations at the Emerging Technologies conference EmTech India 2012 at Bangalore later this month. The conference will be addressed by a team of eminent scientists fromCambridge,USA based Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

“It is heartening to see IITs solving unique Indian problems. This culture of innovation in public institutions will enthuse thousands of bright students pursuing technical programs,” said Mr Pradeep Gupta, Publisher of Technology Review India and a distinguished alumnus of IIT Delhi.

“Indian youth will be attracted to this innovation ecosystem and India will benefit from their work in the near future,” Gupta added.

The Innovator of the Year Aniruddha Sharma, 24, created a haptic shoe for the visually impaired. The haptic feedback guides the user to the destination by vibrating in front, back, or on either side of the shoe, indicating that the user needs to turn.

Humanitarian of the Year Somnath Ray, 35, redesigned the age-old para-transit vehicle for the disabled that gives them not only mobility, but also a mobile commerce platform.