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Kripa Raman

Recently in Palo Alto Hewlett Packard, the largest global manufacturer of printers and personal computers, has restructured HP Labs, its research and development division which has units in seven countries, including India.

The 23 HP Labs centres across these countries will now focus on 20 to 30 “big bang” projects rather than on the 150 being pursued currently, Mr Prith Banerjee, Director of the division, told reporters on a visit to Palo Alto sponsored by HP Labs.

Twenty to thirty researchers constituting “dynamic, high impact teams’, will work on each of the selected projects, he said.

Mr Banerjee who was appointed director of HP Labs eight months ago, comes from an entrepreneurial as well as academic background. He had founded two start-ups and also served as dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

For the India unit of HP Labs, located in Bangalore, the mission is “investment for the next billion” he said. For example, this unit is working on a gesture-based keyboard where users can input data in their own language even though their keyboard is an English ‘qwerty’ one. This is a technology that HP Labs India had been working on even before Mr Banerjee took over. Data entry is not made complicated because of the constraints of an English or even bilingual keyboard. This technology would be relevant to many countries that use a phonetic script.

A newer application from India on display at the conference at HP Labs’ Palo Alto premises was one that allowed bar coding of certificates, to prevent them from being tampered with or modified, something not uncommon in the country. Several universities and government offices have shown interest in this, said an HP researcher.

The display booth illustrated this, showing a certificate of graduation submitted by an applicant to a potential employer showing the applicant’s year of birth as 1965. But upon scanning the bar code on the certificate, the employer got a scanned picture of the original certificate which showed the applicant’s date of birth as 1960!

Another ‘print cast’ technology being developed in India allows people to use commercial cable and wireless networks to deliver educational content and print media for developing economies. This can be used for low cost, distance training, said Mr Banerjee.

For HP Labs as a whole, the new blueprint for corporate research is aimed at better return on investment in research projects, with the right bets being determined with the help of an internal review board. But this is not to say that there will be no breakthrough research, said Mr Banerjee.

One third of the work will consist of breakthrough exploratory basic research, against 10 per cent earlier. One third will consist of application research and one-third advanced development research.

The 600 researchers at HP Labs will work on five major themes. These will be Information Explosion (how to find the ‘needle’ in the mammoth amounts of information being generated); Dynamic Cloud Service (providing reliable information from anywhere); Content Transformation (transfer of physical and analogue data into digital content and enabling of the same in the reverse direction too); Intelligent Infrastructure (smart devices networking that will operate at Internet speed and scale) and Sustainability (technology to reduce power consumption and carbon footprint on the planet).

HP Labs will also collaborate with venture capitalists, universities and entrepreneurs to exchange experiences and ideas. A Web site, HP Idea Labs, will allow researchers and partners to take a peek at some of the research happening too and help them develop on it.

More Stories on : Restructuring | Hardware | Research & Development

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