‘So far Samsung R&D institute filed around 2900 patent applications in India’

We have three R&D centres in India - Samsung Research Institute, Bengaluru (SRIB) and the other two are in the NCR region, Noida. SRIB is the largest software R&D centre of Samsung outside of South Korea and contributes primarily to four different technology areas. These are mobile communications, computer vision and image processing.

A large part of the image processing software for the camera in all the phones is done from SRIB. The recent innovation, scene optimiser that enables camera to identify the object and automatically decide on the settings required for the best picture.

The third area that we continuously work on is Samsung’s AI platform, Bixby. Bixby is a voice-powered digital assistant that recognises the voice and speech in English. The other part of AI is the personalisation of individual users. The last one is the Internet of Things (IoT). This technology connects all Samsung devices at through Samsung Cloud.

Yes. Make for India is a major focus area for SRI-B, where we gather insights from our consumers and develop software. The insights are used to either change the features, buildplatform software or work with the hardware team in Korea. For instance, in a smartphone the screen size is important for the consumer. It has moved from 5.5 -6.4 inch now. As a Make for India initiative, we understand what do people do with such large screens. We developed something called Chat Over Video. This basically enables the consumer to chat while watching the video.

At Samsung, everything revolves around three keywords — technology, innovation and consumer. In 5G, it is a great opportunity that’s coming up. IT will also enable a lot of B2B use cases like smart agriculture, that helps in understanding the soil quality in real-time with so many sensors placed across the country to support farming.

Second is AI. With the growth in the number of features in smartphones what AI and voice assistant do is to break the UI menu based hierarchy. Now with voice commands, users can directly reach the function they would like to use. This will open up a range of interface innovations for the consumer. There are many developments happening in cameras as well. Some glimpse of it in your S9 plus, for example, the Disney characters which you could use while you are taking pictures.

These days AI technologies especially machine learning, deep neural network, natural language processing are mainstream technologies. About 2-3 years back this was used in one or two projects, but now developers who are developing a protocol software, an IoT software, a camera software, all of them are using this as their base technology tool like we used to see C, C++ before. So, we are hiring people with knowledge in the computer science experience. For instance, over the last few years, more number of BTech computer science graduates from IITs in India could be at Samsung. This year, between the three R&D centres in Bengaluru and Noida, we are hiring about 300 from IIT’s. From among the top 50 universities in India, we would have about 1,000 people for Samsung R&D in this year.

Samsung has a very focussed approach towards patent filing. Globally, we are number two just behind IBM in patents. In 2018, we were the number one in India and also been awarded by the government as the largest patent filers from the country among private companies/MNCs category. So far we have filed about 2900 patent applications in India from India R&D. The initial job was to cultivate a patent mindset by improving the quality of inventions in the Bengaluru R&D centre (SRI-B). With the help of a specialised team, we are conducting basic invention creation training, advanced inventive step training and training for top quality invention and creation to help engineers/employees understand the idea of innovation and how to innovate.

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