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HP Selects 41 Professors for Innovation Research Awards

Thursday 14. August 2008 - HP today announced the 41 professors it has selected to receive its HP Labs Innovation Research Awards, which fund strategic joint research projects between academic research institutions worldwide and HP Labs, the company’s central research arm.

As part of a newly announced open and competitive process that reviewed more than 450 proposals from 200 universities in 28 countries spanning the globe, HP selected 41 projects at 34 institutions. Selected professors represent U.S. institutions including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, while selected international institutions include Germany’s Technische Universitaet Muenchen, the Russian Academy of Sciences, Indian Institutes of Technology and China’s Tsinghua University.

“Today, no one has locked up the really good ideas. To stay competitive, the technology industry has to have internal and external innovation paths,” said Henry Chesbrough, author of three books on open innovation and executive director of the Center for Open Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. “Industry-academia collaboration is an open innovation example that can provide competitive advantage to companies that know how to leverage the enormous creative potential of university researchers.”

Awardees will work with HP Labs researchers on speculative and potentially game-changing research, the results of which are expected to generate the next set of technology breakthroughs in the areas of information explosion, dynamic cloud services, content transformation, intelligent infrastructure and sustainability.

HP will work with the world’s leading academic researchers and project topics cover a wide range of challenging technical problems, including nano-photonic quantum systems research (High-Speed Hybrid Silicon Lasers), social computing and how it relates to the diffusion of knowledge (Diffusion of Good Ideas Among Mega-Regions), and the development of sustainable IT ecosystems (Modeling Tools for Data Center Energy Performance and Sustainability).

“Deepening HP Labs’ strategic collaboration with those in academia, government and the commercial sector ensures HP’s research endeavors result in high-impact research that meets the scientific and business objectives of HP and its partners,” said Prith Banerjee, senior vice president, Research, HP, and director, HP Labs. “The professors’ deep technical expertise, HP Labs researchers’ domain and industry knowledge, and governments’ abilities to fund innovative research will come together to address the world’s most complex IT challenges.”

HP Labs Innovation Research Awards provide project funding of up to $100,000 for one year to each academic institution and are renewable for a total of three years based on research progress and HP business requirements. These awards include support for one graduate student researcher, who is also eligible to apply to the HP Labs internship program. The next request for proposals is planned for spring 2009.

2008 HP Labs Innovation research program winners by region:

Americas

Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pa.), Dr. Greg Ganger – USA
Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, Ga.), Dr. Karsten Schwan and Dr. Biing Hwang Juang – USA (two awards)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Mass.), Dr. Erik Brynjolfsson and Dr. Thomas W. Malone – USA (two awards)
Purdue University (West Lafayette, Ind.), Dr. Elias I. Franses – USA
Rochester Institute of Technology (Rochester, N.Y.), Dr. Frank Cost – USA
Stanford University (Palo Alto, Calif.), Dr. Brian A. Wandell and Dr. Hideo Mabuchi – USA (two awards)
State University of New York at Buffalo, Dr. Venu Govindaraju – USA
University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Ruzena Bajcsy and Dr. Van P. Carey – USA (two awards)
University of California, Davis, Dr. Kwan-Liu Ma – USA
University of California, San Diego, Dr. Amin Vahdat – USA
University of California, Santa Barbara, Dr. John Bowers – USA
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Narendra Ahuja – USA
University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Mich.), Dr. Kang G. Shin and Dr. Stephane Lafortune – USA (two awards)
University of Southern California (Los Angeles, Calif.), Dr. Alan E. Willner – USA
University of Toronto, Dr. Ming Hu – Canada
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Mikko H. Lipasti – USA
Asia Pacific

Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, Dr. Soumen Chakrabarti – India
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, Dr. Anurag Mittal – India
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Dr. Anwitaman Datta – Singapore
National Institute of Informatics (Tokyo), Dr. Kae Nemoto – Japan
Peking University, Dr. Xiaoming Li – China
Tsinghua University, Dr. Jianhua Feng – China
Europe, the Middle East and Africa

Bilkent University (Ankara), Dr. Alper Sen – Turkey
Konstanz University, Dr. Essor Daniel A. Keim – Germany
Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow), Dr. Maxim Grinev – Russia
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology (Haifa), Dr. Ron Y. Pinter – Israel
Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Dr. Alfons Kemper – Germany
Universidade do Minho (Braga), Dr. Antonio Luis Pinto Ferreira De Sousa – Portugal
University of Bath, Dr. John Philip Collomosse and Dr. Guy McCusker – England (two awards)
University of Bristol, Dr. Walterio W. Mayol-Cuevas and Dr. Robert M. Richardson – England (two awards)
University of Edinburgh, Dr. Alan Bundy – Scotland
University of Leeds, Dr. Ming Ronnier Luo – England
University of Saint-Petersburg, Dr. Boris Novikov – Russia
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Dr. Frank Van Harmelen – Netherlands