HP Labs completes a decade in India

Hewlett-Packard is celebrating the 10th anniversary of HP Labs in India.

Established in February 2002, HP Labs focuses on creating technology and solutions that help bridge the digital divide by enabling access to IT using intuitive and natural computing solutions and novel technology and business paradigms.

The initial research efforts were aimed at simplifying internet access, speech and gesture based communication interfaces and new software and hardware based models for natural interaction with IT interfaces and devices.

" India is one of the world's largest sources of human potential. At the same time, Information Technology (IT) is one of the world's best mechanisms for maximizing human potential. HP Labs India is bringing these two forces together in ways that are powerful and productive," noted Chandrakant D. Patel HP Senior Fellow and Director (interim) HP Labs.

Some of the notable achievements include the first-ever effort to create world class handwriting recognition, speech recognition and speech synthesis technologies for Indian languages, which aimed to address the language barrier in India to IT adoption.

In 2007, Lipi Toolkit, a toolkit to simplify the creation of handwriting recognition for phonetic based scripts and released by HP as open source averaged over 30,000 downloads per month.

Other key pilots and concepts announced during the last decade include Gesture Keyboard, TVPrintcast, Vayu, Personalized Video, VideoBook, SiteOnMobile, Trusted Hardcopy, Educenter among others. Several of these efforts have been recognized through industry awards such as the Asian Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award 2006, Manthan Award 2007, NASSCOM Award 2007 and NASSCOM IT Innovator 2009 and the MIT Tech Reviews Grand Challenge Awards 2010

In 2012, HP Labs is re-focusing its research efforts towards services and solutions with deeper engagements within HP Enterprise Services, HP Enterprise Group and Global Analytics.

"Cloud computing, mobility, security, collaboration, and big data analytics are beginning to play a crucial part in the evolution of next generation technology usage and adoption across both enterprises and consumers alike. There is a distinct opportunity to take our past end-user focused research and bring its benefits to services and solutions that organizations can use to grow their market and expand their offerings. It's a unique intersection that we fully intend to leverage and explore", said Sudhir Dixit, Director, HP Labs India.

 

Future research will center on enterprise and consumer centric research projects such as Human Augmented Cloud Computing or ‘CrowdCloud' which focuses on achieving intelligent orchestration of human effort and automation to meet the needs of enterprises, and Future School - a cloud based learning platform that will allow personalized education delivery over the Internet in an intuitive and engaging manner.

Other areas include Smart Mobile Services - an initiative using cloud computing, to extend the use of mobile phones beyond voice-based communication for bringing together service providers and consumers in real time and across geo-locations , and a study on Interaction Technologies - to help enterprises expand their customer database, while operating in an environment where technology penetration is low due to lack of familiarity with the keyboard and mouse.