HP and the Olympics of Research

More than among 450 submissions from 200 universities, represent such top-tier institutions as MIT, Stanford University, the Indian Institute of Technology, Israel's Technion and the Tsinghua University in China. "This level of competition has never happened at HP Labs before. It's like the Olympics of research, where the best professors from the best universities around the world were selected to work with researchers at HP Labs," says Prith Banerjee, director of HP Labs and senior VP  for research, HP.

Together with HP Labs researchers, the professors and their graduate students will tackle some some of the most challenging scientific and technical problems today, including photonics,  data anaylsis, quantum computing, next-gen multimedia coms, future data centres, cloud computing and social computing.

The UK focus
University of Edinburgh, Scotland has been given a grant to look into the next generation of enterprise information-management tools.  Professor Bundy (right) explains the remit:

* Businesses are increasingly using 'ontologies', which are a mathematical (logical) representation for the knowledge in a business. It's a way of storing and combining knowledge that may be distributed across the business and in the heads of many different individuals -- who might, for instance, retire, expire or move to another job. These are more than just databases as they may contain rules and procedures, as well as just facts.

* It's a skilled job to develop, merge, maintain and use these ontologies. Our plan is to build a prototype development aid to assist users in these tasks.

* By studying existing ontologies we will identify commonly occurring patterns in them. We will represent these in a generic form, so that they can be instantiated in different ways and combined to form new ontologies.

* Underlying this tool will be some sophisticated maths, called Category Theory, which supports the joining together of generic small ontology parts into bigger ones. But this maths will be hidden from the user.

* This grant will only support a postgraduate student, Roko Mijic  for one year. So, we're only expecting to explore these ideas. If it looks promising, we'll be looking to take it further.

"It's great to work with HP on this as they can point us to a wide range of exemplar ontologies of the kind directly interesting to business. They also have lot of practical experience in building such ontologies that we hope to tap into. And they give us a route to transfer any new technology we develop into practical use. 

"I worked with this group once before in the 80s, when knowledge-based systems were first popular," he adds.

The University of Bath picking up two awards for work on the artistic rendering of video and systems security modelling, while the University of Bristol also gained twi awards to conduct research into location-based services and nanoparticle materials that could be used in display surfaces. The University of Leeds was granted funding to study improved printing techniques.

The US reaction
"We're thrilled about the relationship with HP. Students and faculty working on these projects have the sense that they're really at the leading edge of something," says Frank Cost, professor and associate dean, Rochester Institute of Technology's College of Imaging Arts and Sciences.
Cost and his students are developing an automated framework for collecting and tagging Web content and then publishing it in an attractive, well organized book, magazine or other format. He hopes to have a system working by the end of the 2008-2009 school year.

Industry-relevant research
Although HP Labs has long funded academic research, the new program is a more formal approach designed to deepen HP's university relationships and to provide professors students with opportunities to work on real business and technology problems.  Some of the graduate students also will be awarded HP Labs internships. "Students find it more exciting to work on something that has industry relelvance. They are encouraged by the idea that their work has value and may even be used," says Venu Govindaraju, a professor of computer science and engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Together with Anurag Mittal of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Govindaraju is working to advance the state-of-the-art in human-computer interaction by allowing people use simple gestures to manipulate virtual objects on a computer monitor or projection screen.

Next-generation communications
At the University of California at Berkeley, Ruzena Bajcsy will use the HP funding to advance her research in tele-immersion technologies that allow people in remote locations to collaborate in real time in an environment that feels as if they're in the same room. "I'd like to use this technology to improve communication among people," says Bajcsy, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and director emeritus of Berkeley's Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society.

With 360-degree stereo capturing that allows full-body 3D reconstruction of people and objects, Bajcsy and her students have experimented with remote collaborative dance performances and Tai Chi instruction. She sees applications for the technology in 3D computer-aided design, ergonomics, physical therapy and entertainment.

Information diffusion
Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, is investigating how ideas spread among people in some of the world's most innovative regions. Specifically, he and his students are measuring how quickly ideas flow inside these regions and to determine the importance of geography given the advances in information technology.

Brynjolfsson, who is also director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, says he's particularly pleased about the opportunity to collaborate with HP Senior Fellow Bernardo Huberman. The two have talked but never had the chance to work together. "Bernardo is a pioneer in quantifying the importance of social networks and information flows," says Brynjolfsson. "I'm looking forward to learning from him and hopefully discovering new things together."

For his part, Huberman says he's eager to begin a close collaboration with Brynjolfsson and Thomas W. Malone, also a professor at MIT's Sloan School. In the past, his interactions with the two consisted mainly of informal email exchanges and discussions at conferences. "We'll now be able to co-generate knowledge, exchange students and research results and write papers together," he says. "We're committed to conducting research together on these projects."

2008 HP Labs Innovation research program winners by region:
Source: http://www.hpl.hp.com/open_innovation/irp/2008_results.html

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 (2 awards)
    * Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Mass.), Dr. Erik Brynjolfsson and Dr. Thomas W. Malone – USA (2 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 (2 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 2 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 Dr. Guy McCusker – England (2 awards)
    * University of Bristol, Dr. Walterio W. Mayol-Cuevas, Dr. Robert M. Richardson – England (2 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

Sources:http://www.hpl.hp.com/
http://www.silicon.com/