MIT Technology Review Announces India TR35, Young Technology Innovators under 35 for 2012

The list of 20 innovators from Biomedicine (2), Communications (2), Computing (4), Energy (2), Materials (3), Transportation (2) and Web (5) under the age of 35 for 2012 was announced by the India edition of MIT Technology Review, in Bangalore today.

Bangalore has emerged as India’s hottest technology innovation city with five innovators from the making it to the ‘India TR35 2012 list of young technology innovators’.

The innovators from Bangalore include Shirish Goyal (27) of LinkSmart Technologies for creating fool-proof security to prevent data theft; Sumeet Yamdagni (29) of Instrumentation Scientific Technologies for inventing optical instruments for Fiber Bragg Grating sensors; Animesh Nandi (33) of Bell Labs India, Alcatel-Lucent for devising personalized privacy frameworks and Vikas Malpani (28) of MaxHeap Technologies for bringing communities on a common floor.

Bangalore’s Anirudh Sharma (24) of Ducere Technologies was named the Innovator of the Year for creating Haptic shoe for the visually impaired.

The Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, has emerged as India’s hottest technology innovation center with three of its researchers VSK Murthy Balijepalli (26); Nitin Joshi (28) and Vanteru Mahendra Reddy (30) making it to the list.

VSK Murthy Balijepalli was chosen for developing a novel method to forecast electricity price, grid frequency and load which can assist in making power grids smarter. Nitin Joshi made to the list for developing dual compartment nanostructures which can encapsulate two anticancer drugs, paclitaxel and curcumin, and deliver them in combination to lung cancer patients. Conventional chemotherapy is limited due to its non specificity, poor pharmacokinetics and multi-drug resistance. Mahendra Reddy was chosen for his work on the development of a laboratory scale flameless combustion with liquid fuels by design at IIT Mumbai. The burning of liquid fuels in flameless combustion mode is more difficult as compared to gaseous fuels

Abhijit Majumder (33) from IIT Kanpur, is another notable winner for his highly innovative chemical adhesives that mimic some natural principles.

The only woman innovator in this year’s list is Priyanka Sharma (28) from CSIR-run Institute of Microbial Technology in Chandigarh. She developed a plastic chip which uses simple assay techniques to detect toxic materials in the environment quickly and cost effectively.

Abhijeet Joshi (28) from the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research, Ahmedabad, is the sixth public institute winner. Using nanotechnologies, Joshi has developed a multifunctional implantable platform to aid disease diagnosis and drug delivery simultaneously.

Speaking on the occasion of the announcement, Narayanan Suresh, Group Editor of Technology Review India said, “Two decades of economic liberalization unleashed the innovative energies of Indians with the private sector firms in the technology sector garnering mind space in the innovation arena in recent years. Seeing the presence of technology innovators from country’s public institutions on the 2012 edition of Technology Review India’s TR35 list of young innovators is a matter of pride.”

These 20 technologists would present their innovations at the emerging technologies conferenceEmTech India 2012 at Bangalore later this month. The conference will be addressed by a team of eminent scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The India TR 35 program started in 2010 and in the last two years, Technology Review India has identified 37 young innovators. India lists have so far been dominated by innovators from small and medium size private research institutions.

This year Technology Review India received over 250 nominations from all over India. Over a period of three months, a panel of 23 expert judges identified 20 individuals who have developed technologies that are likely to benefit the society at large.

List of India TR35 2012

Biomedicine

Abhijeet Joshi – Nanosensors in microspheres – National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research, Ahmedabad

Nitin Josh – Making chemotherapy non-invasive – Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai

Communications

Shaunak Khire – Enabling businesses to advertise through mobile phone – Camber Tech, Pune

Venkatesan Oosur Vinayagam – Mobile antakshari - Hexolabs Interactive Technologies, Chennai (Social Innovator of the year)

Computing

Anthony Vipin Das – Digitizing medical records – LV Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad

Shirish Goyal – Fool-proof security to prevent data theft – LinkSmart Technologies, Bangalore

Sumeet Yamdagni – Optical instruments for Fiber Bragg Grating sensors – Instrumentation Scientific Technologies, Bangalore

Hemanth Kumar Satyanarayana – Virtual trial rooms – Imaginate Software Labs, Hyderabad

Energy

VSK Murthy Balijepalli – Forecasting the price and load of electricity – Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai

Vanteru Mahendra Reddy – Flameless combustion with liquid fuels – Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai

Materials

Abhijit Majumder – Making stronger adhesives that can imitate nature – Indian Institute of Technology,Kanpur

Vivek Nair – Carbon nanotubes from carbon emissions – Damascus Fortune, Mumbai

Priyanka Sharma – Plastic biochip electrochemical sensor for immunosensing applications – Institute of Microbial Technology, Chandigarh

Transportation

Somnath Ray – A viable para-transit mode of mobility – Dplay, Delhi (Humanitarian of the Year)

Anirudh Sharma – Haptic shoe for the visually impaired – Ducere Technologies, Bangalore (Innovator of the Year)

Web

Sachin Dev Duggal – Moving desktop computer into the cloud – Nivio Technologies, Gurgaon

Unni Koroth – Open source platform for institute management – Foradian Technologies, Kasaragod

Vikas Malpan – Bringing communities on a common floor – MaxHeap Technologies, Bangalore

Jay Meattle – Demand side platform for selling ad inventories – Shareaholic.com, Delhi

Animesh Nandi – Personalized privacy frameworks – Bell Labs India, Alcatel-Lucent, Bangalore

For iRobot, the future is getting closer, research is going very fast

Ever since Rosey the Robot took care of "The Jetsons" in the early 1960s, the promise of robots making everyday life easier has been a bit of a tease.

Rosey, a metallic maid with a frilly apron, "kind of set expectations that robots were the future," said Colin M Angle, the chief executive of the iRobot Corporation. "Then, 50 years passed."

Now Angle's company is trying to do Rosey one better — with Ava, a 5-foot-4 assistant with an iPad or an Android tablet for a brain and Xbox motion sensors to help her get around. But no apron, so far.

Over the last decade, iRobot, based outside Boston, has emerged as one of the nation's top robot makers. It has sold millions of disc-shaped Roomba vacuum cleaners, and its bomb disposal robots have protected soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, with Ava, it is using video and computing advances to create robots that can do office work remotely and perhaps one day handle more of the household chores.

In late January, iRobot expanded a partnership with InTouch Health, a small company that enables doctors at computer screens to treat stroke victims and other patients from afar. And this week, Texas Instruments said it would supply iRobot with powerful new processors that could help the robots be more interactive and gradually lower their cost.

"We have a firm belief that the robotics market is on the cusp of exploding," said Remi El-Ouazzane, vice president and general manager of the Texas Instruments unit that makes the processors.

Mr. Angle's hopes for broadening the industry's appeal are shared by other robot companies, which have struggled to expand beyond industrial and military uses, toys and other niche products.

Programming robots to mimic human behavior remains difficult. But the ability to use the tablets as simple touch-screen controllers is attracting more software developers, who are envisioning applications that could enhance videoconferencing, provide mobile security guards and sales clerks and help the elderly live longer in their homes.

And with their own innovations now at the center of the effort, the technology giants - Apple, Google, Microsoft and the semiconductor companies - are also pushing things along.

Mr. Angle, 44, who has been at the forefront of robotics since he was a student at M.I.T., said Ava "is one of the things in our pipeline that I am personally most excited about." But he cautioned that the robot was still a prototype and would not report for any actual work duties before next year.

Mr. Angle estimates that the early versions of Ava will cost in the tens of thousands of dollars, high enough that the company is focusing first on medical applications with InTouch Health, based in Santa Barbara, Calif.

InTouch already has robots with video hookups in many smaller hospitals, and they have saved lives in emergencies when specialists could not get there in person. But the doctors have to drive and manipulate the robots with joysticks to see the patients.

Mr. Angle said that a tap on Ava's tablet screen could dispatch it to the right room and free doctors from the more mundane controls. Its mapping system, based partly on Microsoft's 3-D motion sensor for the Xbox, could enable the robot to hustle to the patient's bedside without slamming into obstacles.

As time goes on, Mr. Angle says he thinks that businessmen could use the robots as proxies at meetings, speaking and watching wirelessly through Ava's headgear and even guiding her into the hall for private chats. And if the sticker price eventually gets down to consumer levels, as he thinks it will, Ava could, with arms added, dispense pills to baby boomers or even fetch them cocktails.

Still, given how long other robotic breakthroughs have taken, Wall Street is not sure what to make of all this yet.

As sales of its vacuums and military robots grew, iRobot's earnings shot up to $40 million last year from $756,000 in 2008, and its stock surged to $38 a share from $7. But with pressure mounting for budget cuts at the Pentagon, Mr. Angle told analysts last month that the company's military sales could drop by as much as 20 percent this year, and the stock quickly tumbled to $25 to $26 a share.

The company had laid off 55 of the 657 employees it had last fall in anticipation of a slowdown in military sales in the United States, and the head of that division departed last month amid concerns that iRobot had not picked up enough military sales to foreign governments.

Frank Tobe, an independent analyst who publishes the Robot Report online, said that until Ava was equipped to pick up and handle objects, the robot would have limited uses. But he said the partnership with InTouch gave iRobot a much-needed toehold in health care. iRobot plans to invest $6 million in InTouch, and Mr. Tobe said by combining their technologies, the companies could produce devices at a much lower cost and attract more business.

IRobot also faces growing competition from robotics companies in Asia and Europe, many subsidized by governments that believe the innovations will help push their economies forward.

But analysts say iRobot has a number of crucial patents. And the company has a strong track record in finding practical uses for robots and getting them to market.