HP Labs Commits Research Funding to 46 Universities Across the Globe

Aug 9, 2012 9:15 PM ET

HP Data Central Blog

by Michael_Thacker

HP’s philosophy of open innovation has led to extraordinary collaboration with governments, universities, and our customers and partners.

HP is furthering its commitment to deepening insights and impact through research and innovation. This week, HP Labs announced it is giving over $4 million in sponsored research awards as part of the fifth annual HP Labs Innovation Research Program (IRP).

These awards will enable 60 research projects to conduct breakthrough collaborative research in cloud technology, health care, information analytics, social media, and a host of other disciplines. Faculty and students at leading colleges, universities and research institutes around the world have been participating in research with HP to bring about the next generation of technologists and scientists.

“HP Labs’ ultimate goal is to bring value to HP through commercialization of our research,” said Chandrakant Patel, HP senior fellow and interim director of HP Labs. “One of the ways we get there is by tapping into the wealth of knowledge from leading colleges, universities, and research institutes.  Our academic colleagues contribute a diversity of perspective, new ideas and fresh approaches that strengthen our research.  In return, we help educate the next generation of scientists and engineers.”

Here are a few examples of research projects that were funded as part of the program. The full list of 2012 awards can be found here.

  • Oregon State University Professor Patrick Chang and Texas A&M University Professor Samuel Palermo are jointly working on energy-efficient electronic/photonic interfaces for next-generation data centers and networks.
  • Rice University Professor Edward Knightly is developing enabling technologies for urban-scale wireless networking to improve capacity and security critical to emerging wi-fi standards.
  • At the OFFIS Research Institute in Germany, Professor Susanne Boll-Westermann of the University of Oldenburg will be researching the creation and use of secure personal-health profiles compiled from online data sources, with an initial focus on heart fitness.
  • At University of California-Davis, Professor Chen-Nee Chuah is using innovative measurement of network traffic to enable efficient and scalable network design, capacity planning and anomaly detection.

Now in its fifth year, the HP Labs IRP has channeled approximately $20 million of support to academic projects aligned with the HP Labs research agenda. IRP has gathered more than 2,000 research proposals from more than 40 countries, each seeking up to $100,000 in project funding for one academic year. Of these proposals, IRP has supported more than 150 research projects, most being renewed for a second year. More than 40 patent filings and nearly 250 scholarly publications have resulted from IRP projects to date.