Located in India?s Silicon Valley Bangalore, HP Labs India is one of seven HP Labs worldwide. Its goal is to make computing life simple. HP Labs India director Sudhir Dixit says that the research explores ways in which IT adoption and internet connectivity can be accelerated through simplified and intuitive computing and natural metaphors of human-device interaction. In a recent interaction, he apprises Sudhir Chowdhary about the happenings at the creative hotspot. Excerpts:
HP CEO Meg Whitman has emphasised an increased investment in innovation and research at HP. What does that mean in particular for HP Labs India?
Yes, Meg has reiterated that HP will be investing more on R&D, and the HP Labs now reports directly to her. The change has increased the visibility for HP Labs and enables now even more collaboration across the businesses. It also allows us to focus on new areas and accelerate some of the technology investments we have made over the past few years.
One of our goals is to use an open innovation approach to harness academia, government and industry partnerships to accelerate and amplify research investments. Since innovation is the lifeblood of any technology company, our CEO is committed to investing more in HP Labs to help drive the growth of HP through new cutting edge products, services and solutions.
HP Labs India is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. How has the journey been so far and what changes have you seen?
HP Labs in India was established in February 2002 with the vision to create new technologies to address the IT needs of the billions of people not yet touched by the IT revolution; many of whom we believed would come from countries like India. When we started the HP Labs in India, we were focused on making IT accessible to Indians at the grassroots who aren?t necessarily familiar with computing and internet.
We looked at ways to make computing interfaces and access more intuitive and simple. We created applications and services that were locally relevant.
However, over time we found that the technologies we developed here could be adapted and used in other emerging markets including developed markets. The current direction is to now see how that research can also be harnessed by enterprises to meet their customers? needs. To meet this goal, we are now focusing on developing relevant end-to-end solutions and services while making sure that the user experiences overall, especially the user-device interaction, remains as simple and intuitive as possible.
What are the kind of real world challenges HP Labs India is focused on solving?
One of the key challenges is to make computing and internet relevant and accessible to all sections of society. There are several barriers to this though, especially in the developing and growth markets. Setting aside cost as a factor, there are other factors such as lack of local language content, complicated computing interfaces that are difficult to use, unfamiliarity with the keyboard and mouse usage, and a culture of using paper for transactions and communication. People in villages and smaller cities face these as challenges that either prevent or discourage them from using a computer or surfing the internet. These are some key real world challenges that HP Labs India is focused on.
Can you give us a sense of some of the technologies developed at HP Labs India?
HP Labs India research revolves around paper based interaction, simplified Web access and interaction, multimodal and gestural interaction, technology in education, and device, connectivity and cloud services. The research at HP Labs explores ways in which IT adoption and internet connectivity can be accelerated through simplified and intuitive computing and natural metaphors of human-device interaction, for example, via speech, gestures, touch, paper and mobile handsets.
Any recent successes?
In 2006, we released Lipi Toolkit, an open source toolkit for online handwriting recognition on Windows as well as Linux. In July 2010, we launched the SiteOnMobile beta, a portal based solution that enables website owners to define tasks on their website and make those tasks easily accessible to their customers; even those using low-end mobile phones, through either voice or SMS based interactions, thus bringing Web to the masses.
In 2012, we announced the VAYU concept device, a unique prototype developed to enable rich and intuitive experiences that deliver the value of computing and the Internet to users in their living room without owning a computer. The VAYU ecosystem can function as a ?hub of the home? allowing users to access the internet using their mobile phones or a basic infrared remote as well as execute common tasks when indoors or outdoors.
