HP Labs is the central research lab for Hewlett-Packard (HP). Prith Banerjee, senior vice-president of research at HP and director of HP Labs, joined the firm in 2007. Ever since, the company?s central research organisation has been re-booted and it has focused on many big bet research projects. Based in Palo Alto, Banerjee now helps chart technical strategies for the company. In an interview to Goutam Das, he talks about money in research, successes and an esoteric technology that can help detect oil, predict earthquakes and bridge collapses; also, mimic dogs guarding airports. Excerpts:

People have been talking about a crisis in R&D. HP?s R&D budgets have decreased vastly compared to a few years back; the firm?s spending is lower versus peers. Why is the firm shy on investing in long-term research?

HP as a technology company believes in innovation. HP spends about $3 billion on R&D, which we believe is the right amount to spend. It is not about the amount of money you spend; it?s what you are doing with the money. The strategy is to look at the most important problems facing our customers in the next decade and come up with some very compelling solutions. We have been very successful with that.

Tell us about some of new success stories at HP Labs, where research has been transferred into products or services.

The first one is StoreOnce product in the storage area. It is based on fundamental research in our scalable storage big bet around data deduplication (data deduplication can save a tremendous amount of storage capacity). The second success is ePrint or cloud print technology. We came up with cloud print where you upload documents onto the cloud and it can be downloaded to any wireless printer in the world.

The third technology is our work on ?memristor? (memristors represent a fourth basic passive circuit element?memory chips created with memristor technology can run faster and use less energy than Flash memory technologies). We created the technology and transferred it to memory manufacturer Hynix Semiconductor this year. The fourth project is called the ?Central Nervous System for the Earth?. The vision is a nervous system that will see, hear, feel, touch and smell everything around us having billions of nanoscale sensors. What if we could have a nanoscale sensor that looks like an eye but can see things a thousand times better than the human eye? So instead of two eyes, I have a million eyes. Instead of two ears, I could have a nanoscale ear that can listen a thousand times better.

A ?Central Nervous System for the Earth? appears an esoteric idea. But can this be commercialised?

It was a really wild idea and people said that it could never come to market. This year, we brought it to market by applying the technology to the oil exploration industry. We worked with Shell. To locate oil, you drill innumerable holes. That?s bad for the environment and is expensive. So we do an artificial explosion, say in a 10 x10 square mile area, and then listen to the reflections. Oil will have one kind of reflection, water and rocks another kind. By placing a million sensors and listening to the explosion, we can determine whether there is oil or not. We have deployed it as a services solution.

Apart from the oil and gas industry, where can this project be applied?

We have created a technology that can smell; we can identify the presence of a single biomolecule in a jar. Look at the application in the airline security area. There are airports that keep dogs?they can smell everything but you cannot have 10 billion dogs for all people. So you can deploy HP ?smellers?. The technology can be applied to earthquake prevention as well?can you predict an earthquake 15 minutes before it happens?

My grandmother used to tell me that before an earthquake, snakes moved around and dogs made strange noises; animals can hear the murmurs of an earthquake 15-20 minutes before it happens. The human ear cannot figure it out. That is a potential area we are exploring. A bridge before it collapses, give out signals but we don?t know it. So our technology can be applied to structural integrity. The same vibration sensing technology can have tremendous applications.