Industry Academia Joint Development and Research Initiatives

Joint industry academia research is one of the key vehicles we use to promote innovation in our ICT industry and to promote a research culture in our academic institutions.   We plan to actively solicit proposals from industry. An active directory of technical problems specifications generated by the industry will be maintained and shared with academic research community.  Similarly, an active directory of solutions being developed by academic researchers will be maintained and shared with the industry. During the research proposal evaluation phase proposals jointly submitted by industry and university partners will be given highest priority.  These jointly defined projects will be executed by hiring professional developers working jointly with faculty members.   Commercial activities like final product development, marketing, and sales and support for the systems produced by these joint projects will be performed by the industry partner.  Future research activities in the discipline related to these projects will be performed by faculty and students of the academic partners.  The rationale for employing professional engineers in university R&D environment is to facilitate industrial quality system development and timely completion of projects.

We expect the following benefits from these initiatives:

1. Universities will develop a culture of solving real industrial problems through their R&D efforts.

2. Industry will get manpower trained in solving problems that are relevant to the industry.

3. Trust and communication channels between industry and academia will be created.

4. The time and resources needed to adapt research to industrial products will be drastically reduced.  Students will incorporate their research results in the systems developed by industry representatives.

5. As university R&D efforts mature a culture for innovative solutions will be created.

Similarly we are supporting research and development initiatives focused at increasing the effectiveness of services delivered by lady health workers (LHW) in rural areas.  We plan to develop e-health related systems and applications that use mobile phones and expert systems that will impart continued education and better advice to citizens in rural areas.

The wealth of information available on internet is empowering individuals and organizations through out the world.  Unfortunately, for majority of our population most of this information is in English language.  We are supporting efforts to make it easier to develop content in local languages.  To empower our young citizens through Internet connectivity and to promote social networks, we will impart training in high schools on creating content in local languages.  This training will be followed by a sequence of competitions for our young minds on developing web pages and content that can be of great value to their peers.