IBM India announces research awards

IBM India announced the Shared University Research (SUR) awards for what they term 'Smarter planet' projects, in collaboration with five leading educational institutes: IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi, College of Engineering, Pune, Yashwantrao Chavan Maharashtra Open University and PSG Tech, Coimbatore.

The award, totalling $ 250,000 ( `1.12 crore), will also provide researchers the opportunity for technical collaboration with IBM experts, access to IBM software and high performance computing.

The projects undertaken will be in the fields of healthcare and education.

Dr Bhooshan Kelkar, country manager, university relations, IBM India, said, "The shared university research programme is a very competitive. It is a world-wide programme that promotes academia-corporate partnership to address some challenging problems faced by society. We hope that the collaboration will help provide innovative technology solutions that will bring healthcare and education closer to people."

IBM India and PSG Tech, Coimbatore will work on leveraging benefits of ICT for a public health initiative across 10 villages in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. This SUR will help use high performance computing infrastructure to improve public health in urban and rural healthcare centres.

The project with IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi and College of Engineering Pune. led by IIT Bombay, relates to building a collaborative cloud platform.