Technology major Ericsson will fund two projects developed by IIT students to encourage innovation within the IITs and support talent to develop innovative solutions for the benefit of the industry.
“A total of 67 projects were submitted by students from selected seven IITs. The jury has chosen top 10 projects, which were financially supported to develop the Proof of Concept. We will be announcing two winners from the 10 shortlisted projects on May 12,” Chris Houghton, Head of Region India, Ericsson, told BusinessLine , in an email interaction.
The winners will receive a funding of ₹10 lakh each for incubation of the project over a two-year period at any approved Technology Business Incubator. Also, the intellectual property for the project will remain with the students, Houghton added.
Last year, Ericsson announced the Innovation Awards in association with the Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer. On whether this is a one-time or annual exercise, he said, “We will grow this programme in terms of scale and scope going forward.”
Many ideas that were received from students were on themes such as recognition of facial speech gestures using electromyography, location-wise traffic analysis based on social network data and a human security device for alerting in distress.
Projects were invited on areas such as web design, cloud computing, storage and networking, human-machine interface, embedded and hardware system design, software-defined networking, open source, signal processing, graphics and visualisation, as well as research.