Fresh ideas win Samsung Innovation Awards

Innovation in technology gives you the perfect excuse to let your imagination run wild and tap into those thoughts. Well, that is what the winners of the Innovation Awards, held by Samsung recently, did to emerge victorious in the competition.

Student participants used algae to control CO2 and NOx emissions, a robotic manipulator, an application that matches strangers and enriches their avatars are only a few of the Top 10 entries that made it to the finals of the Samsung Innovation Awards 2012.

The winners for the Samsung Innovation Awards 2012 in the area of Product Design Category were:

Anurag Kumar and Pranay Dighe for CLASAT, an audio based context and event recognition system for mobile platform

Bhushan N. Kharbikar, Nitin T. Pawar, Ajay V. Suryavanshi and Chaitali Joshi for Drishti that seeks to develop universal eyeglasses using tunable-focus lens system and an intelligence module which quantifies refractive errors without human intervention.

Abhishek Gupta, Devashish Tyagi, Saurabh Kumar, Sherjil Ozair, and Utkarsh received the Award in the Web Technology Category for their project Zumble.com, an app that uses NLP and sentiment mining to match strangers and enrich avatars.

A special acknowledgement was made for Ganesh Pitchiah and Pragyanandesh, the team of VORWIS for their application which enables intuitive interaction with virtual objects in the real world via gesture recognition.

Instituted by Samsung India Electronics Ltd. and Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT), the Samsung Innovation Awards in their inaugural year were open only to IIT Delhi students, this year, the Samsung Innovation Awards has been extended for student participation across the IITs in Delhi, Mumbai, Roorkee and Kanpur.

The top-three winning project teams won cash reward along with a Samsung trophy and a Samsung tablet for their institute. The awards were given away by Dipesh Shah, Dy managing director, Samsung India Software Operations in the presence of K Chandrasekhar, CEO Forus Health Pvt and other senior IIT faculty members and students. 

Elaborating on the awards, Dr Anil Wali, managing director, Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT), said, “The objective of our partnership with industry is to create an eco system whereby our students get a sense of the industry’s requirements as well as push their own boundaries to come up with innovative solutions. The Samsung Innovation Awards provides a platform whereby the fresh ideas of our student will not only be recognized but the high potential ones will be further supported.”

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