HP Labs India

Kalpana Shah

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com
July 15th 2004

You’d have thought finding solutions for those on the other side of India’s digital divide would be of concern only for those with roots here. But HP Labs thinks so local that it might as well have been a homegrown entity.

One area of research is in communications technology, to bring affordable wireless connectivity to rural areas. The approach is to work with existing standards but creating additional protocol layers, which will provide the services required by the applications running on top. The lab is working on development of soft 802.11b card based on DSPs; such a solution will be user configurable for long distances (more than 10 kms), and have other useful features.

Another way to expand the reach of communications is to offer value-added services. A content-delivery network, optimised for a low-bandwidth, intermittent connectivity environment, can enable easier access to education and entertainment. To overcome the language barrier, researchers are developing a voice enabled news group, with talking icons, where one can listen to and post voice messages.

Richard Lampman, director, HP Labs, who has responsibility for the research activities in six research labs around the world, with the dual objectives of providing leading-edge technologies to HP’s current businesses and creating new technology-enabled opportunities for HP, was in Bangalore recently.

The role of laboratories, he says, has changed in the past couple of decades. “A modern research lab is still about science but it is much more than just science. What we are doing is putting research into its context.

Thus we need to develop sustainable business technologies, come up with contextual designs for products. Especially in developing countries where a majority of the people cannot afford to spend on technology, it’s important that they be given access in the first place. Just bringing down prices won’t help,” he says. For instance, even if a mobile phone was available for a few hundred rupees, it was of no use to a villager who couldn’t read numbers in English, he said.

The Indian team is working on several projects, one in the area of a handheld device for the retail storekeeper in semi-urban or non-urban areas. A special terminal will help the small retailer to manage credit inventory, connect it back into the supply chain. Too sophisticated? “Not really,” says Lampman, adding that the team had identified such a device as a need which will improve efficiency and raise margins for the shop owner.

A voice based ticket reservation system for the Indian Railways is at a pilot stage, another project will help the census project in recording accurate data with a digital pen, a special language recognition engine is being built.. in short, several areas which are of unique interest to India are being explored. But it isn’t all about altruism. “For us, tech research will open up new markets. Meanwhile, if we find solutions for the local market that are low cost, they can be extended to other parts of the world. Research can be limited only by the imagination of human beings. However, we feel that research should be conditioned by need. That’s why we have research labs all over the world,” says Lampman.

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