HP has announced that two Indian professors along with 39 others have been selected to receive its HP Labs Innovation Research Awards <http://www.hpl.hp.com/open_innovation/irp/ >. The grants will fund strategic joint research projects between academic research institutions worldwide and HP Labs, the company's central research arm.

As part of a newly announced open and competitive process that reviewed more than 450 proposals from 200 universities in 28 countries spanning the globe, HP selected 41 projects at 34 institutions. Selected professors representing renowned Indian institutions include the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, while selected international institutions include US's  Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, Germany's Technische Universitaet Muenchen, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and China's Tsinghua University.

Awardees will work with HP Labs’ researchers on speculative and potentially game-changing research, the results of which are expected to generate the next set of technology breakthroughs in the areas of information explosion, dynamic cloud services, content transformation, intelligent infrastructure and sustainability.

"Deepening HP Labs' strategic collaboration with those in academia, government and the commercial sector ensures HP’s research endeavours result in research that meets the scientific and business objectives of HP and its partners," said Prith Banerjee, senior vice president, Research, HP, and director, HP Labs. "The professors' deep technical expertise, HP Labs’ researchers’ domain and industry knowledge, and governments' abilities to fund innovative research will come together to address complex IT challenges."

HP will work with leading academic researchers and project topics and will cover a wide range of challenging technical problems, including nano-photonic quantum systems research (High-Speed Hybrid Silicon Lasers), social computing and how it relates to the diffusion of knowledge (Diffusion of Good Ideas Among Mega-Regions), and the development of sustainable IT ecosystems (Modelling Tools for Data Centre Energy Performance and Sustainability).

HP Labs Innovation Research Awards provide project funding of up to $100,000 for one year to each academic institution and are renewable for a total of three years based on research progress and HP business requirements.