IIT Delhi, Ericsson awards innovative new start-up ideas

The 2nd edition of the awards held jointly by IIT Delhi's Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer and Ericsson

Teams from BITS Pilani, IIT Bombay and IIT Varanasi, were declared the winners of the the Ericsson Innovation Awards 2016, held at IIT Delhi on Friday.

The second edition of the awards held jointly by IIT Delhi’s Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT) and Ericsson, saw students from across 14 premier engineering institutes of country including IITs, IISC, BITS Pilani and IIITs, pitch their ideas for innovative start-ups, vying for the three top prize, which includes a cash prize of Rs 13 lakh for each, and an incubation tenure with the research and development wing of Ericsson .

A jury comprising of Ericsson Head of Region for India, Paolo Colella, Vice-Chancellor of IIT Delhi V Ramgopal Rao, and Director of Tata Sons R Gopalakrishnan, among others, adjudged the three winners of the nearly three-month-long competition.

The projects were submitted by students in areas such as web design, cloud computing, storage and networking, human-machine interface, embedded and hardware system design, MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output), machine-to-machine/Internet of Things, software-defined networking, open source, signal processing, graphics and visualization, as well as research.

From the proposals received, seven were shortlisted in the month of February 2016 on criteria such as degree of innovation, feasibility, scalability and the overall impact on masses. Each shortlisted proposal was given an incentive by Ericsson to complete the initial prototype within two months. The winning projects were selected by the Jury in front of an audience comprising of students, Faculty, Innovators and industry leaders.

Paolo Colella, Head of Region India, Ericsson awarding students from IIT Varanasi at Ericsson Innovation Awards India 2016

 

The team from BITS Pilani, under team leader Chandradeo Arya, worked on human recognition using GAIT analysis and other body features based on Microsoft Kinect sensor an unique and innovative way of human recognition, which provides and alternative way to the currently established system based on face, fingerprint and iris.

Dheeraj Kotagiri, led the team from IIT Bombay, which presented a LED Beacon and Receiver Module for harnessing Li-Fi technology. The product would be a LED light source, which would be connected to a receiver which would transmit data in real time.

IIT Varanasi’s Naman Singhal led a team working on a Breathalyzer Helmet, a smart helmet integrated with a two wheeler which – will keeps both the driver as well as the vehicle safe and secure by making it mandatory for the driver to put on the helmet and have a permissible alcohol breath level so as to be able to start the vehicle. The uniqueness of the solution being that a particular two-wheeler can only be switched on with a particular helmet and without which the two-wheeler cannot be started hence making it safe from theft also.