Using algae to control CO2 and NOx emissions, a generic gesture based controller which provides spatial coordinates for anything from the mouse to Robotic Arms, a robotic manipulator, an app that uses NLP and sentiment mining to match strangers and enrich avatars are only a few of the Top 10 entries that made it to the Finals of the ‘Samsung Innovation Awards 2012’. 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 Samsung Innovation Awards invited innovative projects from IIT students in the areas of Web Technology, Human Machine Interface (HMI), Embedded & Hardware System Design, Graphics & Visualization, Audio/Visual Content Processing, Cloud Computing, Product Design and related aspects.
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.
The top three Winning Project teams received Cash reward along with a Samsung Trophy and a Samsung Tablet for their institute. The Samsung Innovation Awards were given away by Mr. Dipesh Shah, Dy Managing Director, Samsung India Software Operations in the presence of the keynote speaker Mr. K. Chandrasekhar, CEO Forus Health Pvt., Mr. S.N. Singh, Dy. Director (Operations), IIT Delhi, Dr. Anil Wali, Managing Director, Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT) and other senior IIT faculty members and students. At the Samsung innovations Awards felicitation ceremony, Samsung also organized a pan IIT Innovation Quiz that saw all the IIT students keenly compete for the Winners’ title and the prize of Samsung Mobile phones.