Secrets of IT success

HP believes Bangalore will continue to be a world-leading centre for research and development

Back in 1989, HP was only the second company to set up research and development in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. It's now a world famous destination in the IT world, but it wasn't always the case, as Ajay Gupta, lab director of HP Labs India, explained recently.

Earlier Bangalore was a cantonment town for British army officers who found the garrison town of Chennai too hot. Later, after independence, Bangalore became the centre for electronics and it was the days of planned, socialist economics that saw the Indian telecommunications, major electronics and space industries take root here under heavy government protection. When IT companies later came to India, Bangalore was perhaps the only place where one could hire people who knew about electronics and software - and thus the Indian IT miracle took root.

Worldwide, HP Labs has 700 people and has been in operation for more than 40 years, guiding the transformation of HP from an instrumentation company to a computing company in the early days of PA-RISC, and later becoming a printing company through work in the labs on thermal inkjet technology. Today work continues on topics as exotic as nano-mterials, bi-stable displays (electronic paper) and other technologies, most of which are only expected to see the light of days five to 10 years down the road.

Gupta said that while many view India as a place for cost arbitrage, or cheap labour, when someone is doing research, they cannot make that research cheaper. Rather, the labs in Bangalore were set up to tap into the best of Indian talent.

It is expected that three quarters of the new demand for IT over the next 20 years will come from the developing world and many of HP's labs are located there to better understand that demand. By 2020, India's median age will be only 29 against China's 37, due to its one child policy. Europe and Japan will see their median age rise to 25 and 48, with only the US staying young at 37 due to immigration. Gupta says that with such demographics, it is clear that India will be the powerhouse that fuels the global economy in the years ahead.

"Ten years ago we had a problem with a population that was 400 million. Today everyone acknowledges it as an asset. You can't just spend on the local consumers, you have to serve the global market. The question is how we can build up that expertise level."

Language challenges

But with changing demographics comes a challenge. Local language is near the top. There is a clear correlation between English literacy and PC literacy. One Indian telco said that most of its last million new subscribers cannot use an English language interactive voice recognition menu.
HP Labs in Bangalore has been working on an alternative way to input the Sanskrit-based languages, which includes Thai. Most of the Indian languages have between 35 to 40 characters and 15 to 18 modifiers, which means that with over 300 typical symbols in common use, the qwerty keyboard is overwhelmed.

The same is true for Thai. Indeed, the project leader spent time collecting name cards from the Thai journalists at the event, demonstrating his linguistic skills by translating our names into English, and said he was confident that it could easily be adapted to Thai.

The gesture based keyboard works by overlaying a touchpad with the characters in a table the way it is taught in school. The idea is that instead of writing the entire character, the user only writes the modifiers on the template, or for a base character, to simply tap the centre of the character. Instead of having to recognise hundreds of shapes, the system will recognise only the modifiers and knows which character is being modified based on the location on the touchpad.

The gesture based keyboard is also in the testing phase with 1,000 units developed, 500 with the local Karnataka state government. Preliminary data shows that the system is easy to learn and users can reach a decent speed - entering words in as little as 10 minutes at a rate of up to 20 words per minute.

It is expected that the total untapped market for such a keyboard exceeds one billion users.
Going beyond niche languages is the need to input more and more data in limited spaces, such as a mobile PDA phone or a printer. HP Labs in Bangalore is experimenting on gestures, hand movements, head movements or pen and touch.

One recently completed project which has been open sourced is LipiTK, which allows natural handwriting recognition complete with personalisable gestures. Another, the freepad IME, uses the touchpad on a typical notebook combined with a dictionary to allow for finger-written words.
The system would be ideal on PDAs and also for some authentication tasks as the way we write with our fingers is unique to each individual.

Paper security

The authenticity of paper documents for prevention of fraud is a big problem. Most IT companies in India today have to hire a third party to verify university degrees and work records at a substantial cost of around US$200 per employee. Recently, the state of Karnataka, which includes Bangalore, asked HP if it was possible to generate printed documents with paper with the same kind of security as a digitally signed document.

The idea is that a farmer can go to a cyber cafe to access an e-goverment service and print out proof of land ownership. However, because that printout comes from an everyday printer, the farmer still has to go and have that print-out signed and verified by an official before it can be used for loans or to receive fertiliser.

HP Labs created the trusted hardcopy system, whereby a 2D barcode is printed along with the document. A small strip on the lower edge of a transcript, for instance, could hold all the data and style sheets for the transcript. The barcode can be scanned and uploaded to a service, perhaps a central government service or a university server, and the data on it can be verified or printed.

To preserve privacy it is possible only for checksums or signatures to be verified so that the actual data is not transmitted. This will help catch, for instance, transcripts which have been modified and with grades changed.

Data in a typical 2D barcode is stored with a density of 1,000 bytes per square inch and includes both error correction, to ensure that a slightly damaged barcode can still be read, and strong encryption so that it will not be possible to generate a counterfeit certificate and barcode pair.
But perhaps the most interesting use was for e-governance. The back of a typical ID card is large enough for a 2D barcode that includes citizen information and a JPEG digital image. This means that even if a picture was changed on an ID card, the policeman could scan the barcode and bring up the original picture.

Adding print to video

Another government led initiative is HP's Printcast, which adds print to conventional digital broadcast media stream. Digital broadcasting is much more practical than video-on-demand in a country that still suffers from a lack of high-speed broadband penetration. However, the breakthrough lies in adding paper documents to the video stream, which then can be printed though a click on the remote control with a printer connected to the set top box. This additional data can be embedded in the video stream and works with conventional DVB digital TV broadcasting hardware.

Not only can this be used for e-learning documents or recipes for a cooking show, but it could, for instance, be used to print out forms to apply for government subsidy programmes that are explained in the video. This has already been used in rural Karnataka.

A similar project was shown with converged multimedia cast. People watching football on TV can have the highlight clip of the the goal sent to their PDA, which can then be replayed again and again.

Secrets of IT success

Worldwide HP employees 25,000 people in R&D and employs 21,000 people in Bangalore, though it is not allowed to disclose the exact numbers involved in R&D in Bangalore. Virtually all of the R&D's employees are hired from the United States to return to India and are paid roughly 70 percent of a similar US based job. Once the cost of living is taken into account this means that they are three to four times better off than if they had a US-based job, plus they are also closer to friends and family.

Gupta says that the road from labs to commercial success is frustratingly long and not every project that graduates meets with commercial success. However, as a lab, he has to celebrate each graduation and to move on.

The road to success was not a five year one, but more like 20 years of hard work. After independence, India invested heavily in education and today the top 10 engineering schools, and 28 of the top 30, are all state universities. Today this is becoming a challenge as there are simply not enough graduates to satisfy industry demand. The long term challenge moving forward - and one that Gupta spends a lot of time personally working on - is how government, industry and academia collaborate better in doing research.

Asked if he had any advice for the IT sectors in small countries in Southeast Asia, Gupta replied, "The focus must not be local. It opens us to unacceptable risks. Aspiration must be global."

From Bangkok Post,

Story by DON SAMBANDARAKSA, BANGALORE, INDIA