Bell Labs, India

Take the learning way home

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 09:12:00 +0000

by Vishy Poosala, Head of Bell Labs, India

There are several ways to get to Mysore from Bangalore - take a bus, car, bike, etc. You know how to do the first, so you take the bus. It's cheaper, familiar, and does the job, right?

Wrong. The goal of undertaking a journey is not just to reach the destination, but also to learn something in the process .. something new that comes in handy for the rest of your life.

This applies to a road trip, a project, or life itself. Let's stick to the one we programmers understand the best - a coding project.

I was helping someone develop a web-scale chat server as part of BuzzAlike, a social chat & analytics tool for helping online businesses improve their customer conversion rates. I considered two options:

1. The Familiar Way: LAMP, AJAX / COMET

2. The Unknown Way: CodeIgniter framework, Node.js, Redis, socket.io

It's much easier to build a web-scale chat server using nodejs etc. Even otherwise, I wouldn't have gone with #1 because the learning opportunity and a hacker's-fun are only in doing things in new ways, right?

It worked. The server as well as learning. And, it led me to further explore MVC (from CodeIgniter), Asynchronous Programming (from Node.js), NoSQL (from Redis), and Sentiment Analytics. That is the ultimate reward for a computer scientist / developer: to grasp the fundamentals beneath the plethora of programming languages and tools out there. Right?

PS: Don't drive without a seat belt on. Don't code without Stack Overflow.

PPS: Already know how to drive a car? Then learn to ride a motorcycle.

PPPS: Know every possible way to get to Mysore? Scrap Mysore and go to.. hmm Mt. Everest may be?

Life is too short to be repeating the same stuff that we know already. Get new experiences. Learn asynchronous programming ;)

Based on a welcoming talk I gave to the new batch of summer interns at Bell Labs India.

Making the electric grid that much smarter

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 14:31:00 +0000

Article in 'The Hindu' by Anand Muralidhar, Researcher @ Bell Labs

A smart grid will be more affordable, reliable and efficient, and light up more homes

In the late 19th century, two of the leading minds then engaged in the ‘war of currents’ to design the electric grid. The maverick entrepreneur, Thomas Edison, held many patents on the direct current (DC) technology and favoured a grid based on it. Nikola Tesla, a former employee of Edison and an engineer, proposed the alternating current (AC) technology.

The DC system was safer than AC — Edison famously demonstrated the dangers of AC by electrocuting a rogue elephant to death with it. But AC was eventually chosen as the technology for the grid owing to its efficiency in transmitting power.

The electric grid is counted among the most important innovations of the 20th century. However it has not seen a major technological innovation over the last century.

In fact, if Tesla or Edison appear today, they will recognise the key components in the existing grid!

Many countries have woken up to the reality of an ageing infrastructure controlling their grid and have embarked on an ambitious programme to redesign and modernise it. The new design employs the latest advances in IT, is more reliable, affordable and efficient than the old one, and is aptly titled the “smart grid”.

The smart grid will incorporate clean sources of energy and will be secure against malicious attacks.

Real-time pricing

One of the main drawbacks of the existing grid is an imbalance between supply and demand of power. The utility companies cope with this by designing the grid for maximum load, which sharply increases the cost of power. The smart grid will have mechanisms for communication and control to solve this problem.

An example is real-time pricing of electric power according to its demand. This is in contrast with today’s grid where the cost of electricity does not vary with load.

The electric meter at home will be transformed to a smart meter capable of communicating with the utility company and updating the price of power on a regular basis. Then, product companies can design intelligent appliances that adjust their behaviour according to the price of electricity reported by the smart meter.

Going green

Generation of electricity contributes to 40 per cent of the greenhouse emissions and the smart grid reduces this percentage by incorporating renewable sources such as solar and wind. It is proposed to increase the contribution of renewables to 80 per cent of total electricity output.

This poses a challenge as the energy from a renewable source varies during the day and does not follow the cycle of demand.

Also, electricity cannot be efficiently stored for future use and must be consumed as soon as it is produced. Hence, inducting renewables into the grid and matching them with the demand will require research on control mechanisms to ensure stability of the grid.

The smart grid offers incentives to consumers to install solar panels or windmills at home and sell excess power to the utility companies, thereby allowing the consumer to become a producer of electricity.

Faulty meters, pilferage

India has a huge electric grid: its transmission lines, in grid parlance, span more than 2,50,000 circuit km, and can circle the earth six times. But the antiquated grid is poorly managed and suffers from 30 per cent losses during transmission and distribution (T&D).

In comparison, the U.S. experiences T&D losses of 7 per cent.

The losses in India are mostly ascribed to faulty meters and pilferage of electricity.

The country also holds a dubious record for the largest blackout in history, when half the population went without power for a few days in July 2011. The cause was an imbalance between supply and demand, which tripped a part of the grid, followed by a domino effect that led to the collapse of the northern and eastern grids.

The newly set up India Smart Grid Task Force (ISGTF) has the mandate to introduce initiatives for a smart grid in India. A smart grid in India will reduce the T&D losses, prevent blackouts, and light up homes of a third of the population who have no access to electricity. The ISGTF should listen to the clarion call to modernise the grid.

(The author is a researcher at Bell Labs India. The opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his employer.)

Keywords: India Smart Grid Task Force, electricity generation

When Opportunities have no borders: The Promise of Neo-Urbanization

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:46:00 +0000

Opportunities Without Borders” is the story of Neourbanization and the role of ICT In India . Neourbanization is changing the way we look at cities. In Neo urbanization, the traditional definitions of urban, suburban, rural and semi-urban are blurring. This is particularly evident in places that are experimenting with the formation of mega-corridors, mega-cities and converged rural areas—all of which challenge the common definition of ‘city limits’.

To investigate the phenomenon in 2011-2012 Alcatel -lucent Market and Consumer Insight group and Bell- Labs India conducted a qualitative research study of neo-urbanization in India and its implications for people, urban planning, governance, and the ICT industry. To gain a better understanding of the impact of neourbanization and the role technology plays in it, the research team gathered the perspectives of more than 80 people from the rural and semi-rural areas surrounding the cities of Ahmedabad, Coimbatore and Delhi through individual interviews, focus group discussions and ethnographic immersions. Workshops were also held with expert from areas such as urban planning, education and sustainability. This primary research was complemented by extensive secondary research into development trends, demographic shifts and the role of technology in socio-economic change.

You are invited to dive into the interactive book based on the study and experience the meaning of “ Opportunities Without Borders”

E-book

Download the pdf version here

Market Analysis

Download the pdf version here

Video - When Opportunities have no borders: The Promise of Neo-Urbanization

Creating an Innovation Culture (3/3): The Ritual

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 06:13:00 +0000

This is the last part in the 3-part series on Creating an Innovation Culture in your company. The first part talked about goal-driven, pervasive innovation culture. To create it, you - as a leader in the company or team - need to first set the right Stage. In this last part, you will see the Ritual to keep the innovation beat going.

Keeping the Innovation Beat Going

A garden doesn't happen with just the soil and sunlight. You also need to plant seeds, water the plants, remove the weeds, harvest the fruits, and repeat the process. Innovation in your company needs a similar ritual to keep the ideas coming. You can go through the following exercise every 6 to 12 months. Tweak it to fit your environment.

Step 1: Opening Act

Choose a specific target or two, driven by business needs

Lower energy opex by 20%
Reduce call center costs

Define metrics that track progress towards that goal and share them everywhere

Power bill per month, for each data center
Number of calls to call center in a day, Average hold time

Announce the goal and incentives

$1000 for top-10 ideas having the most impact on power bill
CEO award for the most innovative idea to reduce customer calls

Step 2: Action

Regularly meet with small employee groups to brainstorm and listen

Townhalls, team meetings, Friday innovation sessions
You can use the brainstorming and lateral thinking techniques from my recipe for innovation and some thoughts on next generation innovation

Ask people to openly share ideas and seek collaborators

Create an internal social networking platform for discussing ideas
Think Jive, Facebook + Wiki, not Sharepoint

Provide resources to pilot promising ideas & scale them

Identify the data center where some of the ideas can be quickly tried out with least impact to business

Track the ideas and progress on the portfolio dashboard

Simple Excel sheet showing idea, team, potential, progress

51% into the program, conduct an event where the Top 10 ideas are presented to the company

Use this opportunity to also seek collaborators for implementation

Step 3: The Grand Finale

Conduct a public event to recognize the winning ideas

Share the current and projected progress towards the business goal

Inform how these ideas will be taken forward for full scale implementation

Tiger teams, business units, innovator role, what you created as the Stage

Launch the next cycle with new goals

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

Creating an Innovation Culture (2/3): The Stage

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 03:35:00 +0000

by Vishy Poosala

Part 2/3 on Creating an Innovation Culture. Part 1 talked about goal-driven, pervasive innovation culture. To create it, you - as a leader in the company or team - need to first set up the right Stage. Part 3 covers the Ritual to keep the innovation beat going towards specific goals.

The Checklist for Take-off

Check if you have the following items in your company. Start creating what's missing. Southwest Airlines has every one of these and they have not had a loss since 1971 (financial, accidental, or lay-offs) and have been the best performing US Airline company! Enuff reason I think to learn from them.

1.Define the WHATs and WHYs

Define business goals & metrics

Because we want innovation to be focused on results that matter
Metrics should be broken down from the business goals (e.g., profitability, affordable service) all the way down to EVERY Employee in a way that they can track and influence their own metrics
e.g., our airline company is profitable when the average luggage loading time is less than 10min. A luggage loader needs to see how his job affects the company in a quantifiable way.

Create an incentive scheme (financial, recognition, intrinsic)

But it's not all about incentives. Once money stops being an issue, the real drivers for people to innovate are Autonomy, ability to Master a skill, and a Sense of Purpose for their work (youtube video).
Also discussed this on "What motivates creative people?"

Form an innovation board

With top management and known innovators in the company
Why? To communicate, evaluate, motivate, maintain focus, help execute

Guarantee CEO commitment

This is the Killer. When things are tough, the first thing to kill are risky ventures like innovation. But those are precisely the times where innovation is needed the most and people innovate the best.
So, set aside some money - away from your P&L statement - just for innovation and DON'T TOUCH IT!

2.Implement The HOWs

Create a forum where users can share ideas and collaborate

Can be as fancy as the spigit tool with nice gaming elements
Or, as simple as a Jive-like platform for employees to engage with each other
Depends on how much "push" your employees need to start innovating: leave them in a big room (jive) or hand-hold them through an innovation staircase (spigit)
Check out an evaluation of gaming platforms for innovation

Make it easy for people to track progress towards specifc, drilled-down business targets

Display on laptops, at the gym, at the cafeteria. Make it feel like a NASA mission!

Set up physical and online forums where employees, partners, customers, leaders interact

Innovation happens on the interconnect - when people talk and new knowledge flows
These are also opportunities for different groups to collaborate (developers helping inventors)

Create sessions and material on business drivers, innovative thinking

Get Edward de Bono-type sessions, or
Or, If you can't afford him, check out my recipe for innovation

Make a plan for idea selection, piloting, and scaling

Much of this depends on the specific goals you set for a certain round of innovation ritual
This forms the crux of the Ritual we will look at in Part 3
Create an Incubator where the ideas can be protected from the rest of the company, at least for piloting and hopefully for 1-2 years

3. Communicate and create an exciting buzz

The power of buzz marketing, a passionate leader, and energetic role model innovators is immense.
Don't just send out newsletters and intranet articles. Have Soapbox sessions where your employees are hearing it straight from the leadership team

What does Google know about you? : BL India Study on web privacy

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 09:27:00 +0000

Ever wanted to know what Google knows about you?

Bell Labs India is working on a new research project aimed at helping users easily figure out the information that websites like Google collect about users and in controlling this information better. As part of this project, we are conducting a user study which evaluates users’ preferences towards privacy and personalization when using websites like Google.

Would you like to participate?

We are looking for people who are willing to be research subjects in our study. The study will take 35 minutes per person, which includes a 15-minute break during which our code runs in the background. So, we’re asking for 20 minutes of your time.

Our eventual goal is to build tools which help people browse websites like Google in a more privacy-preserving manner. Your participation and feedback is important in this process.

Participation criteria:

· You should satisfy a few criteria to be able to participate:

· Must have a Gmail or other Google account

· Your past search history on Google must be available. To determine this, go to http://www.google.com/history. After logging in, you will either see your past search history – OR, a statement – “Your History is Paused”. If you see your past history, it means you qualify for the study.

Kindly email saurabh.panjwani@alcatel-lucent.com or sajithra.k@alcatel-lucent.com if you want to participate.

Regards, Bell Labs Team.

Study overview

Online services like Google collect a lot of data about you. For example, Google often maintains information about all search queries made by you and all the results that you ever clicked on.

Why does Google do this? So that it can personalize search results for you in the future i.e. serve you search results that are more suited to your interests. For example, if you search Google a lot for cricket-related information and one day you search for “bat”, Google may show you more results for the cricket bat than for the flying bat.

Past studies have shown that Google users do not always want their search queries and click activities to be tracked by Google because they feel this information is private. Google lets you disable tracking of all your queries. But if you do this, there is one disadvantage: if you disable tracking of all queries on Google, Google will be unable to give you personalized results during searches.

This study tries to understand your preferences related to privacy and personalization with respect to Google search. Our goal is to understand how much you like personalization in your search results and how much you don’t and to what extent you think of your search queries as being private. Your feedback will be used to design tools that will help improve your and other users’ experience on Google and other online services. The study has 4 steps.

Step 1: View your Google search history; identify sensitive queries (5-10 mins)

In this step, you will install a tool we have created which will help you view all search queries that Google has stored under your account, and pick out sensitive queries.

Step 2: Fetch results for your recent Google queries (1-2 mins)

Our tool will then fetch search results for some of your recent Google queries for analysis in the next step. It will collect your Google login details & send it to Google.

BREAK for 15 mins! Our tool runs in the background; you don’t do anything here.

Step 3: Rate search results for few queries from your history (5-10 mins)

Here, you will be shown pairs of search results for 20 queries from your search history – personalized results on one side of the screen, non-personalized on the other. You will have to select one set of results in each pair.

Step 4: Closing Questionnaire (5 minutes)

You will answer a questionnaire and then, view results from Step 3.

No private data about you will be viewed by us or stored on any machine (other than your machine) unless you give us permission to do so. Our tools will collect your Google login details but this will be sent to Google directly and will not be accessible to us. We will not collect information about your search queries without your permission.

Declaration: I understand the goals of the study and the terms and agree to participate under these terms.

_________________________________________

(Sign and print name here.)

Creating an Innovation Culture (1/3): The Southwest Way

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 05:00:00 +0000

by Vishy Poosala

Part 1 of 3 on creating an effective innovation culture inside companies and teams. This part gives the background for what kind of innovation culture we're going after. The other two parts talk about the innovation environment to set up and the idea exercise to follow to implement that culture. No MBA mumbo jumbo and preaching. We will look at some specific steps to take for thriving in times of change.

What's your company's inner animal like?

Does your company remind you of any of these lovely creatures?

Brontosaurus: Had a great past but struggling to grow in the changing world (whether because of own faults, Euro crisis, or cut-throat competition from Asia)
Sitting Duck: A start-up or a young company, has been doing well in its niche, but not prepared to survive and grow in a changing landscape
Sheep: Employees are too jaded or scared to suggest how to improve the company - typically found nestling inside a Brontosaurus herd
Chameleon: Southwest Airlines, -insert your favorite example-. The organization thrives on innovation. You don't need this article, but you can tell us how you do it!

If your company is one of the first three, then this blog is definitely for you. You need to start innovating, or you might be following that Bronto stuck in a pit munching on a Blackberry.
Btw, "you" = All of us working at companies. It IS meant to be taken personally.

What kind of innovation culture do you need?

One where every employee is motivated to innovate towards a shared mission.

If you don't ask the person connecting wires in your data center to think, you might miss an energy-saving opportunity there, right? The knowledge of problems and solutions is spread throughout the organization. Don't expect an offsite with a small group of "thinkers" to innovate your company out of crisis. This has to be a universal and continuous process. A corporate culture thing.

Given the shrinking resources and time-to-react, you also need to align much of the innovation towards specific business goals. This is more like Southwest Airlines innovating towards affordable travel, and less of the open-ended research at Bell Labs / Xerox PARC where 1000 disruptive ideas bloom. There's a place for both, but right now we're focusing on a more focused and more urgent goal-driven innovation.

How do you create such a culture?

Interestingly, creating an innovation culture in a company is not like making people build the bridge over Kwai. In fact, it's the most natural thing for humans to want to do - improve things around them in a creative way to evolve, survive, and have fun. The hard part is allowing people to be natural!

IMO you need to orchestrate two things:

Stage: Create an environment where people are allowed to behave like natural born thinkers, are rewarded, and have the basic tools for innovating.
Ritual: Keep the innovation beat going at the right pitch and in the right harmony through some periodic practices (yes, I finally used a music metaphor, all those guitar lessons paid off!). In particular, have specific goals identified for each session of the ritual which may last a few months

It's just like gardening. First, prepare the soil and sunlight conditions, then plant the seeds and water them regularly. The seeds naturally WANT to burst open and grow into fruit-producing trees, but they won't do it if you keep munching on them prematurely or spread them on the road.

In the next article, we will see how to create the Stage. If you want to discuss it in your team's unique context, you can email me at vpoosala AT gmail DOT com. I'm happy to help and learn!

Innovation is not Invention

Much of this spiel comes from my experience at Bell Labs, helping with transforming a service provider company, and reading stuff like this:

Southwest Airlines, the poster child for a pervasive, goal-driven innovation culture. Next time you're flying, please read this book on going NUTS!
Summary of The Southwest Way, by Jody Gittell
St. Peter Drucker: Innovation and Entrepreneurship, The Essential Drucker, Management Challenges for the 21st Century
HBR on innovation's enemies
Making Innovation Work by Davila et al.

I'm not creating anything original here, but I'm combining known stuff in a hopefully more useable way. Now that's innovation too, esp. if it's worth paying for :-)

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

Videos: Green Telecom & IT Workshop (Key notes & Panel Discussion)

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 17:42:00 +0000

Download the ppt presentations here

Green Telecom & IT Workshop: Opening by Vishy Poosala

Green Telecom & IT Workshop : Key note by Gee Rittenhouse

Green Telecom & IT Workshop : Key note by Rod Tucker

Panel Discussion

Pics: Green Telecom & IT Workshop by IISc and Bell Labs

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 11:47:00 +0000

Pics from the Green Telecom & IT Workshop by IISc and Bell Labs!

Workshop url: www.tinyurl.com/greenws

Green Telecom & IT Workshop by IISc and Bell Labs

View the Green Telecom & IT Workshop by IISc and Bell Labs Live on 4th April 2012, 5th April 2012!

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 17:51:00 +0000

View the Green Telecom & IT Workshop by IISc and Bell Labs Live!

Live broadcasting by Ustream

Workshop url: www.tinyurl.com/greenws
Twitter hash tag: #greenws

The goal of the workshop at IISc is to expose the participants to the most pertinent research programs in Green Telecom and facilitate collaborations
There will be 5 workshop sessions on the topics Green Access, Routers & Transport, Green Devices, Energy Harvested networks, and Green data centres
The opening keynote will be delivered by Dr. Gee Rittenhouse, Chairman of the Board of Directors of GreenTouch, COO of Software, Solutions and Services and Former Head of Bell Labs Research at Alcatel-Lucent. The speakers of the workshop sessions are distinguished experts on the subject.
The workshop sessions on April 4th will be followed by a Panel discussion ‘The Innovation Opportunity, and need, for green telecommunications in India’
Venue on April 4th is the Satish Dhawan Auditorium, Venue on April 5th is the Golden Jubilee Hall, ECE Dept at IISc

Panelists:-

· Suresh Goyal, Bell labs (Moderator)

· Mrs. Shachi Devi, CTO, Indus Towers

· Harish Hande, Co-founder, SELCO, India, , Magsaysay award winner

· Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala, Professor, IIT Chennai

· Srikantan Moorthy , Senior Vice President and Group Head, Education & Research, Infosys

· Dr. Gee Rittenhouse, Chief Operating Officer of Alcatel-Lucent’s Software, Services, and Solutions Group (S3G) and Former Head of Bell Labs Research

· Arun Seth, Chairman, Alcatel-Lucent, India

· Prof. Rod Tucker (University of Melbourne), Laureate Professor, University of Melbourne

Green Telecom and IT workshop by IISc and Bell Labs India : April 4th and April 5th, 2012 at IISc, Bangalore

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 08:27:00 +0000

We invite you to attend the Green Telecom and IT workshop by Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and Bell Labs India, to be held on April 4th and April 5th, 2012 at IISc.

Please go to the workshop website www.tinyurl.com/greenws for more details.

The goal of the workshop at IISc is to expose the participants to the most pertinent research programs in Green Telecom and facilitate collaborations.

There will be 5 workshop sessions on the topics Green Access, Routers & Transport, Green Devices, Energy Harvested networks, and Green data centres

The opening keynote will be delivered by Dr. Gee Rittenhouse, Chairman of the Board of Directors of GreenTouch and the COO of Software, Solutions and Services at Alcatel-Lucent. The speakers of the workshop sessions are distinguished experts on the subject.

The workshop sessions on April 4th will be followed by a Panel discussion ‘The Innovation Opportunity, and need, for green telecommunications in India’

Venue on April 4^th is the Satish Dhawan Auditorium, Venue on April 5^th is the Golden Jubilee Hall, ECE Dept at IISc

Panelists:

Dr. Gee Rittenhouse, Chief Operating Officer of Alcatel-Lucent’s Software, Services, and Solutions Group (S3G)

Arun Seth, Chairman, Alcatel-Lucent, India

Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala, Professor, Chennai, IIT-M

Prof. Rod Tucker (University of Melbourne), Laureate Professor, University of Melbourne, Director of the Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (IBES) and the Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications (CEET)

Harish Hande, Co-founder, SELCO, India

Srikantan Moorthy , Senior Vice President and Group Head, Education & Research, Infosys

Suresh Goyal, Bell labs & GT (Moderator)

Seats are limited for the workshop!

Workshop: 100

Panel Discussion : Open to all

Please RSVP to the workshop by sending an email to blrindia@alcatel-lucent.com

Note: There is no Registration fee for the workshop

AGENDA

Apr 4th, 2012

Venue: Satish Dhawan Auditorium

8:30 AM to 9:00 AM : REGISTRATIONS

9:00 AM to 9:05 AM: Welcome speech & setting the context by Prof. Vinod Sharma (IISc)

9:05 AM to 9:10 AM: Introduction to Green research by Suresh Goyal (Bell labs)

9:10 AM to 10:45 AM: Key Note Address by Gee Rittenhouse (Alcatel-Lucent & GT), Rod Tucker (University of Melbourne)

10:45 AM to 11:15 AM: TEA BREAK

11:15 AM to 12:50 PM: Green IT

· Smarter Energy: Applying Networking Ideas for Efficient Energy Grids by Shivkumar Kalyanaraman (IBM)

· Saving Energy in Desktop Computing Environments by Venkat Padmanabhan (Microsoft)

· Demo by Sandeep Karanth (Microsoft)

· TBD by Vikram Srinivasan (Bell labs)

12:50 PM to 2:00 PM: LUNCH BREAK

2:00 PM to 3:15 PM: Green Access 1

· Energy Efficiencies of Wireless Networks with Small Cells by Rouzbeh Razavi (Bell labs & Green Touch )

· Dynamic Access to Variable Grade Spectrum: New Paradigms for High Capacity Cellular Networks by Milind Buddhikot (Bell labs)

· TBD by HS Jamadagni (IISc)

3:15 PM to 3:35 PM: TEA BREAK

3:35 PM to 5:15 PM: Green Access 2

· GreenTouch Research projects by Peter Vetter

· TBD by Prasanna Chaporkar (IIT-B)

· Impact on coverage and capacity of reduced transmit power in cellular networks by Marceau Coupechoux

(Telecom ParisTech)

· TBD by Ashok Jhunjunwala (IIT-M)

5:45 PM to 7:15 PM: Panel discussion @ Satish Dhawan Auditorium

Apr 5th, 2012

Venue: Golden Jubilee Hall, ECE Dept.

9:00 AM to 9:40 AM: Key Note Address by Prof. Vinod Sharma (IISc)

9:40 AM to 10:00 AM: TEA BREAK

10:00 AM to 11:40 AM: Routers and Transport 1

· Energy efficiency in optical transmission: On quantum communications and spatial multiplexing by Peter J. Winzer

· Energy efficient routing and networking by Thierry Klein (Bell labs)

· TBD by Ashwin Gumaste (IIT-B)

· Topology Design, Embodied Energy and Peer-to-Peer Networks by Jaafar Elmirghani (U. of Leeds & GT)

11:40 AM to 12:00 PM: TEA BREAK

12:00 PM to 1:15 PM: Green Devices

· Greening access and edge networks @ IIT Delhi by Subrat Kar (IITD & GT)

· Limitations of Power Dissipation on the Scalability of Network Elements by David Neilson (BL & GT)

· Towards minimum energy computation, communication and sensing by Bharadwaj Amrutur (IISc)

1:15 PM to 2:15 PM: LUNCH BREAK

2:15 PM to 3:30 PM: Energy Harvested Networks 1

· Towards realizing Zero Energy Networks by TV Prabhakar (IISc)

· Competitive Ratio Analysis of Online Algorithms to Minimize Data Transmission Time in Energy Harvesting Communication System by Rahul Vaze (TIFR)

· Fundamental limits and algorithms for communication systems with energy harvesting by Vinod Sharma (IISc)

3:30 PM to 4:00 PM: TEA BREAK

4:00 PM to 5:00 PM: Energy Harvested Networks 2

· Dual-Stage Power Management Algorithms for Energy Harvesting Sensors by Chandra Murthy (IISc)

· Energy harvesting cooperative relaying by Neelesh B. Mehta (IISc)

Panelists bio:-

Panelists Bio:-

Dr.Gee Rittenhouse

Dr.Gee Rittenhouse is the Chief Operating Officer of Alcatel-Lucent’s Software, Services, and Solutions Group (S3G). The S3G organization works with global operators to transform their business by creating new revenue generating opportunities in areas ranging from Cloud to applications such as mobile commerce and digital music as well as solutions that focus on customer experience. These solutions are backed by a team of services experts who deliver everything from concept planning through full-scale operations support to meet complex customer needs. Before his current role in the S3G organization, Gee was Vice President of Bell Labs Research, overseeing all Alcatel-Lucent research in physics, computer science, mathematics, optics, access, networking, and applications. Prior to leading research he was Vice President of Bell Labs' Technology Integration Group, with the primary mission of taking Bell Labs research innovations and driving them into Alcatel-Lucent’s products and services. Before that Gee was Vice President, Bell Labs Wireless Research. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in physics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1986. Then in 1993 he received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined Bell Laboratories as a member of technical staff in 1993 where he worked on high-speed circuits using X-ray lithography for optical networking applications. He later joined the Wireless Research Laboratory at Bell Laboratories where his research focused on RF front-end radio architectures and cellular system engineering. In 2000 he was promoted to Director of the Wireless Technology Research Department and led several projects including MIMO system development, cellular network optimization, wireless IP networks, and fourth generation wireless systems. In 2002 he received the Bell Labs Fellow Award. He is currently the Chairman of the Board of Green Touch, a non-profit pre-competitive research consortium focused on dramatic reductions in network energy requirements. He also has numerous publications and patents in the areas of communications and circuits.

Prof. Rod Tucker

Rod Tucker is a Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. He is Director of the Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (IBES) and theCentre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications (CEET). He has held positions at the University of Queensland, the University of California, Berkeley, Cornell University, Plessey Research, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Hewlett Packard Laboratories, and Agilent Technologies. He joined the University of Melbourne in 1990.

Professor Tucker is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He served on the Management Committee of the Australian Telecommunications and Electronics Research Board from 1991 to 1993, and has been a member of the Australasian Council on Quantum Electronics. From 1995 to 1999, he served as a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society. He was Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques from 1988 to 1990, Guest Editor of the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics Special Issue on Semiconductor Lasers, June 1995, Guest Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, Special Issue on Microwave and Millimetre-Wave Photonics, September 1995, and Associate Editor of IEEE Photonics Technology Letters from 1997 – 2006. He is currently Vice-President Publications of the IEEE Photonics Society.

Professor Tucker received the BE (Elec) degree from the University of Melbourne in 1969, and the PhD degree, also from the University of Melbourne, in 1975. In 1970 he was awarded the Fisk Prize by the Institution of Radio and Electronics Engineers, Australia, and in 1975 he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship by the Commonwealth Fund, New York. He received the Institution of Engineers, Australia, M.A. Sargent Medal for 1995 for his contributions to Electrical Engineering and was named IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society Distinguished Lecturer for the year 1995-96. In 1997 he was awarded the Australia Prize, Australia’s premier international award for science and technology, for his contributions to telecommunications and in 2007 he received the IEEE LEOS Aron Kressel Award. He has been named one of ISI’s Highly-Cited Researchers.

Arun Seth

Arun Seth has been the Chairman for India Operations at Alcatel-Lucent since July 2011. Mr. Seth served as Senior Vice President in the UB Group in their Corporate Management division in Bangalore and Delhi. He headed the commercial operations of Unitel Communications, the Telecom arm of the UB Group for 5 years. He worked for BT Group in a variety of positions over 14 years, having set up the BT India office in 1995 as the First Country Manager. He set up the JVs with Bharti in mobiles, VSATs and Internet. With over 30 years of commercial and technical expertise in the IT and Telecom Industry in India, he is a regular speaker at seminars for Telecom and IT. He has been Non Executive Chairman for BT Private India Limited, a subsidiary of BT Group plc since December 2004. He serves as the Chairman of BT (India) Private Limited and Alcatel-Lucent India Limited. He has been an Independent Non Executive Director of GlobeOp Financial Services S.A since January 1, 2008. Mr. Seth has been an Independent Director of Jubilant Foodworks Limited since October 5, 2009. He has been a Director of Cadista Holdings Inc. since May 5, 2011 and ACME Tele Power Ltd. since August 2007. He serves as a Member of Advisory Board at The Energy and Resources Institute. He serves as Director of Balmer Lawrie & Company Ltd., BT Telecom India Private Limited, BT Global Communications India Private Limited and BT e-serv (India) Private Limited. He served as a Director of Tech Mahindra Limited from 2005 to January 22, 2010. He is on the Executive Committee of NASSCOM (India’s leading Industry Association for IT and BPO) and has chaired the BPO Forum for NASSCOM from its inception in 2002. He sits on the IT and Telecom Committees of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce of India (FICCI) and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). He is actively involved in the education and charity field in India and is on the board of the IIM, Lucknow and on the Board of Governors of Helpage India. He is also a Trustee of the India Sponsor Foundation. Mr. Seth holds a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur as well as an MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.

Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala

Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala is Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India and was department Chair till recently. He received his B.Tech degree from IIT, Kanpur, and his MS and Ph.D degrees from the University of Maine. From 1979 to 1981, he was with Washington State University as Assistant Professor. Since 1981, he has been teaching at IIT, Madras.

Dr.Jhunjhunwala leads the Telecommunications and Computer Networks group (TeNeT) at IIT Madras. This group is closely working with industry in the development of a number of Telecommunications and Computer Network Systems. TeNeT group has incubated a number of technology companies which work in partnership with TeNeT group to develop world class Telecom and Banking products for Rural Markets.

Dr. Ashok Jhunjhunwala has been awarded Padma Shri in the year 2002. He has been awarded Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in 1998, Dr.Vikram Sarabhai Research Award for the year 1997, Millennium Medal at Indian Science Congress in the year 2000 and H. K. Firodia for "Excellence in Science & Technology" for the year 2002, Shri Om Prakash Bhasin Foundation Award for Science & Technology for the year 2004, Awarded Jawaharlal Nehru Birth Centenary Lecture Award by INSA for the year 2006 and IBM Innovation and Leadership Forum Award by IBM for the year 2006. He is a Fellow of INAE, IAS, INSA and NAS.

Dr. Jhunjhunwala is a Director in the Board of SBI. He is also a Board member of several companies in India, including TTML, BEL, Polaris, 3i Infotech, Sasken, Tejas, NRDC, and IDRBT. He is member of Prime Minister's Setup Scientific Advisory Committee.

Srikantan Moorthy

Senior Vice President and Group Head, Education & Research, Infosys

Tan has over 23 years of industry experience. Tan brings with him extensive experience in technology, project and people management and customer interaction. Tan's experience ranges from systems and applications programming on a variety of computing platforms to client partnering, operations management, business development and strategy definition.

Tan has been a key contributor to the competency development initiative at Infosys. Prior to his current role, Tan was the delivery head of Infosys' Communication Service Providers unit.

Tan holds a degree in electronics engineering from Bangalore University.

Dr. Harish Hande

Harish Hande co-founded SELCO INDIA (in 1995), a social enterprise, to eradicate poverty by promoting sustainable technologies in rural India. With its headquarters in Bangalore , SELCO has 25 branches in Karnataka and Gujarat. Today SELCO INDIA has installed solar lighting systems in over 120,000 households in the rural areas of these states. Harish Hande is a graduate of IIT Kharagpur and has a masters and PhD from University of Massachusetts.

Dr. Suresh Goyal (Moderator)

Dr. Suresh Goyal leads the Green Research theme at Bell Labs involving cross-domain research on sustainable networks and energy-efficiency enablement. Bell Labs’ green research involves more than 50 researchers and a large number of external collaborators. A center point of Bell Labs’ green research is GreenTouch™. GreenTouch™ is a global research consortium, formed under the leadership of Bell Labs, with the goal of inventing sustainable, ultra-energy-efficient, ICT networks. Suresh led the Bell Labs research teams that performed the analyses leading to the announcement of GreenTouch™.

Suresh is a founding member of Bell Labs Ireland, and the CTVR, where he led the Test and Reliability research group, and co-led general strategy development, for 5 years. He has previously held positions in optical networking research and wireless packaging research in Bell Labs, leading research programs in impact-tolerant product design, and design and data-analysis for high manufacturing yield of networking components and systems. Suresh has served as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Limerick, Ireland, and at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Suresh obtained his PhD from Cornell University, an MS from the University of Iowa, and a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India. He is a Fellow of the ASME. He has more than 75 peer-reviewed publications, 15 patents, 3 Best Paper awards, and several Internal Bell Labs awards. Suresh has co-supervised 3 PhD students, 2 Master’s students, and mentored several Senior researchers and students.

Animesh Nandi from Bell labs, India wins TR35!

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 04:23:00 +0000

Bangalore shines in MIT journal’s innovators list

Indian Express

The India edition of the MIT Technology Review on Saturday announced exemplary innovations in the field of technology with its ‘India TR35 2012 list of young technology innovators’, all aged below 35. While Bangalore emerged as the hottest technology innovation city with five innovators making it to the list, IIT-Mumbai was the hottest innovation centre with three of its researchers in the list.

A list of 20 innovators was announced in Bangalore. The only woman innovator in the list is 28-year-old Priyanka Sharma from CSIR-run Institute of Microbial Technology in Chandigarh. She developed a plastic chip which uses simple assay techniques to detect toxic materials in the environment in cost and time-effective manner.

The technologists would present their innovations at the Emerging Technologies conference, EmTech India 2012, later this month, which would be addressed by scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The India TR35 members from Bangalore are Shirish Goyal, 27, of LinkSmart Technologies for creating fool-proof security to prevent data theft; Sumeet Yamdagni, 29, of Instrumentation Scientific Technologies for inventing Optical instruments for Fiber Bragg Grating sensors and Vikas Malpani , 28, of MaxHeap Technologies for bringing communities on a common floor. Anirudh Sharma, 24, of Ducere Technologies was named Innovator of the Year for creating Haptic shoe for the visually impaired. Animesh Nandi, 33, of Bell Labs India, Alcatel-Lucent for devising personalized privacy frameworks. Nandi was the only India TR35 member from a Bangalore-based multi-national while the rest were from local enterprises.

IIT-Mumbai’s V S K Murthy Balijepalli, 26, also made it to the list. Balijepalli was chosen for developing a method to forecast electricity price, grid frequency and load that can help make power grids smarter, Joshi made nano-structures which can encapsulate two anti-cancer drugs, paclitaxel and curcumin, and deliver them in combination to lung cancer patients. Reddy was chosen for his work on a laboratory scale flameless combustion with liquid fuels.

Innovation and the Bell labs Miracle

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 05:52:00 +0000

Article from The New York Times: Innovation and the Bell labs Miracle

By JON GERTNER

Published: February 25, 2012

Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1966. The long hallways encouraged interaction among
researchers
Alcatel-Lucent/Bell Labs, via Associated Press
Courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc. and the AT&T Archives and History Center
Courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc. and AT&T Archives and History Center
Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center
Courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc. and the AT&T Archives and History Cent

“INNOVATION is what America has always been about,” President Obama remarked in his recent State of the Union address. It’s hard to disagree, isn’t it? We live in a world dominated by innovative American companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook. And even in the face of a recession, Silicon Valley’s relentless entrepreneurs have continued to churn out start-up companies with outsize, world-changing ambitions.

Bell Labs: A Hive of Invention

But we idealize America’s present culture of innovation too much. In fact, our trailblazing digital firms may not be the hothouse environments for creativity we might think. I find myself arriving at these doubts after spending five years looking at the innovative process at Bell Labs, the onetime research and development organization of the country’s formerly monopolistic telephone company, AT&T.

Why study Bell Labs? It offers a number of lessons about how our country’s technology companies — and our country’s longstanding innovative edge — actually came about. Yet Bell Labs also presents a more encompassing and ambitious approach to innovation than what prevails today. Its staff worked on the incremental improvements necessary for a complex national communications network while simultaneously thinking far ahead, toward the most revolutionary inventions imaginable.

Indeed, in the search for innovative models to address seemingly intractable problems like climate change, we would do well to consider Bell Labs’ example — an effort that rivals the Apollo program and the Manhattan Project in size, scope and expense. Its mission, and its great triumph, was to connect all of us, and all of our new machines, together.

In his recent letter to potential shareholders of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg noted that one of his firm’s mottoes was “move fast and break things.” Bell Labs’ might just as well have been “move deliberately and build things.” This sounds like the quaint pursuit of men who carried around slide rules and went to bed by 10 o’clock. But it was not.

Consider what Bell Labs achieved. For a long stretch of the 20th century, it was the most innovative scientific organization in the world. On any list of its inventions, the most notable is probably the transistor, invented in 1947, which is now the building block of all digital products and contemporary life. These tiny devices can accomplish a multitude of tasks. The most basic is the amplification of an electric signal. But with small bursts of electricity, transistors can be switched on and off, and effectively be made to represent a “bit” of information, which is digitally expressed as a 1 or 0. Billions of transistors now reside on the chips that power our phones and computers.

Bell Labs produced a startling array of other innovations, too. The silicon solar cell, the precursor of all solar-powered devices, was invented there. Two of its researchers were awarded the first patent for a laser, and colleagues built a host of early prototypes. (Every DVD player has a laser, about the size of a grain of rice, akin to the kind invented at Bell Labs.)

Bell Labs created and developed the first communications satellites; the theory and development of digital communications; and the first cellular telephone systems. What’s known as the charge-coupled device, or CCD, was created there and now forms the basis for digital photography.

Bell Labs also built the first fiber optic cable systems and subsequently created inventions to enable gigabytes of data to zip around the globe. It was no slouch in programming, either. Its computer scientists developed Unix and C, which form the basis for today’s most essential operating systems and computer languages.

And these are just a few of the practical technologies. Some Bell Labs researchers composed papers that significantly extended the boundaries of physics, chemistry, astronomy and mathematics. Other Bell Labs engineers focused on creating extraordinary new processes (rather than new products) for Ma Bell’s industrial plants. In fact, “quality control” — the statistical analysis now used around the world as a method to ensure high-quality manufactured products — was first applied by Bell Labs mathematicians.

So how can we explain how one relatively small group of scientists and engineers, working at Bell Labs in New Jersey over a relatively short span of time, came out with such an astonishing cluster of new technologies and ideas? They invented the future, which is what we now happen to call the present. And it was not by chance or serendipity. They knew something. But what?

At Bell Labs, the man most responsible for the culture of creativity was Mervin Kelly. Probably Mr. Kelly’s name does not ring a bell. Born in rural Missouri to a working-class family and then educated as a physicist at the University of Chicago, he went on to join the research corps at AT&T. Between 1925 and 1959, Mr. Kelly was employed at Bell Labs, rising from researcher to chairman of the board. In 1950, he traveled around Europe, delivering a presentation that explained to audiences how his laboratory worked.

His fundamental belief was that an “institute of creative technology” like his own needed a “critical mass” of talented people to foster a busy exchange of ideas. But innovation required much more than that. Mr. Kelly was convinced that physical proximity was everything; phone calls alone wouldn’t do. Quite intentionally, Bell Labs housed thinkers and doers under one roof. Purposefully mixed together on the transistor project were physicists, metallurgists and electrical engineers; side by side were specialists in theory, experimentation and manufacturing. Like an able concert hall conductor, he sought a harmony, and sometimes a tension, between scientific disciplines; between researchers and developers; and between soloists and groups.

ONE element of his approach was architectural. He personally helped design a building in Murray Hill, N.J., opened in 1941, where everyone would interact with one another. Some of the hallways in the building were designed to be so long that to look down their length was to see the end disappear at a vanishing point. Traveling the hall’s length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions and ideas was almost impossible. A physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.

Another element of the approach was aspirational. Bell Labs was sometimes caricatured as an ivory tower. But it is more aptly described as an ivory tower with a factory downstairs. It was clear to the researchers and engineers there that the ultimate aim of their organization was to transform new knowledge into new things.

Steven Chu, secretary of the Department of Energy, won a Nobel Prize in 1997 for his work at Bell Labs in the early 1980s. He once said that working in an environment of applied science like Bell Labs “doesn’t destroy a kernel of genius, it focuses the mind.” At Bell Labs, even for researchers in pursuit of pure scientific understanding, it was obvious that their work could be used.

Still another method Mr. Kelly used to push ahead was organizational. He set up Bell Labs’ satellite facilities in the phone company’s manufacturing plants, so as to help transfer all these new ideas into things. But the exchange was supposed to go both ways, with the engineers learning from the plant workers, too. As manufacturing has increasingly moved out of the United States in the past half century, it has likewise taken with it a whole ecosystem of industrial knowledge. But in the past, this knowledge tended to push Bell Labs toward new innovations.

Mr. Kelly believed that freedom was crucial, especially in research. Some of his scientists had so much autonomy that he was mostly unaware of their progress until years after he authorized their work. When he set up the team of researchers to work on what became the transistor, for instance, more than two years passed before the invention occurred. Afterward, when he set up another team to handle the invention’s mass manufacture, he dropped the assignment into the lap of an engineer and instructed him to come up with a plan. He told the engineer he was going to Europe in the meantime.

In sum, he trusted people to create. And he trusted them to help one another create. To him, having at Bell Labs a number of scientific exemplars — “the guy who wrote the book,” as these standouts were often called, because they had in fact written the definitive book on a subject — was necessary. But so was putting them into the everyday mix. In an era before cubicles, all employees at Bell Labs were instructed to work with their doors open.

Saddled with a difficult problem, a new hire there, an anxious nobody, was regularly directed by a supervisor toward the guy who wrote the book. Some young employees would quake when they were told to ask a question of famous mathematicians like Claude Shannon or legendary physicists like William Shockley. Still, Bell Labs’ policy was not to turn them away.

THERE was another element necessary to Mervin Kelly’s innovation strategy, an element as crucial, or more crucial even, than all the others. Mr. Kelly talked fast and walked fast; he ran up and down staircases. But he gave his researchers not only freedom but also time. Lots of time — years to pursue what they felt was essential. One might see this as impossible in today’s faster, more competitive world. Or one might contend it is irrelevant because Bell Labs (unlike today’s technology companies) had the luxury of serving a parent organization that had a large and dependable income ensured by its monopoly status. Nobody had to meet benchmarks to help with quarterly earnings; nobody had to rush a product to market before the competition did.

But what should our pursuit of innovation actually accomplish? By one definition, innovation is an important new product or process, deployed on a large scale and having a significant impact on society and the economy, that can do a job (as Mr. Kelly once put it) “better, or cheaper, or both.” Regrettably, we now use the term to describe almost anything. It can describe a smartphone app or a social media tool; or it can describe the transistor or the blueprint for a cellphone system. The differences are immense. One type of innovation creates a handful of jobs and modest revenues; another, the type Mr. Kelly and his colleagues at Bell Labs repeatedly sought, creates millions of jobs and a long-lasting platform for society’s wealth and well-being.

The conflation of these different kinds of innovations seems to be leading us toward a belief that small groups of profit-seeking entrepreneurs turning out innovative consumer products are as effective as our innovative forebears. History does not support this belief. The teams at Bell Labs that invented the laser, transistor and solar cell were not seeking profits. They were seeking understanding. Yet in the process they created not only new products but entirely new — and lucrative — industries.

There’s no single best way to innovate. Silicon Valley’s methods have benefited our country well over the course of several decades. And it would be absurd to return to an era of big monopolies. Today’s telecom industries are thriving, and customers likewise have access to a dazzling range of affordable devices and services, which most likely would not have been true had the old phone company remained intact. Though it had custody of the world’s most innovative labs, AT&T introduced new products and services slowly, and rarely cheaply. As Time magazine once put it, “Few companies are more conservative; none are more creative.”

But to consider the legacy of Bell Labs is to see that we should not mistake small technological steps for huge technological leaps. It also shows us that to always “move fast and break things,” as Facebook is apparently doing, or to constantly pursue “a gospel of speed” (as Google has described its philosophy) is not the only way to get where we are going. Perhaps it is not even the best way. Revolutions happen fast but dawn slowly. To a large extent, we’re still benefiting from risks that were taken, and research that was financed, more than a half century ago.

Research study: Neo-urbanizing India and the role of ICT

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 11:14:00 +0000

The Alcatel-Lucent Market and Consumer Insight team joined hands with IMRB International to carry out an ethnographic study in India, to understand the impact of urbanization (“neo-urbanization”) and ICT in emerging markets. The study covers various demographics, and urban and rural geographies.

The research team has a live blog, and videos (Part 1, 2 , 3, 4 and 5)

The team designed this project to meet the following objectives:

Understand the ‘neo-urbanization’ phenomenon in the Indian context– how it’s playing out in the world today, how it’s affecting people and their lives, the factors impacting and influencing this trend, as well as envisaging how all of this will unfold in the next 5 to 10 years.
Understand how ‘digital urbanization’ – that is, technology, especially ICT – is playing a role in ‘neo-urbanization’ in particular, and in socio-economic development, in general.

The Research journey is documented in the following Blog entries:-

Ahmedabad, Gujarat: Only ten years ago, they remembered one part of the city as being a jungle. As children, they’d go there for outings with their families. Today, however, the “jungle” consists of large concrete structures in the central part of the city. This changing landscape is mirrored in the changing trajectory of peoples’ lives – be it healthcare, education, governance or telecom. As the city expands, services and infrastructure, which used to be scarce, are altering personal stories. Please click here to know more
Valad, Rural Gujarat: As the city crawls towards the village, land is becoming dearer. Many farmers in Valad have chosen to sell their farms at attractive prices and have reinvested in the agricultural hinterland. Evidence of higher disposable income and prosperity is especially visible in the tractors, cars, two wheelers and home appliances that are now part of many homes. Please click here to know more.
Noida, NCR (National Capital Region): Formerly, for most people living in Delhi, NOIDA was referred to as ‘yamuna paar’ (lying beyond the river Yamuna). Due to a lack of good roads and infrastructure most people had no reason to hike all the way to the other side of the river. But since the conception of NOIDA in 1976, things have changed. That’s because NOIDA has become the largest planned industrial township in Asia – in addition to being a rapidly evolving urban centre. Please click here to know more
Bhiwadi and Gurgaon, NCR (National Capital Region): Initially a small farming village, Gurgaon saw an almost 75 percent growth in population during the last 10 years. It was hit with rampant urbanization after DLF, a real- estate developer; bought farms owned by the locals and started developing housing complexes. Please click here to know more.
Coimbatore: Coimbatore has been turning into a vibrant, regional power-house for healthcare, education and information technology. This transformation is mirroring a larger trend towards self-contained, technology-fueled cities across South India. Please click here to know more.

Blog Entry on Coimbatore:-

Our research takes us to Coimbatore, a town of 1.25 million people located at the base of the Western Ghats foothills in the Tamil Nadu region of South India. Once a textile town, Coimbatore is slouching towards middling prosperity. It has been turning into a vibrant, regional power-house for healthcare, education and information technology. This transformation is mirroring a larger trend towards self-contained, technology-fueled cities across South India.

As we drive into the city from the Peelamedu Airport on the outskirts of the city, signs of this transformation are evident everywhere — in the odd mish-mash of farmland, small shops, factories and swanky steel and glass offices that litter the landscape. In 2010, the Coimbatore Municipal Corporation doubled the size of the city, swallowing up twelve adjacent, semi-urban local bodies. This move dramatically altered the limits of the city, fudging the city-hinterland boundaries in a single stroke. The result is a unique techno-hub town — more neo-rural than neo-urban.

As one of the few, large towns in India with a high level of literacy in a state obsessed with technology education, Coimbatore’s adoption of ICTs has been unabashedly enthusiastic. We soon found that the embrace of technology and its integration into all aspects of life is virtually complete. Sophisticated ICT technologies are prevalent everywhere, even among disadvantaged and socially marginalized groups. As the level of ease and comfort with ICTs increases, people are shifting from basic, rudimentary patterns of usage, to more complex and disparate ones.

We spent a day with Murgarasu, a twenty-year-old student from one of 100 plus colleges in Coimbatore. Ten years ago, his uncle opened one of the earliest Internet cafes in Coimbatore. As Internet cafes mushroomed across town, Murgarasu spent all of his time hanging out in them, until his mother finally bought him a computer of his own. We visited him at home in a densely packed shanty-town, which is part of the city. He proudly showed us his extensive collection of software CDs, e-learning modules and e-books. His mother stood nearby, beaming in the background. Murgarasu also told us how technology has transformed the way he approaches education. He spoke about how the e-learning courses in Tamil that he plods through diligently are allowing him access to a higher class of education.

Even more interesting, was the dramatic shift in spending priorities and investment decisions that we repeatedly saw in the low-income families we met. Ratna, a microbiology student, and her family of migrants from a neighboring state, had given up buying meat. They had chosen instead to invest in a laptop. The impetus for the purchase had not come from Ratna, but from Ratna’s mother. Ratna’s mother had been denied an education and wanted to provide her daughter with the best she could manage. In this respect, technology has become a great gender equalizer, opening up avenues for women to generate income on their own. In an earlier generation, they would have never ventured outside the house.

In a former village, swallowed up by new Coimbatore, and where the road dissolves into a congealed mess of potholed bitumen and sand, we met Vaigai. A school teacher turned housewife, Vaigai juggles the responsibility of looking after her newborn child, with tutoring foreign children through the Internet.

We also met Radha, a cancer researcher, who uses Skype to video chat with her husband in America. She told us how she earned money by transcribing prescriptions for doctors overseas when her daughter was young and Radha didn’t want to leave the house. In both cases, technology not only augmented the family income, but also allowed the family an unprecedented degree of control over their own lives. It also exposed them to a whole new way of thinking.

While clearly changing lives, this leapfrogging into a brave new world, together with the shift to neo-urbanization, has not been an entirely smooth process. People are feeling its constraints already. Manivannan, an enterprising young businessman who set up his own restaurant, talked about how his life was only partially transformed. For example, even though the Coimbatore Municipality had moved to online payment and business licensing models, the inadequate implementation has meant that government offices are refusing to process online applications. As a result, Manivannan has been forced to spend hours bribing his way through petty government clerks for a permit.

Problem is, new systems and processes have not been successfully integrated into older ones. In addition, technology interventions, particularly in governance, have not been grounded in real-world policy changes, leaving behind a patch-work quilt of regulatory mechanisms. More concretely, rolling electricity blackouts across the city means Vaigai’s foray into foreign classrooms risks being sabotaged by a temperamental electricity board.

Pararadoxically, however, these governance-related hiccups have only deepened people’s engagement with ICTs. For example, Thirunavukarasu, an entrepreneur, wants to develop a platform that would enable users to form local online communities to report violations; he is frustrated by the municipality’s inability to maintain the cleanliness of Coimbatore’s streets. In a scene oddly reminiscent of Egypt, he wants to mobilize people to take the civic authorities to task.

Despite teething problems, Coimbatore is a glittering example of how technological intervention, in tandem with the changes in the social fabric that neo-urbanization unleashes, is beginning to change lives and unlock opportunities. Indeed, as we blog, Coimbatore is being transformed into a truly neo-urban hub – one where the gradual process of technology-driven change is giving people a newfound sense of agency and belonging, and washing away the molasses-like inertia and resignation of the past.

Press release: City of Orlando Trialing Technology From Alcatel-Lucent to Monitor and Predict Real-Time Traffic Conditions

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 11:19:00 +0000

With traffic congestion in the U.S.A.'s major metro areas on the rise, innovations from Bell Labs help measure traffic flow and suggest alternate routes especially in extreme weather conditions, road construction or special events

ORLANDO, Fla., and PARIS, Oct. 17, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- The City of Orlando is conducting a trial of new technology from Alcatel-Lucent that can help monitor, manage and predict traffic patterns on roads and highways. The trial is currently under way in downtown Orlando and will run thru November.

Alcatel-Lucent's Intelligent Travel Time System (ITTS) application uses analytical techniques from Bell Labs and using Bluetooth technology to provide accurate traffic flow information in real time, including:

Journey/travel time information based on route selection on maps (e.g. Google Maps).
Real-time traffic congestion monitoring to identify changing traffic patterns.
Predicting traffic in situations like extreme weather conditions, or special events (e.g. concerts, sporting events).
Speed distribution across lanes.
Ability to provide live traffic updates through social media, such as Twitter and Facebook.
Personalized travel-time predictions.
Uses standard XML interfaces, but can be customized to work with proprietary networks.
"Green" benefits through reduction in traffic congestion.

"The type of information that we are able to gather through an ITTS system not only helps with managing both day-to-day and special event traffic in real-time, but will also be extremely valuable to regional planning organizations, municipalities and public safety agencies," said Charles Ramdatt, City of Orlando Transportation Engineer. "In addition, the Bluetooth radio technology in cell phones and cost-effective sensors along the roadside has a green benefit since the equipment can be powered by alternative energy sources."

"Gridlock cost the U.S. alone more than $100 billion in 2010 - the equivalent of $750 in time and gas for the average commuter in many of the nation's major metropolitan areas. By 2015, those costs could climb as much as 30%*," said Robert Vrij, president of Alcatel-Lucent's Americas Region. "By gathering real-time data, the Alcatel-Lucent Intelligent Travel Time System benefits everyone from commuters to transportation organizations and emergency first responders, who can instantly track and react to traffic issues as they happen. As a result, ITTS saves time, money and energy -- helping both the economy and the environment."

About Alcatel-Lucent for Transportation

Alcatel-Lucent has established global leadership and expertise in deploying complex, multi-vendor networks to meet the communications needs of transportation operations globally. These organizations depend on Alcatel-Lucent to transform their dated networks or build new, state-of-the-art communications infrastructures that meet demanding requirements for 24/7 network availability, safety and security. In all cases, the deployments require a partner with a large, global reach, financial strength and decades of experience building carrier-grade networks.

About the City of Orlando

The City of Orlando is a 111.2 square mile center of a dynamic metropolitan area of more than two million people. Orlando has a $15.7 billon modelling-and-simulation industry, a well-established and growing digital media industry as well as a burgeoning life sciences cluster. Transportation has always been a key element of Orlando's vibrant economy. Growth was first spurred by the arrival of the railroads, then highways and air travel, and today this region is host to a number of important aerospace companies. For more information on the City of Orlando, visit www.cityoforlando.net.

About Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU)

The long-trusted partner of service providers, enterprises, strategic industries and governments around the world, Alcatel-Lucent is a leader in mobile, fixed, IP and Optics technologies, and a pioneer in applications and services. Alcatel-Lucent includes Bell Labs, one of the world's foremost centres of research and innovation in communications technology.

With operations in more than 130 countries and one of the most experienced global services organizations in the industry, Alcatel-Lucent is a local partner with global reach.

The Company achieved revenues of Euro 16 billion in 2010 and is incorporated in France and headquartered in Paris.

For more information, visit Alcatel-Lucent on: http://www.alcatel-lucent.com, read the latest posts on the Alcatel-Lucent blog http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/blog and follow the Company on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Alcatel_Lucent.

Press Release: Bell Labs Chief welcomes new Management batch at MAPS

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 03:35:00 +0000

Source: MAPS –Millennium Academy of Professional Studies
Tuesday, September 06, 2011 07:19 PM IST (01:49 PM GMT)
Bangalore, Karnataka, India, Tuesday, September 06, 2011 -- (Business Wire India)

Millennium Academy of Professional Studies (MAPS) promoted by Educomp Raffles Higher Education Ltd welcomed their Management batch at their Bangalore campus recently. MAPS - a joint venture between Educomp Solutions Limited & Raffles Education Corporation Limited (REC) aims to create an environment in which students benefit from experiential learning thru exposure to real world practical case studies.

Students had the opportunity to hear distinguished speakers from the industry who shared their insights on the knowledge and skill sets that Management students should focus to make a mark. A plethora of practical experiences were shared by the speakers with the students in order to prepare them for an engaging and interactive learning, next 2 years.

Mr. Vishwanath Poosala, Head - Bell Labs, India addressed the gathering as Chief guest of the event. Talking with the students he said “It’s a good idea for every graduate to do a course in management. It enables a top view of functioning when it comes to production, marketing, finance, sales & HR. A management program helps an organization to think from the consumers perspective enabling it to deliver a satisfying experience & procreate a culture of continuous innovation”. Mr. Jagdish Kini –Former CEO Airtel also presided over the function as Guest of Honour.

The management course at MAPS began first week of September, 2011. The 2 year MBA course is delivered by a team of renowned faculty members, guest lecturers and top management executives from diversified industries. The courses are designed to empower the participants through quality education focusing on innovation, entrepreneurship and benchmarked Management techniques. “Professional certifications are offered to our students by a number of multinational companies including Oracle, Microsoft etc.” said Mr. Harpreet Singh, Executive Director, Educomp Raffles Higher Education Ltd.

The institute has invested in the latest technology to ensure that their technological capabilities meet the cutting edge requirements of the industry, promote learning and facilitate quality placements of students.

For press backgrounder on MAPS –Millennium Academy of Professional Studies click here

Media contact details

Ms. Amrita Kapur Suri, Manager Marketing (Communication & Admission),
Educomp Raffles Higher Education Ltd.,
+91 (11) 43172222/ +91 9999818264,
amrita@educompraffles.com

Fostering Innovation Culture: Bell labs, Alcatel-Lucent commemorated with Zinnov Awards

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 03:35:00 +0000

Alcatel-Lucent bagged awards in 3 categories for its leadership in Innovation at the ‘Zinnov Awards and Recognition Program 2011’ organized by Zinnov, a management consulting group. The awards were distributed during the Annual Conference Globalization Summit 2011 at The Leela Palace, Bangalore on 7th of July.

Zinnov is a leading management consulting company founded in 2002, providing services in the area of Offshore Advisory, Human Capital Optimization and Market Expansion to Fortune 1000 companies. They have been playing a leading role in the current dynamics driving the various R&D organizations in India.

Viswanath Poosala (Vishy), Head of Bell Labs India was adjudged as the ‘Best Technical Role Model’ for being an inspiration, not only within Bell Labs but for every individual in the Indian R&D ecosystem.

Vishy Poosala, Head of Bell labs, India received the 'Best Technical Role Model' award

Recognizing the contribution made by Alcatel-Lucent in addressing challenges of the society, our ‘Teleport Solution’ was awarded in the category of ‘Innovation – Potential to Solve Large Scale Problems’. ‘Teleport’ offers a low-cost, real-time traffic monitoring solution for commuters and traffic authorities, addressing one of the major challenges faced by the society today.

Vikram Srinivasan, Director, Bell labs accepted the award on behalf of the Teleport team

Teleport team:

Research- Supratim Deb, Sharad Jaiswal, Vikram Srinivasan, Avhishek Chatterjee, Samik Datta

Marketing - Jeremy Haskey

Business Modeling- Markus Berg

Product Manager-Anima Ade

Further more, we also won the third award in a row that evening, in the category of ‘Best in Class Innovation Culture’. This category of award recognizes those multinational R&D organizations in

India

which have done exceptionally well in fostering a culture of innovation.

Usha Padmini, Director-CDMA accepted the award on behalf of Alcatel Lucent

These awards are recognition of various initiatives and contributions made by Alcatel-Lucent India in innovating new technologies and solutions. It also emphasizes the support and importance given by Alcatel-Lucent to individuals to build a strong culture of innovation in the organization.

Alcatel-Lucent in India has R&D teams working on products from our Network Groups aligned to our HLN strategy, developing applications aligned to our AE strategy and providing services to larger part of the telecom ecosystem in India and globally.

Bell Labs and Alcatel-Lucent Ventures have teams in

India

which provide the much needed impetus for driving innovation in the organization. Together with other technical groups such as ALTA, DMTS and Alcatel-Lucent University, Bell Labs drives the culture of creativity and invention in the organization.

Encouraging entrepreneurship within the organization, the Alcatel-Lucent India R&D center has launched various platforms like Ideaz Central, supported by Alcatel-Lucent University and Alcatel-Lucent Technical Academy to drive and foster the innovation culture.

Leader's quote

“Our India R&D has a strong product R&D culture. Along with Bell Labs, we have successfully used this strong foundation to create an active innovation culture with a potential to solve large problems. These awards to Alcatel-Lucent, among a large global MNC R&D ecosystem in India, are recognition of our ongoing R&D transformation towards establishing a best-in-class innovation culture. I share a sense of pride with everyone. I am confident that our innovation culture will enable more and higher value innovations.”

– Subhash Bana, Vice President – R&D, India RU

Extending WiFi to one mile, thanks to empty TV channels

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 12:16:00 +0000

Last September we posted about TV whitespaces and how the researchers at Bell labs, India had developed a first-cut whitespace prototype of a multi-radio whitespace access point that could adapt to different frequency bands and channel widths.

Rice university made use of this frequency translator to extend broadband services to a home in Houston. Ryan Guerra who had interned with us last year was responsible for this project by Rice University. The article from arstechnica by Nate Anderson is syndicated below:-

Extending WiFi to one mile, thanks to empty TV channels

By Nate Anderson

Rice University grad student Ryan Guerra is on a mission to extend the range of WiFi signals from a few hundred feet to a mile—and beyond. This month, he succeeded, thanks to some nifty engineering and a few empty TV channels.

The first beneficiary of his work is Houston resident Leticia Aguirre, 48, who lives at the very edge of a local free WiFi network run by Technology for All. The high frequencies (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz) used by WiFi mean that signals don't easily penetrate the tree branches and leaves which surrounded Aguirre's home.
On the "deadest, stillest day of winter" the signal might be reliable, Guerra told me, but most of the year, it has been frustratingly intermittent. Even though the WiFi connection was free and Aguirre can't afford DSL or cable, her experience was so poor she considered canceling the service.

Guerra decided to use Aguirre's home as the first location for new "Super WiFi" test gear being developed and tested at Rice. Instead of relying on traditional WiFi frequencies, the Super WiFi project downshifts the signal into an empty TV channel—in this case, channel 29, which has the additional virtue of having empty adjacent channels, as well.

Guerra is part of a Rice team led by professors Edward Knightly, Robert Stein, Lin Zhong, and William Reed that last year won a $1.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The team's goal is basic research on providing broadband in the TV "white spaces"—empty channels that the government recently cleared for use by unlicensed Internet providers. Such tests have been done on a small scale—Microsoft ran a white spaces network on its corporate campus, for instance—but the Rice team wanted a real-world urban environment. They also wanted to start by using existing WiFi protocols.

Guerra was put in charge of creating the Super WiFi gear for Aguirre's home, which was one mile from the Technology for All transmission tower. He began with an off-the-shelf 2.4GHz WiFi card on a computer running Linux. The card's output is piped through a frequency translator prototype from Alcatel Lucent, which shifts the signal down to Channel 29's 563MHz—far better for plowing through trees and walls.

While WiFi channels at 2.4GHz are 20MHz wide, TV channels only have 6MHz of bandwidth, so this setup also has to squeeze the incoming signal down to 5MHz of bandwidth in order to stay safely within channel boundaries (in the future, techniques like channel bonding should increase the available bandwidth). Output from the translator then goes to a small TV antenna on Aguirre's home, where it's sent to the local Pecan Park transmission tower and patched into the fiber backbone connection there.

The setup "actually works very well," says Guerra. The longest link he could make with existing point-to-point WiFi connections was 400-500 feet; with the new Super WiFi gear in the TV band, he can reach a mile—and it's not a point-to-point signal. Instead, the transmitter serves up a directional 60 degree beam, and anyone in its path can receive broadband service.

The wider signal beam also has a side benefit: smaller antennas. Aguirre used to require an antenna mounted on a 30 foot pole in order to get a line-of-sight, point-to-point connection; the newer setup doesn't need this kind of tight alignment, and so Aguirre now uses a much more discreet TV antenna.

Results so far have been good. Rice has worked with mesh WiFi networks for years, but researchers have noted that the quality of channels varies dramatically over time. The new connection has been quite stable, even with leafy trees and through bad weather, and has yet to show any interference or connection problems, even at a mile from the transmitter.

The current approach has some bandwidth limitations. Because it uses existing WiFi protocols but uses only 25 percent of WiFi's bandwidth, Guerra's setup will never get more than 25 percent of WiFi's maximum throughput—and indeed, that's what he's seeing.

The greater range of Super WiFi gear means that the current setup will also run into problems as it scales up. WiFi uses a Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) approach to sending data, which means that WiFi transmitters try to detect other nearby transmitters and wait for them to fall silent before sending data of their own. This works pretty well when only a few devices coexist, but it can become chaotic when hundreds of nodes are involved.

As Guerra rolls out his Super WiFi solution to other Pecan Park residents, he anticipates running into CSMA congestion, which will lower the efficiency of the network. Eventually, whole new protocols may be required, probably relying on scheduled access mechanisms in which transmitters are assigned specific time slices wherein they can transmit without having to detect other signals (cell networks often work this way, and companies like Microsoft are already researching new protocols for use in the TV white spaces).

But the work has shown that empty TV channels will be a huge boon for broadband. Urban areas will likely rely on wireline networks, but Guerra sees terrific potential for people like his rural relatives, who need better last-mile connections. If Super WiFi can easily reach a mile in urban conditions, it's likely to go further in rural locations.

Guerra's work doesn't just involve time spent at the lab bench or with computer models, giving him a unique grad school experience. "I didn't realize how unique it was until I started going out in the field and installing equipment," he says, until he would return from a trip to see other grad students looking up in jealousy from their computers.

ACM Mobicom 2011accepts the paper "MOTA: Engineering an Operator Agnostic Mobile Service" by Kanthi Nagaraj, Supratim Deb and Vikram Srinivasan

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 03:28:00 +0000

The paper "MOTA: Engineering an Operator Agnostic Mobile Service" by Kanthi Nagaraj, Supratim Deb and Vikram Srinivasan has been accepted at ACM Mobicom 2011. 29 papers were accepted out of 214 submissions.

Abstract:
There are two emerging trends in the mobile data world. First, mobile data is exploding at a rapid rate with analysts predicting 25-50X growth by 2015. The second trend is that users are demanding greater degree of flexibility in selecting their operators at fine timescales. Across Asia, dual-SIM phones have become popular, while Apple is designing a Universal SIM that will allow iPhone users to toggle between different operators. This latter trend points towards an impending disruption in wireless service models which could also be the need of the hour from the spectrum shortage perspective.

This points towards a new service model where users can choose an operator based on application needs. However, if users make this choice greedily without network assistance, this can exacerbate spectrum scarcity and degrade user experience. In this work, we consider user devices with multiple network interfaces (3G, LTE etc.) that can be simultaneously active and each running multiple applications. We propose the MOTA service model to enable users to associate each interface with the operator of choice at fine time scales.

Under the MOTA service model, through concise signalling information, operators provide information about their own network, so that each user can
(i) choose a suitable operator for each interface,
and
(ii) choose an interface for each active application. We make the following contributions in this paper.

First, we propose concise network signalling that assists users to make informed choices even under mobility.

Second, we develop user-choice algorithms that maximize a suitable notion of user satisfaction while using spectrum resources efficiently.

Third, we perform extensive evaluation over actual base station deployment in a city coupled with real signal propagation maps.

Our results with two operators show that, MOTA service model provides capacity gain in the range $2.5\times\--4\times$ over the current existing service model. Finally, we argue that our solution is practically implementable by combining appropriate IEEE standards and IETF proposals.

Challenges in Using Mobile Internet in Emerging Markets

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 06:41:00 +0000

Posted by Akhil Mathur

Mobile internet is increasingly becoming popular in emerging markets. Google estimates that there are more than 40 million mobile internet users in India and this number will increase to 300 million by 2015 [Link]. I believe that this growth will be fuelled by non-PC users who will access internet for the first time from their mobile phones. Hence it is important to explore the challenges faced by the future mobile-only internet users in emerging markets.

In my opinion, access to mobile internet is no longer the biggest challenge. As a result of increasing telecom penetration in both urban and rural markets, the reach of mobile internet is increasing rapidly. GPRS data plans are reasonably affordable. Most ‘feature phones’ available in the market are GPRS-enabled (costing as low as Rs. 2500) and can be used to access the internet.

Language and local relevance of the existing content are arguably two of the biggest challenges faced by an internet user in emerging markets and they must be addressed. However in this blog post, I will discuss some very trivial problems that most internet users seldom face, but which are very relevant for mobile-only internet users.

Let us start with the internet settings configuration on the handset. As a first step to connecting to the web, the user needs Operator APN, Server IP, and Port etc. Typically the operators send these settings to your mobile phone, but in many cases you receive an error stating “Your mobile handset is not supported by our network.” In such a scenario, you need an alternative way of obtaining these GPRS settings for your handset. PC users can alternatively access the web from their PC and obtain the GPRS settings, but the mobile-only users will have to wait till they find someone who can provide them the settings – not a good user experience.

Assuming that the user is somehow connected to the mobile internet, let us look at the problems he/she faces with existing mobile websites. Take the example of Twitter Signup mobile website (https://mobile.twitter.com/signup) which has a very simple user interface.

1) The user is expected to provide an email address to verify his/her authenticity. I think it is wrong to assume that a mobile-only internet user will have an email address. A job seeker in a rural area would like to directly interact with a job portal and he/she should not be required to have an email address. Clearly, some other unique identifier is required for the authentication – using the mobile number is a possibility, but in scenarios where a mobile phone is shared by an entire family, it may not remain a unique identifier.

2) The user is asked to solve an image-based captcha to prevent spam. However, it is a known problem that image captchas are not displayed properly on a mobile device, particularly on the small screen feature phones. Some mobile websites even mention, “If captcha image is not displayed properly on your screen, sign up for our service from a PC”. Again, bad user experience for mobile users. We need better spam prevention methods for mobile devices – audio captchas or semantic captchas can be explored.

3) The user is also required to ‘Accept’ a 3000 words long End User License Agreement (EULA), reading which is incredibly difficult on a mobile device due to the small screen size. In my field studies in rural India, I observed that new adopters of technology take these end-user agreements very seriously and prefer to read and understand them before accepting to use the technology. Hence, the end-user agreements need to be made simpler and more readable on mobile phones.

These issues may seem trivial to the PC users, but they can be show-stoppers for mobile-only internet users in emerging markets. In a previous blog post Looking beyond tailoring apps to mobile versions, as a key to succeed in emerging markets ! , Animesh Nandi made a good point that we need to look beyond tailoring the PC apps to mobile versions. I would extend this argument to User Experience as well – we should not just borrow the PC user experiences and apply them to mobile internet. We should keep in mind that mobile websites will be used by people with very different mental models, and with no prior exposure to the internet jargons and metaphors. It is imperative that we understand the goals and expectations of mobile-only users from the internet and design the user experiences accordingly.

Teleport comes to the rescue of harried city commuters: The Teleport story in Deccan Chronicle

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 06:36:00 +0000

A detailed feature on Bell labs, India's traffic solution Teleport appeared in the Deccan Chronicle.

Please click here to read the entire article.

Technical Networking & Career Event at Alcatel Lucent

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 06:19:00 +0000

The event organised to provide an ideal opportunity for networking and learning what other Business units do and the kind of professional profiles they employ, is part of a company-wide program on Talent Enrichment.

Teleport-Low cost traffic sensing solution

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 04:33:00 +0000

Opportunity
•Traffic growth outstrips capacity growth world over
•Current traffic sensing methods are expensive (US$50,000 per mile)

Solution
•Low-cost sensor network to detect handset movement on roads
•E.g. Bluetooth
•Femto cells etc

•Patent-pending solutions for travel time estimation

Looking beyond tailoring apps to mobile versions, as a key to succeed in emerging markets !

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 06:41:00 +0000

Posted by Animesh Nandi

Alligator vs. bear fight? Who wins?
-It depends.
-It depends on whether the fight occurs in the alligator's habitat of the water of the swamp, or in the bear's habitat of hard ground.

The deeper meaning on this statement is that in a competitive ecosystem, the key to success is to tilt the competitive game in your favor by operating in a ecosystem where you have a clear advantage. What this means, is that every time we intend to launch a product one key question we should ask is whether we are playing to our strength.

So now what does this mean for the Emerging market strategy. What this could mean is that identify opportunities where otherwise successful and fierce competitors lose their advantage due to the unfamiliar environment posed by emerging markets, just the way an otherwise adept alligator appears weak on fighting 'on ground'.

Some classic examples of such fierce competitors losing their edge in the emerging market environment are -

a) Google's Web Advertisement-based revenue model - Obviously this doesnt work well in emerging markets like India where Web (via broadband/smartphone) penetration is low

b) Facebook's social-network based revenue model - Breaks down for a similar reason

c) Successful crowdsourcing approaches like Amazon MTurk and Google's Aardvark - Breaks down again for the same reason because of not having enough people connected to the Web

So does the Over-the-Top (OTT) provider extending its solution to encompass the mobile phone ecosystem address all these problems? On the surface of it, the answer may seem 'yes' , but there is a lot of deeper introspection that needs to be done. Lets take the above examples and extend that to the mobile ecosystem

a) Lets say tomorrow Google's 'AdMob' Mobile Advertisement solution develops a non-smartphone based solution (via SMS-based advertisement) also to address emerging markets, do you think this would generate revenue. Well I dont think so, there is not just enough interactions they can tap into to serve advertisement, nor do they have a scope of building a rich profile of the user to offer targeted advertisements.

b) Similarly, do you think 'Zero Facebook (0.facebook.com) even if extended to support non-smartphone users (via SMS-based social friend activity updates etc) will get people in emerging markets to start becoming more active on social networks? I dont think so, the Bottom-of-Pyramid (BoP) in emerging markets operates very differently they dont have time for fun, they are on the seek out of money. Yes, they will ofcourse join the social networks if that enables them to earn money.

c) Similarly, if you take Amazon's MTurk to mobiles, do you think the Bottom-of-Pyramid in emerging markets are qualified enough to do many of the tasks that Amazon's MTurk typically houses. Amazon's MTurk pays users using Paypal accounts, how would you pay the task-doers in emerging markets who dont have Paypal like accounts.

So clearly, in order to succeed here you need to look beyond just tailoring your apps to mobile versions. Here's an opportunity for the mobile-operator to step in, given that the emerging market is a perfect environment for him to fight battles. The mobile operator has several key enablers that plays to its strength -

1) Firstly, its wide subsriber base

2) The subscriber information (basic demographics, monthly bill amounts etc etc) it posseses. This can aid in targeted advertisements or a crowdsourcing service. Down the road when the operator application ecosystem that operators are trying to develop,

3) The ability to pay subscribers not possessing Paypal like accounts using airtime minutes

4) Last but not the least 'location enabler'

Having the above 'operator enablers' is good, but its clearly not sufficient. Additional efforts need to be done to enable easy creation / consumption of services on mobile phones (e.g. simple interfaces etc, multi-language support). Also, as depicted in the examples above, the services should be structured differently - identify novel use-cases where the Bottom-of-Pyramid (BoP) is both (a) valuable to the money providers (say ad agencies, task givers in crowdsourcing service) participate and (b) where the BoP sees a benefit in parcipating in the apps because of extra revenues that they themselves make.

Summary is -

a) OTTs developing mobile versions of products will not fly in emerging markets

b) Mobile operator has an opportunity to play to its strength using 'key enablers' uniquely possesed, since the emergin market is the perfect battleground for a mobile operator

c) However conventional use-cases will not fly, novel use-cases need to be identified that simultaneously 'benefit BoP monetarily' and ideally also 'critically require BoP expertise'

Why do Telecom Operators care about going Green?

noreply@blogger.com (Bell Labs, India) — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 11:02:00 +0000

Posted by Girija Narlikar

Energy efficiency, for obvious reasons, has been an important goal for mobile device makers over the last several years. Constant innovation has led to hardware, software and networking all becoming greener on laptops, mobile phones, sensors, etc. But you may wonder why telecom operators and equipment vendors too have, in the past couple of years, declared going green as a critical goal. Their motivations, besides concerns for the environment, have a strong economic basis.

Large-scale telecommunications equipment, including high-speed/high-density network elements and macro-cellular base stations, consume a significant amount of energy. In developing economies like India, access to the power grid is limited. Even in large cities, networking sites routinely operate on diesel generators and batteries for several hours a day. Diesel gets pilfered and therefore must be monitored closely, while generators require frequent maintenance. High ambient temperatures add to cooling costs. Since networks are traditionally designed and equipped for peak capacity, energy is often wasted to keep the equipment on at full capacity during off-peak times. In India, for example, energy-related costs can easily constitute 30-45% of an operator’s operating expenses.

In response to these challenges, several telecom vendors have begun to introduce green features in their equipment. Techniques like reducing a base station’s capacity and hence resource usage at off-peak time; breaking large, monolithic DSL access boxes into smaller, passively cooled units; and introducing alternative energy sources such as wind/solar, have all started gaining traction with operators. However, what have been missing are network-wide optimization techniques to make the entire network and its collective elements more energy efficient. Further, most operators have equipment from multiple vendors, so green enhancements to a specific vendor’s equipment will have limited impact on large networks.

At Bell Labs India, we have started working on developing network-wide technologies that can be deployed in real, multivendor networks. For example, wireline DSL access networks typically consist of pure copper loops. Instead, passively-cooled distributed DSLAMs can be placed at strategic locations closer to customers. Such careful planning of both existing and green-field DSL networks can simultaneously extend the reach of high-bandwidth services and save power.

With wireless networks, we have proposed intelligent shut-down of entire sectors or cell sites, especially at off-peak times. The pictures below show a major operator’s cellular network in a dense region of a mid-size Indian city. First is the original cellular map, while the second is the cell map created by turning off over half the sectors at off-peak times. Of course, such changes to a live network require detailed analysis and monitoring to ensure that capacity and coverage constraints continue to be satisfied when some transmitters are turned off. As each sector uses separate power amplifiers, turning off even a single sector results in significant energy savings.

Figure 1: Small cells in a dense urban area designed for peak load. Saturated transmitters are indicated in red.

Figure 2: The same urban area at an off-peak time with several transmitters switched off (shown in blue). The red cell sites have all their transmitters switched off.

Our research at Bell Labs with real wireline and wireless networks indicates significant energy savings are possible with careful network design and planning, coupled with dynamic monitoring. Ideally, the network should be designed such that it can automatically and dynamically adapt to the current traffic conditions to remain energy-efficient.

Bell Labs, India

Take the learning way home

Making the electric grid that much smarter

A smart grid will be more affordable, reliable and efficient, and light up more homes

When Opportunities have no borders: The Promise of Neo-Urbanization

Creating an Innovation Culture (3/3): The Ritual

Keeping the Innovation Beat Going

Step 1: Opening Act

Step 2: Action

Step 3: The Grand Finale

Creating an Innovation Culture (2/3): The Stage

by Vishy Poosala

The Checklist for Take-off

1.Define the WHATs and WHYs

2.Implement The HOWs

3. Communicate and create an exciting buzz

What does Google know about you? : BL India Study on web privacy

Creating an Innovation Culture (1/3): The Southwest Way

What's your company's inner animal like?

What kind of innovation culture do you need?

How do you create such a culture?

Innovation is not Invention

Videos: Green Telecom & IT Workshop (Key notes & Panel Discussion)

Pics: Green Telecom & IT Workshop by IISc and Bell Labs

View the Green Telecom & IT Workshop by IISc and Bell Labs Live on 4th April 2012, 5th April 2012!

Green Telecom and IT workshop by IISc and Bell Labs India : April 4th and April 5th, 2012 at IISc, Bangalore

Animesh Nandi from Bell labs, India wins TR35!

Innovation and the Bell labs Miracle

By JON GERTNER

Published: February 25, 2012

Alcatel-Lucent/Bell Labs, via Associated Press

Courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc. and the AT&T Archives and History Center

Courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc. and AT&T Archives and History Center

Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center

Courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc. and the AT&T Archives and History Cent

Bell Labs: A Hive of Invention

Research study: Neo-urbanizing India and the role of ICT

Press release: City of Orlando Trialing Technology From Alcatel-Lucent to Monitor and Predict Real-Time Traffic Conditions

Press Release: Bell Labs Chief welcomes new Management batch at MAPS

Fostering Innovation Culture: Bell labs, Alcatel-Lucent commemorated with Zinnov Awards

Extending WiFi to one mile, thanks to empty TV channels

Last September we posted about TV whitespaces and how the researchers at Bell labs, India had developed a first-cut whitespace prototype of a multi-radio whitespace access point that could adapt to different frequency bands and channel widths.

Extending WiFi to one mile, thanks to empty TV channels

ACM Mobicom 2011accepts the paper "MOTA: Engineering an Operator Agnostic Mobile Service" by Kanthi Nagaraj, Supratim Deb and Vikram Srinivasan

Challenges in Using Mobile Internet in Emerging Markets

Teleport comes to the rescue of harried city commuters: The Teleport story in Deccan Chronicle

Technical Networking & Career Event at Alcatel Lucent

Teleport-Low cost traffic sensing solution

Looking beyond tailoring apps to mobile versions, as a key to succeed in emerging markets !

Why do Telecom Operators care about going Green?