R&D

Innovation can often come unexpectedly, so researchers should be given the freedom and opportunity to explore new ideas, says the head of Microsoft's research lab in Beijing.

As managing director of Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), Hsiao-Wuen Hon leads a 10-year-old organization that is the software giant's flagship research arm in the region, responsible for some 350 researchers and engineers.

Hon said that managing innovation in the Beijing-based facility is different from running an organization with set goals, because often the magic "spark" is stumbled upon accidentally.

His task in running the lab is a matter of … Read more

India is starting to assert itself as a center of high-tech innovation, according to a study set to be released Monday morning.

A talent pool of engineers working in research and development that barely existed 15 years ago has blossomed to 250,000 people, more than 140,000 just in Bangalore, said Vamsee Tirukkala, co-founder of the consulting company Zinnov, which conducted the study. That's second only to Silicon Valley. And as Indian ex-patriots return home and new college graduates stay home rather than read to regions such as Silicon Valley, as they have in the past, those numbers … Read more

Microsoft's research-and-development spending hit a record high in 2008, according to its most recent annual report. At the same time, the company's R&D spending relative to employee head count has gone down.

Not that it matters. For all Microsoft's spending on the future, it continues to focus its business on guarding the past. Yes, it builds cool (but useful?) things like the Sphere, but when was the last time you saw Office or Windows significantly improved by that R&D spending?

In Microsoft's defense, perhaps we've tapped out the desktop software metaphor, … Read more

It might sound very Noah's Ark, but this is not a joke: $12 million in government funding, as well as bandwidth from two research hubs, has been awarded to the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI), a project from BBN Technologies that literally wants to rebuild the whole Internet.

The funding comes from the National Science Foundation, and it's in the form of a three-year grant that will span about $4 million per year. More specifically, it's for GENI's "design and risk-reduction prototyping," and will involve contracting 29 university research teams. The Internet has … Read more

Following its massive overhaul earlier this year, HP Labs will begin a more formal and focused program doing collaborative research with universities.

Beginning Wednesday, the research and development arm of Hewlett-Packard will begin accepting proposals from university researchers anywhere in the world.

Proposals will be accepted until mid-June, then judged and awarded in the fall. The winners will receive a grant ranging from $50,000 to $75,000, which is enough for each professor who wins to hire at least one graduate student, according to HP's Office of Open Innovation.

"In the past, we did a lot of … Read more

PALO ALTO, Calif.--It looks and feels like a square, yellow crayon.

But it's actually a lot more sophisticated than that. It's ink in solid form (aptly called "solid ink") made of a polymeric resin, and Xerox researchers are using it, combined with advances in print head technology to make a greener printer.

Solid ink is different from what's used in the average desktop printer. Instead of buying cartridges filled with liquid ink, which are inserted into small print heads that race back and forth to transfer an image to paper, solid ink is melted, … Read more

DUBLIN, Ireland--Necessity is the mother of invention, but coffee breaks help, too.

In an effort to encourage interaction among researchers, Pat Frain, director of NovaUCD, the incubation and technology transfer center at University College Dublin, had the cafe in the center's complex start serving 1 euro cappuccinos. That's a nice deal in a city where a coffee can set you back 3.20 euros, or nearly five dollars.

The deal made the front page of one of the local newspapers. Because it became popular, the facilities manager had him boost it up to 1.30 euros, but the … Read more

The mission statement at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is pretty much this: Look beyond the cutting edge, throw money at whatever's out there (and we do mean "out there"), and see what happens. Case in point: DARPA's budget request for the government's fiscal year 2009, in which the agency is asking for $3.29 billion to investigate, among other things, laser-guided bullets, robotic vehicles for land, sea, and air, and a project called Synapse, for Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics--chips that mimic gray matter.

For more, see this post on Wired'… Read more

Over the past couple of days Crave had the privilege of visiting Nokia's R&D facility in Oulu, Finland, at an event entitled the "The Way We Live Next." Among a plethora of cool futureware, one of the first things that caught our eye was a quick demo of Nokia's iPhone-alike, running the brand new S60 Touch user interface. These pictures first appeared last week at the Symbian Smartphone Show, but we got a better look at it this time round. Click here to see more.

(Source: Crave UK)