Motorola awards driver

The winners of the inaugural Motorola Scholar Awards 2005-06 are Dhiren K. Patra, Rakesh J.S., Ritesh N. Phalak, Shulin Todkar (K.K. Wagh Institute of Engineering Education and Research, Nasik); Sourabh Nirmal, Abhinav Khandelwal and Abhishek Sharma (Global Institute of Technology, Jaipur) and Ajay S. Nath and S. Ashwin (Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering, Sriperum-budur). Prof. P. Balaram, director, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) presented citation certificates and cash purses of Rs.100,000, Rs.75,000 and Rs.50,000 to these three winning teams on July 31 in Bangalore. The Motorola Scholar Awards will be presented annually by Motorola India Electronics Pvt Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Motorola Inc, USA (annual sales: US$ 36.8 billion) and Foundation for Advancement of Education and Research (FAER), Bangalore, a non-profit, non-government scientific research organisation. “The objective of the Motorola Scholar Programme (MSP) launched last year is to encourage engineering students to undertake innovative research in digital communication technologies i.e mobile telephony. Through this programme we hope to acknowledge and reward students doing revolutionary work in bridging the digital divide between urban and rural India. We want to encourage experimentation and innovation within the community of engineering students so that they are more industry-ready when they graduate,” says Bangalore-based Soumitra (‘Sammy’) Sana, managing director, Global Software Group, Motorola India Electronics Pvt Ltd. FAER was founded in 2004 by a group of academics and industry professionals with the objective of conducting faculty development programmes, under-taking general and specific research, encouraging individual research and converting research projects into marketable ideas. “We chose FAER to be our assessing partner because of its governing board which comprises top scientists, academics and industry leaders committed to improving the quality of technical and research content in higher education,” says Sana, an electronics and electrical communications engineering graduate of IIT-Kharagpur and active member of NASSCOM, AmCham and Indo-American Chamber of Commerce (IACC). According to Sana, Motorola has allocated an annual budget of US$60,000 (Rs.27 lakh) for MSP. This year the contest received over 200 research proposals from engineering students across the country. After careful evaluation by an FAER panel of 25 experts from academia and industry, nine research proposals were short- listed for final appraisal and received seed funding of Rs.65,000. The short-listed teams were given four months to proceed with the implementation and completion of their project proposals, subsequently presented before a panel of judges which included eminent professors from IISc and communication industry leaders. Buoyed by the good response and high quality project papers presented at the inaugural MSP Award programme, Sana has drawn up an ambitious blueprint for Motorola’s incremental involvement in higher education and research. “Another area where we plan to become involved, is doctoral and post doctoral research projects. Starting this year we will sponsor six Ph D scholars researching different areas of digital communications,” says Sana. Srinidhi Raghavendra (Bangalore) Said School’s research ambassador With the interest of foreign corporates and investors in the fast-track Indian economy at fever pitch, several top management consultancy firms and B-schools abroad (Harvard, Stanford, etc), have established research…