December, 2009 -- HP Labs has launched its third annual 2010 Innovation Research Program (IRP) Call for Proposals, offering awards in the range of $50,000 to $75,000 USD to researchers at colleges, universities and research institutes around the world

December, 2009 -- HP Labs has launched its third annual 2010 Innovation Research Program (IRP) Call for Proposals, offering awards in the range of $50,000 to $75,000 USD to researchers at colleges, universities and research institutes around the world.

The program is designed to create opportunities for breakthrough collaborative research with HP. Proposals will be judged on their potential scientific and societal impact, as well as the caliber of the principal researchers, the availability of matching funds for the project and the quality of the proposed research plan.

The deadline for abstract submissions is 29 January 2010. Program guidelines and the online submission tool are available at www.hpl.hp.com/open_innovation/irp/

This year, IRP proposals are invited against a targeted set of 23 compelling topics. They include, among others:

• Planetary-scale environmental sensing networks
• Automatic knowledge creation from an organization’s data
• Rich and intuitive computing experiences for non-tech-savvy users
• New forms of personal visual communication

New for 2010 is the inclusion of a special topic for author-selected proposals, where researchers can propose collaborative projects that are futuristic, intellectually exciting and industry-changing, that may not be aligned with one of the other published research topics, but still fall within the scope of HP Labs’ broad research themes.

"Our Innovation Research Program has yielded two years of success in delivering outstanding results to HP Labs,” said Prith Banerjee, director of HP Labs and senior vice president for research, HP. “The momentum for new and exciting ideas and collaboration just keeps building among our researchers and their academic partners through this program.”

Also new in 2010 is a collaboration between HP Labs and the HP Office of Global Social Innovation to include a topic on Cloud Computing Services in Education, designed to fund cloud computing service applications that can support global transformations in education, and facilitate innovative teaching and learning concepts.

“We are very excited about the opportunity to attract innovative proposals through the Innovation Research Program,” said Jeannette Weisschuh, director of HP’s Office of Global Social Innovation. “Cloud Services in Education is a very relevant area for many educational institutions. We aim to support the development of cloud services applications to help closing existing gaps, to reward excellence and to showcase some of the great solutions that are available already in the academic community for the benefit of many more institutions.”

The Innovation Research Program is administered by the HP Labs Open Innovation Office, which is responsible for enabling strategic collaborations with academia, the government and the commercial sector to produce mutually beneficial, high-impact research.

IRP calls have attracted over 700 proposals from more than 250 universities in nearly 40 countries in just two years, making for a highly selective program. HP selected 60 professors at 47 institutions in 12 countries to receive HP Labs Innovation Awards in 2009. The selected project leaders reflect the truly global span of the program, including faculty at the University of California, Berkeley; the Indian Institute of Technology; Bombay, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST); Carnegie Mellon University; and the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The 2010 awards may be renewed for total project duration of up to three years, based on research outcomes and HP’s business needs. A key element of each award will also be on-campus support for one graduate-student researcher. Research proposal abstracts for 2010 will be accepted via the Web through 29 January 2010, and winners are to be announced in May 2010.

Program guidelines and the online submission tool are available at www.hpl.hp.com/open_innovation/irp/