Qualcomm names winners of QInF program in India

NEW DELHI: Qualcomm Incorporated today announced six winners of the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QInF) program in India for the 2017-2018 academic year.

Qualcomm has a long history of supporting education, particularly with institutions of higher learning, through different very valuable programs that go from identifying and hiring talent, to supporting employees in their continuing education, as well as collaborating with and financially supporting engineering schools, professors and students to advance their research and accelerate the development of key technologies.

QInF is a program created by Qualcomm’s R&D team that invests in University PhD students in order to cultivate new and forward thinking ideas, and to continue to further research and development overall. It is an annual program that recognizes, rewards and mentors innovative graduate students across a broad range of technical research. In 2016, QInF India was launched to include both Masters and PhD students from India. This year, graduate students from IISc Bangalore, IIT Madras, IIT Bombay, IIT Kharagpur and IIIT Hyderabad, participated and submitted proposals on:

Advances in Communication Techniques

Robotics and Drones

Computer Vision and Virtual Reality

Imaging

Machine Learning

“This year, we received a large number of research proposals across a broad range of topics. We have been very encouraged by the response from the participating teams and especially the very high quality of the proposals,” said Dr. Dhananjay Gore, Senior Director Engineering, Head of Qualcomm Research India.

“We look forward to QInF India’s continued success and growth in the coming years and hope each participating team will succeed in bringing their research goals to reality," he said.

The six winning teams receive a financial award of INR 10 lakhs (approx. $15,000) each for the academic year 2017-18 and mentorship from Qualcomm engineers.

The six winners are:

Avisek Lahiri and Abhinav Agarwalla from The Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, recommended by Prof. Kumar Biswas and Prof. Pabitra Mitra, have been selected for their proposal on “Domain adversarial networks for bridging cross domain semantic gaps in computer vision”.

Pratik Kalshetti from The Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, recommended by Prof. Parag Chaudhuri has been selected for his proposal on “A deep learning framework for hand tracking with personalized dynamics”.

Junaid Ahmed Ansari and Sarthak Sharma from International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, recommended by Prof. K Madhava Krishna have been selected for their proposal on “Real-time monocular object slam system for dynamic road scenes”.

Sayandeep Saha and Sikhar Patranabis from The Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, recommended by Prof. Debdeep Mukhopadhyay and Prof. Pallab Dasgupta have been selected for their proposal on “Automating fault based cryptanalysis in secure embedded applications using machine learning”.

Preety Priya and Sucharita Chakraborty from The Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, recommended by Prof. Debarati Sen have been selected for their proposal on “Blind joint equalization and detection in presence of non-linearity and synchronization errors for millimeter wave communications”.

Reneeta Sara Isaac from The Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore recommended by Prof. Neelesh B. Mehta has been selected for his proposal on “Novel selection algorithms to exploit spatio-temporal correlation in opportunistic wireless systems”.