Stanford University reaches out to Indian academia, industry

Bangalore, Dec 18: World-renowned US-based Stanford University plans to reach out to Indian students, universities and industry to share its domain expertise in science and technology.

"Advances in convergence technologies enable us to provide online access to Indian academia and industry to our courses, faculty lectures and domain expertise built in high-end disciplines such as bio-engineering, environment and energy, IT, nanoscience and nanotechnology," Stanford School of Engineering associate dean Andy DiPaolo told reporters Thursday.

Stanford is one of the sought-after universities in the US by Indian students, scholars and companies for academic and industry pursuits.

"Our school of engineering is already associated with Indian IT bellwethers Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys Technologies on strategic research projects such as developing next-generation solutions in data privacy and transportation," DiPaolo said at a two-day symposium on 'Networking Infrastructure Technologies & Emerging Trends," organised by the school in association with networking portal SiliconIndia.

The school is open to similar projects with Indian universities, researchers, companies, start-ups and entrepreneurs for technology transfer and sharing its varied resources built over a century.

Besides providing access to complete courses in electrical engineering and computer science for free use, reuse, adaptation and redistribution by students and professionals, the school is ready to work on specific research projects tailored to address problems and challenges faced by Indian academia, industry and society.

"Our faculty and domain experts are open to collaborate on research in a specific area, interact with teams, guide professionals, managers and executives in enterprises and facilitate partnerships with vendors on next-generation technologies, products and services," dean James D. Plummer said.

The 117-year-old university boasts of 1,700 faculty members, 4,500 sponsored research projects with an annual budget of USD 1.1 billion, 7,800 graduate students and 6,000 undergraduates.

The school of engineering has nine departments and 65 research labs. With 250 faculty and 4,500 students, the schools has spawned generations of serial entrepreneurs who founded global tech firms such as Google, Yahoo, HP, Cisco, Adobe, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Symantec and eBay among several others.

Interestingly, Wipro chairman Azim Premji, Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia and Helion Ventures founder Ashish Gupta are some of the illustrious alumni of Stanford School of Engineering.

Eight Stanford faculty members in electrical engineering and computer science are participating in the symposium to deliberate on innovations and research developments in Internet, data-centre networking, wireless, social networking, and enabling technologies such as silicon design and manufacturing.

"India creates an innovative environment for emerging technologies due to unique consumer demands and a large market with rapid adoption rates. These factors will impact network architectures and protocols which support social networking, security, and e-commerce," DiPaolo averred.