Xerox Research Centre India (XRCI), Xerox’s latest global research location that captures innovation opportunities 
for Xerox in emerging markets to advance Xerox’s position as the leading global provider of document and business process services conducted the 3rd edition of the XRCI Open Innovation Symposium 2016 in Bangalore.
This edition propelled the technical agenda with a Ph.D. Symposium, keynote talks, a competitive and peer-reviewed research colloquia and panel discussions involving renowned people from the academia, industry and students from top-tier technology institutions.
“Technology is reshaping our world. With advances in computational power and increasing digitization of the world, there is an opportunity to apply information technology to transform services like healthcare, education, and transportation. The barriers to innovation are disappearing, and with the growth of a robust innovation eco-system in India in the form of world class universities, corporate R&D labs, and startups, we are entering a golden era when these organizations can work together to make a difference to the problems that confront us.” said Dr. Manish Gupta, Vice President, Xerox Corp and Director of Xerox Research Centre in India during his welcome address. Manish spoke about innovations from Xerox Innovation Group in industry verticals like healthcare, transportation, education and banking, and opportunities for partnership with start-ups.
Xerox has actively engaged in productive collaborations with Indian academia through a number of initiatives such as research grants and open innovation projects. The goal of XRCI Open is to establish stronger partnerships with the universities and the startup community.
The opening keynote address was delivered by Prof. Balaraman Ravindran, IIT Madras on Correlational Neural Networks. The keynote was followed by the felicitation of outstanding doctoral research. XRCI received 22 nominations from some of the top institutions in India to compete for this award. The program committee invited top 5 submission for presenting their work to the jury for final decision.
Prof. Ajit K Chaturvedi, IIT Kanpur, Prof. Uday B. Desai, IIT Hyderabad and Mr. Mohandas Pai, Chairman, Manipal Global Education Services also took part as keynote speakers.
The event also witnessed stimulating panel discussions on ‘Real world Impact from Research’ with panelists Dr. Amarjeet Singh, IIIT-Delhi & Zenatix, Prof. Ashish Verma, IISc, Prof. Gitakrishnan Ramadurai, IIT Madras, Prof. Sudipta Mukhopadhyay, IIT Kharagpur and Prof. Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam, IIT Madras – moderated by Dr. Manish Gupta, Vice President, Xerox Corp and Director of Xerox Research Centre.
Another panel discussion was moderated by Dr. Satish Rath, Principal Scientist, XRCI on ‘Bridging the innovation gaps: between Corporations & Start-ups’. Ahimanikya Satapathy, Founder & CEO, DocEngage, Deepesh Agarwal, Founder & CEO, MoveInSync, Amit Mahensaria, Co-founder, Impartus Innovation and Rutvik Doshi, Director, Inventus (India) Advisors took part as panelists.
Other highlights of the event included a Ph.D. Symposium, which provided a forum for Ph.D. students to present their work. XRCI provided awards worth over a total of three lakh rupees for the best poster and doctoral research presentations.
The event concluded with the supposition of the Research Innovation Challenge that went beyond the conventional coding contests/hackathons and was aimed at harnessing the creativity of students to solve some of the pressing problems in India.
The challenge received phenomenon response to the challenge with roughly 4,200 student registration in 3,182 teams –with about 1850 students from IIT’s, IIIT’s, IISc, IMSc etc. Also received registrations from foreign universities, like CMU, Stanford, UIUC, UC Berkely, Imperial College London, to name a few.
Students spent two weeks at Xerox Research Center India to work on Real world data during the final round of challenge and following team came out as winners in this grand challenge:
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Kundan Kumar, Sanil Jain, Peeyush Agarwal (IIT Kanpur) – Winners
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Aditya Siddhant, Harshanl Giridhari, Akhil Kansal (IIT Guwahati) – First runner-up
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Shubham Singh, Jaiwant Rawat, Pulkit Shukla (BITS Pilani) – Second runner-up
