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Education Plus
TI Leadership Universities
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Funding engineering education and research
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Innovation and passion are the two buzzwords that the industry keeps repeating. Many, through industry-academia partnerships, are trying to create awareness among the students about the importance of innovation and passion. Collaborative industry-academia partnerships are taking centre-stage today in benefiting engineering education and research.
Texas Instruments India (TI) has a university programme that provides critically-needed, long-term funding for specific engineering education and research projects at universities. TI has a three-pronged strategy for its university programme. At the lower end is relevant training on latest chip technologies. At the intermediate level, TI undertakes targeted research with select universities, such as Indian Institutes of Technology and National Institutes of Technology.
At the top end is the TI Leadership University. Seven universities worldwide have been named as TI Leadership Universities: Rice University (U.S.), Tsinghua University (China), Shanghai Jiaotong University (China), University of Electronic Science and Technology (China), Indian Institute of Science (India), Georgia Tech (U.S.) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (U.S.).
Sham Banerji, Director, Corporate Business, TI India Pvt. Ltd., said that early 2007, TI chose IISc. after a review of 16 criteria ranging from research leadership and knowledge of technology, to its focus on future applications in wireless, consumer, medical and industrial markets.
Seed funding
As a Leadership University, IISc. will receive a seed funding of $ 400,000 over five years, an extension of the funding already received by IISc. “It will also gain enhanced access to TI’s worldwide teams and an opportunity to work with TI’s other Leadership Universities on future TI-funded programmes.
The funding will be used to support research programmes for industry-specific applications, as well as curriculum development in DSP, analog and mixed signal systems.” He said that TI chose IISc. because it is “a mother ship of all top educational institutions in the country.”
Potential
H.S. Jamadagni, Chairman of Centre for Electronics Design and Technology, IISc., said there is a potential for application of several technologies. “We, at IISc., want to play a major role in that domain, see the requirements and try to solve the technical difficulties. We are keen on creating researchers who will have the ability to connect things and innovate.”
He said that the gap between the industry and academia, these days, is often misunderstood and blown out of proportion. “There is a gap. However, people seem to be taking extreme stands. One major problem is that the students these days do not have adequate skill-sets.”
Behnaam Aazhang, J.S. Abercrombie Professor, Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Director of Centre for Multimedia Communications, said that the situation is almost similar in the U.S. “Learning is the key word everywhere. A student can work in any university, provided his/her fundamentals are strong.”
About the TI collaboration at Rice University, he said that one research group is concentrating on developing a seamless protocol so that computer users can retain consistent network connections while roaming from various locations.
Another group is working on providing enhanced multimedia services for wireless networks to easily accommodate the diverse applications demanded by today’s users. The TI Leadership University Programme enables multi-discipline research and connects TI with customers, students and universities.
CVR
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