Pictures of the Future    Spring 2006

Made for India—in India

India's booming economy is growing almost as fast as China's. That's why Mukul Saxena and the new Siemens Corporate Technology team in Bangalore are working hard to tap the domestic market.

We're the new kids on the block," says Mukul Saxena with a smile. He's referring to the young, 39-member research team that he has set up in Bangalore as part of the global Siemens CT network. Since April 2004, the 43-year-old engineer and manager has been building up the new research center. Bangalore, located in the south of the subcontinent, is famous as India's answer to Silicon Valley. Its Whitefield and Electronics City technology parks are home to some 800 IT, biotech and nanotech companies offering much more than inexpensive IT services. For the past 15 years, Bangalore has been an outstanding research location. CT's neighbors there include one of the country's best IT institutes, the Indian IT flagship Infosys and HP Labs. At CT India, engineers are working together with colleagues from all over the world on distributed imaging systems, computer vision, and software development.

When he was still living in the United States, Saxena was impressed with Bangalore's dramatic rise and wanted to help shape it. He first worked for General Electric's global research and development team in the U.S. But in 1997 he returned to India and spent four years at an automotive supplier. From 2000 to 2004, he once again joined GE and headed a 140-member research team distributed between Bangalore and Niskayuna, New York. In that position he had a major impact on research activities in the area of advanced automation technologies and was a member of the Board of Directors of GE Medical Systems, India. "I was then at a point in my career when I should have returned to the United States," recalls Saxena. However, for personal reasons he decided not to take that step. Besides, he says, "I wanted to generate growth in India, and I wouldn't have been able to do it as effectively if I had moved to the U.S."

And that's exactly what his new job at Siemens lets him do. Part of Saxena's team works for Siemens Medical. "We develop very flexible client-server architectures that distribute huge amounts of three-dimensional image data among computers with less capacity, in real time," explains Romain Moreau-Gobard, a French scientist who is the liaison to Siemens Corporate Research at Princeton, where he previously worked for four years. In the future, surgeons will be able to use systems based on research from Bangalore to access computer tomography data in real time in operating rooms. High-performance computers will then no longer be needed to access such files, which often contain more than a gigabyte of data. The resources of many computers will be used in the background so that the tomographs' output can be called up on a workstation using visualization software.

Cost-Effective Solutions. Saxena's top priority is to achieve close coordination between CT India and Siemens Information Systems Limited (SISL), Siemens' fast-growing software company in India, which now has 3,420 employees and plans to have more than 4,300 by September 2006. "By working together as a team, we can apply the technology more quickly to our end products and complex solutions," says Saxena. That's in line with his ultimate goal, which is to do research in India for the Indian market and successfully implement cost-effective solutions there. "What's driving the local market? And how can we adapt solutions that cost $1,000 in the U.S. to the Indian market, where they shouldn't cost more than $100?" he asks.

Skimping on technology is not the solution, he says. On the contrary, he points out that know-how in machine vision has already been instrumental in helping Siemens win the status of preferred supplier from Indian customers. For example, a total of 70 machines for cigarette production at the Indian Tobacco Company in Bangalore have been equipped with special cameras, sensors and a light source. The equipment uses infrared light to check the thickness of the cigarette paper. The result is a quick way of checking that the machine contains the right paper for six types of cigarette manufactured. "Here we've created a cost-efficient solution for the Indian market that I believe can be transferred to the global market as well," says Saxena proudly.

Smart Cameras. Another team, headed by Rita Chattopadhyay, is researching optimized solutions for camera systems in traffic monitoring. One of the aims is to enable special cameras to create better images in twilight conditions. She is also focusing on embedded software for security cameras. "We want them to be able to recognize when something unusual is happening and to sound an alarm on their own," says Chattopadhyay. For this purpose she is developing algorithms that are adjusted to the cameras' low processor capacity and their application in real time. The cameras should be able to communicate with one another wirelessly in the future. "As soon as someone steps outside one camera's range of view, the next camera will take over," she predicts.

She is working closely with SCR in Princeton and with Siemens researchers in Karlsruhe, Germany, who are focussing on building technology, video surveillance and computer vision. Building technology is booming in India, along with power generation, industrial services, automation technology, and traffic and medical technology.

"In the future, our research will have a decisive effect on growth markets such as India," predicts Saxena. That's why his team's slogan for 2006 is "Made for India—in India." He's also driving his organization's integration into Siemens' existing research network, so that new ideas from India will help in globalizing research. The current cooperative projects with Princeton and Karlsruhe are the first steps in that direction.
                                                                                                             Nikola Wohllaib