 AU-KBC Mou
 Anna University
(AU) and K B Chandrasekar Research Foundation (KBCRF) Pvt Ltd
signed a commercialisation agreement between for marketing the products developed by
AU-KBCRF.
The agreement was signed by the Registrar, Anna University, and one of
the directors of KBCRF Pvt Ltd in the presence of
Dr E Balagurusamy, Vice-Chancellor, Anna University, and K B
Chandrasekar, founder, AU-KBCRF at Anna University,
Chennai.
Speaking at the function, Dr Balagurusamy stated that this
was the best example for public-private partnership and this partnership will be a role model for other universities and companies. The research done in the
laboratories should come to the outer world for the benefit of the people through industries, by which people will get the full benefit.
K B Chandrasekar, chairman of JamCracker
Inc (USA), said only in India there was low cost of innovation. KBCRF would take care of the marketing of the products developed by
AU-KBCRF and pay a royalty of 10 per cent to the university, which would be used for further research purposes.
He was optimistic that the centre would be
a pioneer in public-private partnership. The chairman also added that this was the first time that a technology is converted from research
laboratory to commercial market directly.
Prof C N Krishnan, director,
AU-KBCRF, said with 40 research students, 16 research scholars and 25 research
engineers, the centre has been working to develop many innovations. One product has been patented and
the rest would also be patented.
The Anna University AU-KBC research centre was set up in the Madras Institute of Technology
(MIT) campus at Chromepet, Chennai, of Anna University, with an initial investment of over
Rs 6 crore, by alumnus K B Chandrasekar, chairman of JamCracker Inc. (USA), e4E Inc. (USA and Bangalore),
and Aztec Software
(Bangalore).
The research centre develops products, technologies and know-how of use and value to the industry, government and other users. Functioning as an autonomous centre of Anna University with its own building, infrastructure and staff, the centre is close to attaining financial self-sufficiency in its operations.
The AU-KBC research centre carries out a
strong inter-disciplinary research programme in two areas, life sciences and information sciences.
The focus of the life sciences group is on
nano-biology with the goal of understanding the molecular mechanisms of diseases and drugs, and it has a state-of-the-art experimental facility and expertise.
The information sciences group undertakes research and development work in the areas of cryptography and network security, language technologies and knowledge management tools, and wireless communication. There is a strong and unique interdisciplinary research culture that prevails in the
AU-KBC centre.
A set of products, technologies and know-how has been developed and tested at the centre and is ready for
commercialisation:
1. 'Web Guard' - a hardware solution for protecting websites against defacement.
2. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for secure transactions over enterprise networks.
3. Dynamic Password Authentication Token (DPA) for roaming secure access over the
Internet.
4. Industrial pattern recognition system for recognising faces and objects.
5. Indian language content aggregation and management tools for online news portals.
6. Multilingual search engine for Indian languages.
7. Machine translation systems involving Tamil, Tamil-Hindi and English-Tamil.
8. Translingual information accessor for newspaper classified advertisements.
9. Processing tools and resources for Indian languages, especially Tamil.
10. Proprietary W-LAN (WiFi) security solution for secure wireless networking.
11. W-LAN (WiFi) analysis and design tools.
12. Nano scale imaging technologies for online industrial inspection.
These have been developed at the AU-KBC Centre at a cost of about
Rs 2 crore during the last four years, and are available for examination at the centre. The KBCRF
is a research company funded by K B Chandrasekhar, which has been supporting the AU-KBC centre on the basis of an arrangement spelt out in the MoU, which it has signed with
Anna University. The commercialisation agreement, signed on November 1, assigns the
commercialisation rights to KBCRF for a period of 3 years with a specified revenue-sharing formula.
A rough estimate made by KBCRF has projected figures of about
Rs 1.5 crore and Rs 3 crore for the sales value of these items for the first and second
year respectively.
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