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Annual Research Report 2008-09 

INNOVATION 

RESEARCH 

BUSINESS 

ENVIRONMENT 

ENVIRO 

TECHNO

In keeping with TCS’ commitment to Conserve the Environment 

we have published TCS Research Report digitally, saving paper. 

Contents 

Leading with Innovation in Difficult Times Mr S. Ramadorai, CEO & MD 

Business Focus in TCS Innovations N. Chandrasekaran, COO 

Adding Value to Customers through Innovation K. Ananth Krishnan, CTO 

From the Research Advisory Board 

Expanding the Software Research Footprint Prof. Jeffrey Ullman 

R&D at TCS: A Turning Point? Prof. Krithi Ramamritham 

Innovating with Global Relevance Prof. V S Subrahmanian 

Innovation Governance Boards 

Business Oriented themes 

Promote Business Agility 

Optimise Enterprise Knowledge 

Conserve the Environment 

Enhance Health Care 

Manage Enterprise Risk and Compliance 

IT Oriented themes 

Improve Operational Efficiency 

Application Development and Management 

Engineering and Industrial Services 

Simplify and Transform 

Foster Information Ubiquity 

Enable Understanding of Customers and Markets 

Enrich User Experience 

Business Unit Labs 

TCS Innovation Labs - CMC 

TCS Innovation Labs - Engineering & Industrial Automation 

TCS Innovation Labs - Retail 

TCS Innovation Labs - Telecom 

TCS Innovation Labs - Travel & Hospitality 

TCS Innovation Labs - Insurance 

Innovation Functions 

TM 

TCS Co-Innovation Network (COIN ) 

Emerging Technology Companies 

Strategic Alliances 

Academic Alliances 

Incubation Group 

iGTM, ISU Interface and Integration Lab 

iConnect 

People 

Special Features 

TCS Top 10 - Quest for the Best Coders 

Web 2.0 platforms get together “Smart Mobs” in TCS 

Appendices 

Events 

Visitors 

Publications 

Contribution to Industry Standards and Proposals 

Patents 

Honours and Awards 

03 

09 

15 

16 

38 

51 

62 

82 

85

USINESS 

technology 

While the global economy is changing beyond 

recognition, innovation and co-innovation 

partnerships will help to keep pace with, and stay 

ahead of, that change. Historically, TCS has shown 

the capacity to innovate and lead change.

Leading with Innovation in Difficult Times 

S. Ramadorai, CEO & MD 

In a challenging environment, TCS depends on its capacity to innovate and stay nimble. 

This core value is in line with our Group’s vision of being ahead of the curve, investing in 

the future and delivering excellence. It is significant that this year the Tata Group has been 

voted among the most innovative companies in the world (ranked 4th in Asia and 8th in 

Europe; ranked 13th in North America). 

This has been a tough year for our industry and for our customers. There have been issues 

for businesses not only in the financial services industry, but also in telecom, hi-tech and 

manufacturing industries. There is an energy crisis looming ahead. Consumer confidence 

is plummeting. While the global economy is changing beyond recognition, innovation 

and co-innovation partnerships will help to keep pace with, and stay ahead of, that 

change. 

Historically, TCS has shown the capacity to innovate and lead change. We have been able 

to adapt quickly to new requirements and changing business scenarios. TCS transformed 

its operating model in 2008 and redefined markets in order to stay close to customers. We 

have also innovated on business and service models. Similarly, our research focus today 

has adapted to our customer goals. TCS R&D now focuses on several outcomes our 

customers desire: increased productivity and efficiency, simplification and transformation, 

agility, and risk management. 

This is also a good time to speed up learning processes. We believe in applying 

technology for learning, information sharing and collaboration at many levels within and 

outside the organization - from individuals, to corporations, communities and countries, 

on to a global scale. 

Our Co-innovation network creates a multi stakeholder community that enables a flow of 

ideas, some of them disruptive, anticipating needs in a changing market scenario. We 

have been able to leverage our partners’ capabilities not just for creation of intellectual 

property, but for innovating on business models and jointly creating and capturing value 

across the business value chain. We see great opportunity in leveraging global networks 

to address problems in healthcare, the environment and energy. 

Rather than looking at the market as a constraining factor, we should look at it as an 

opportunity that will spur innovation. It is a time to address issues that our customers 

face, to keep us as well as our customers, ahead of competition and to reinforce our 

leadership position in the IT industry. 

TCS I Annual Research Report 2008-09 

4

ECURITY 

Innovation is a key element in TCS' ability to deliver 

excellence. IT Innovation is no longer just about 

technology. We expect it to drive process efficiencies 

and trigger business model innovation. We see 

technology-process-business models as interlinked and 

the need to recast one, catalyzes innovation in the 

others. Our customers derive best benefits when we 

help IT departments enable new business models.and 

end-user experience.

Business Focus in TCS Innovations 

N.Chandrasekaran, COO 

Innovation is a key element in TCS' ability to deliver excellence. IT Innovation is no longer 

just about technology. We expect it to drive process efficiencies and trigger business 

model innovation. We see technology-process-business models as interlinked and the 

need to recast one, catalyzes innovation in the others. Our customers derive best benefits 

when we help IT departments enable new business models. 

This gains urgency in the current scenario. Customers are demanding greater dynamism 

from their IT infrastructure and application environment to address current challenges. 

Research at TCS has aligned itself more closely to customer's challenges today- with a 

sharp focus on agility and productivity. The theme based approach to research is oriented 

to meeting customer expectations both in terms of business and IT. TCS full services play 

also incorporates R & D initiatives. 

This year several of our global customers have lauded TCS' innovative solutions and 

approaches. We won Ferrari's Innovation Award for “excellent involvement in activities of 

design and contribution towards innovation.” TESCO rated our ideas “fantastic” and 

awarded us for innovation. We have also won accolades from several other customers 

who have used our R and D inputs. 

This year TCS has won, and influenced numerous customer wins, based on its research 

capabilities. SURe, an application for managed evolution of IT plants, from TCS Innovation 

Labs – TRDDC, is creating an overall vision and strategy for optimization and 

transformation of entire IT infrastructure for a telecom major. Corporate Tools Group has 

brought to our customers across verticals several tools that can enhance productivity and 

reduce costs. MasterCraft – an integrated framework for application development – for 

instance has been an enabler for TCS Financial Services 

We are working with our customers in enabling them to enter emerging markets and 

innovate on their business models. The incubation group in the Corporate Technology 

Organisation is testing out big bets that will help us enter new markets and create non 

linear growth. 

TCS Co-innovation Network has offered our customers access to leading edge 

technologies, options in co innovating, and cost effective ownership models. Several 

solutions have been created in collaboration with our COIN partners in emergent 

technologies. Compliance solutions, Security applications and Dynamic pricing tools are a 

few that have created delight amongst key customers. 

Going forward we will draw upon TCS Innovation Labs, the Co-innovation network and 

other arms of the CTO to increase operational efficiencies and boost business benefits 

both for our customers and ourselves 


6

ESEARCH 

INNOVATION 

The TCS CTO and R&D Organisation aligns itself 

closely to support TCS's business objectives. iConnect, 

the Innovations marketing group in TCS, owns the 

mission of facilitating better communication between 

the CTO and R&D organization, and all of TCS's 

internal and external stakeholders.

Adding Value to Customers through Innovation 

K Ananth Krishnan, CTO 

The TCS CTO and R&D Organisation aligns itself closely to support 

TCS's business objectives. iConnect, the Innovations marketing 

group in TCS, owns the mission of facilitating better 

communication between the CTO and R&D organization, and all 

of TCS's internal and external stakeholders. The Innovations Go-tomarket 

team supports our sales teams to win new business. The 

ISU interface works on creating solutions based on R&D from the 

Innovation Labs and our Co-Innovation partners. Co-Innovation 

comes alive for our customers in 'Co-Innovation Days' held for 

each strategic customer. 

Our Co-innovation Network continues to expand, forging new 

alliances. We have created stronger links with Indian Institutes of 

Technology; we are working with several startups on leading edge 

solutions in GPRS and RFID (for asset tracking), Analytics (for 

dynamic pricing), and Web 2.0 (Enterprise networking and 

collaboration) for our customers; and we are also studying our 

own carbon footprint, to further our internal green initiative, with 

TM 

several TCS COIN partners. We continue to help customers create 

their own innovation networks based on our network. 

The CTO Incubation Group, focusing on big bets from 'Inception 

to Implementation,' has made good progress with solutions and 

services in the areas of advertising ecosystems, mobile valueadded 

services and digital devices. The Corporate Tools group 

promotes the use of tools and enables our business units to 

deliver continuously improving productivity and quality of 

services to our customers. 

Internally, TCS CTO and R&D sponsored several initiatives to foster 

TCS's culture of innovation. The TCS Top10 coding challenge, 

which was open to associates across organizational units in the 

enterprise, created a buzz among programmers in every region 

and geography. Web 2.0 platforms such as JustAsk and IdeaMax 

were deployed to capture tacit knowledge as well as innovative 

ideas within the enterprise and were eagerly adopted. 

Our R&D organization has grown. We have more than doubled the 

number of PhDs in TCS R&D and have attracted top talent from 

notable universities across the world. Our research internship 

program brings interns from many world class universities to our 

labs. 

We have hosted, and participated in, several events creating a rich 

and interactive environment for our researchers. The 7th TCS 

Excellence in Computer Science Week (TECS Week 2009) was held 

at the TCS Innovation Labs - TRDDC with experts of international 

repute delivering a series of lectures. Senior Researchers from TCS 

Innovation Labs were a part of the prestigious Stanford 

Engineering Symposium, India. TCS Academic Interaction Meet – 

Sangam – held its 10th conclave this year and showcased 

innovation at TCS. The delegates, heads from noted institutions of 

research and higher education, visited several TCS Innovation 

Labs. TACTiCS - TCS Technical Architects' Conference, was held in a 

distributed, “Green” format this year and had over 500 delegates in 

4 events held across 35 locations connected by collaboration 

tools, video conferencing, and even a 'Second Life' presence. 

This year has been a watershed year with respect to Intellectual 

Property creation. We have redefined our IP strategy with a view 

to building a stronger portfolio for future monetization, 

collaboration and risk mitigation. We have been granted 42 

patents so far in multiple country jurisdictions, and another 190+ 

are in various phases of approval. 

Our efforts have won many awards. TCS Mobile Agro Advisory 

Solution won the Wall Street Journal Innovation Technology 

Award for 2008 in the wireless category and the Golden Peacock 

Innovation Award. Scientists from TCS Innovation Labs won Tata 

Innovation Day Awards. Infoworld ranked TCS's Global Certainty 

IdeaStorm in its list of Top 100 Innovative IT Projects. Many of our 

researchers and Scientists have won individual laurels and awards 

– a notable example is that Dr M Vidyasagar was awarded IEEE's 

prestigious Control Systems Award for 2008. 

This year saw greater participation by TCS's CTO and R&D 

organization in Tata group's innovation efforts: we linked up 

TM 

through TCS COIN to group companies on various projects; 

including those that helped build visibility like the launch of the 

social networking features for the Tata Nano portal. Many of our 

scientists have been closely involved with Tata CRL's EKA, which 

was rated Asia's fastest and the world's fourth fastest 'super' 

computer. 

I look forward to exciting innovations and more oppportunities to 

add value to our businesses and to all our stakeholders. 


8

ESEARCH 

technology 

I am excited to see TCS becoming a leading player 

in the world of technology innovation and 

invention. The core business of TCS has spawned 

research into some of the hardest and most 

important research areas of computer science.

Expanding the Software Research Footprint 

Prof. Jeffrey Ullman, Research Advisory Board Member 

It has been a distinct honor and a great pleasure to serve on the 

Research Advisory Board (RAB) of TCS since late in 2007, along 

with old friends and colleagues Profs. Krithi Ramamritham and VS 

Subrahmanian. The time of my service on the RAB is one in which 

TCS has expanded greatly its footprint in computer-science 

research. I am excited to see TCS becoming a leading player in the 

world of technology innovation and invention. 

The core business of TCS has spawned research into some of the 

hardest and most important research areas of computer science. 

TCS’s experience creating software applications across the full 

spectrum of industries has engendered novel research into the 

problem of understanding large families of similar applications 

and making it easier for software engineers to create such 

applications efficiently. The requirement for quality and reliability 

of TCS software products has led to world-leading efforts in tools 

for software analysis, requirements engineering, and 

management of the software life cycle. Work in each of these 

areas is extremely challenging, and progress depends on an 

intimate understanding of software products and the processes 

by which software is created. 

But all technology companies need to evolve and look for new 

opportunities, while maintaining what has gone before. Thus, it is 

especially interesting to see the recent efforts to explore new 

areas of research, especially work that addresses the most 

important societal needs. A major effort will help farmers be more 

productive by introducing information technology in rural areas. I 

can see the opportunity not only to improve the management of 

agriculture, but to change the lives of the villages through the 

introduction of the sort of information access that city-dwellers 

take for granted today. 

The research team also is tackling many of the most important 

scientific problems for the future. Both the science of Biology and 

much of Medicine depend on advances in computer algorithms 

and computer applications. These advances range from managing 

health-care records --- requiring data integration technology, a 

high level of security, and advances in management of privacy --- 

to analyzing how human genes and the products of genes relate 

to disease. 

Providing each human being with adequate and inexpensive 

energy is another grand challenge. While much of the energy 

problem requires physical science and engineering, I am 

impressed with how TCS research has attacked those portions of 

the problem, such as computer management of the electrical grid 

and computer management of home and office energy use, that 

are addressable through computer science. 

A third important direction is the evolution from home/office 

computing to computing as a utility. This innovation has the 

potential to provide consumers with new capabilities and lifestyle 

improvements. Through concentration of resources at computing 

clouds and mass storage devices, it also has the potential to make 

computing far more energy efficient at far lower cost to the 

consumer. Though the field is in its infancy, I believe great 

opportunities lie in this direction for TCS, its research arm, and its 

customers. 

Please accept my greetings and my wishes for even greater 

success in 2009 for all on the TCS research team. 

Jeffrey Ulman, Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Princeton Univ., 1966. 

Prof. .Jeffrey Ullman is the CEO of Gradiance Corp. Stanford CA USA. 

He is on the Research Advisory Boards and Panels of reputed 

technology organizations. He is the author / coauthor of 16 books 

and 170 technical publications. 


10

FFICIENCY 

technology 

Developing solutions for real-world problems will 

demand that researchers and engineers from erstwhile 

independent areas – each with its own terminology, 

methodology and culture – (be encouraged to) come 

together, to exploit each other's inherent strengths and 

research faculties, and collaboratively tackle issues.

R&D at TCS: A Turning Point? 

Prof. Krithi Ramamritham, Research Advisory Board Member 

High-technology institutions the world over are having to transform themselves into 

organizations with greater commitment to innovating for the social and economic 

benefits of their stakeholders. For the Indian IT industry majors, who have historically 

focused on the business of providing software-as-a-service, this would mean a conscious 

departure from the past. Self-assessment and introspection, along with external pressures 

as well as incentives are called for. Today’s problems demand a multi-disciplinary 

problem-solving approach, especially given the concurrent concerns about financial 

viability, environmental sustainability, safety & privacy properties of any new technology. 

Developing solutions for real-world problems will demand that researchers and engineers 

from erstwhile independent areas – each with its own terminology, methodology and 

culture – (be encouraged to) come together, to exploit each other’s inherent strengths 

and research faculties, and collaboratively tackle issues. 

For research and development at TCS to flourish, a large multiplying effect must be 

associated with the researchers’ efforts. To be fruitful in these efforts, we need to ensure 

that the “support systems” are at par with the needs. This requires that the organization 

fund beyond the usual, expect more than the obvious, encourage the “can-do” dreamers 

and entertain risky propositions. This calls for bold leadership and vision, one which can 

see opportunity in adverse times and capitalize on it. There can't be a better time for TCS 

to rise up to the task of externalizing its innovative potential. 

It is heartening to see visible impact of similar thinking within TCS. This exercise has been 

in progress at TCS for some time now, and has already resulted in the establishment of its 

Innovation Labs. I am happy to note that TCS is putting in place a number of processes 

that will help identify multi-disciplinary theme-based R&D programs with well-defined 

targets and deliverables. The highly visible innovations of the “life sciences group”, 

involving scientists with varied skills is a laudable example of this endeavour. 

Also essential is the necessity to intensify fundamental research programs with a view to 

setting up an R&D philosophy that is commensurate with its status as the Numero Uno of 

Indian IT and as a means to attracting top researchers to be part of its R&D future. 

Finally, today, with the country on an economic upswing and substantial demographic 

expansion, expectations are on the rise, as is the appreciation for home grown 

technology. Our people are increasingly expecting our IT powerhouses to turn their 

attention inwards. E-governance projects executed by TCS have already made a difference 

to many citizens of India. It is time to nurture a distinctly indigenous research culture as 

well. 

Prof. Ramamritham received the Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah and 

then joined the University of Massachusetts. He is currently at the Indian Institute of 

Technology Bombay (IITB) as the Vijay and Sita Vashee Chair Professor in the Department of 

Computer Science and Engineering. He is currently serving as Dean (R&D) of IITB. 


12

LOBAL 

INNOVATION 

TM 

TCS 's Co-Innovation Network (COIN ) has coalesced the 

strengths of an extraordinary collection of world class 

abstract thinkers from the finest academic institutions with 

the vast experience of seasoned industry professionals and 

customer representatives who understand both the practices 

and the needs of industry and governments worldwide.

Innovating with Global Relevance 

Prof. V S Subrahmanian, Research Advisory Board Member 

The world’s first ink. 

The world’s first shipping dock. 

The game of chess. 

The number zero. 

For a couple of millennia, India has developed outstanding 

discoveries and inventions that have revolutionized the way we 

communicate (ink), the way we travel and transport goods 

(shipping docks), the way we entertain ourselves (chess), and the 

way we conduct financial transactions (the number zero). 

Innovation knows no national or international boundaries, no 

scientific stovepipes, and no fear of criticism. Over the last 10 

years, TCS has recruited an outstanding group of innovative 

thinkers from around the world who understand that the world’s 

best corporate R&D cannot be isolated from its customers, cannot 

be isolated discipline by discipline, and must transcend the 

artificial boundaries that exist between scientific and engineering 

disciplines. Computer scientists, economists, engineers, and 

politicians cannot single handedly solve the world’s economic 

problems on their own. The world’s energy crisis cannot be solved 

even by the finest power engineers on earth. 

TM 

TCS ‘s Co-Innovation Network (COIN ) has coalesced the 

strengths of an extraordinary collection of world class abstract 

thinkers from the finest academic institutions with the vast 

experience of seasoned industry professionals and customer 

representatives who understand both the practices and the needs 

of industry and governments worldwide. 

Whether they are addressing the problems of rural Indian farmers 

(as in the ambitious mKrishi project described on page 43of this 

report), or the need to protect ordinary citizens from the bane of 

terrorism through the use of multimedia surveillance (page 50 of 

this report), TCS scientists and engineers are pioneering “out of the 

box”, interdisciplinary thinking that is focused on solving major 

problems. Visionary products such as mKrishi bring together a 

team of experts on agriculture, weather and climatic forecasting, 

supply chain management, and farm economics so that the best 

advice can be provided to farmers at the right time, so that they 

consistently make the best choices. TCS Innovation Labs - Delhi’s 

project on multimedia surveillance offers the hope that airports 

and multinational corporations’ physical locations can be 

monitored – in real time – for suspicious activity that might harm 

innocent people. It brings together experts in civil aviation, 

transportation, signal processing, and computer science together 

to help fight terrorism. TCS’s innovative Pay as You Drive insurance 

research would allow insurance companies to track how far 

customers drive per month and bill them based on the distance 

they drive. Soon, such innovative insurance plans will track driver 

behavior, rewarding good drivers with low premiums and bad 

drivers with higher premiums. The incentive to drive sensibly 

would be high, saving countless lives per year. 

The ability to take on globally relevant problems is a hallmark of 

TCS research. By consistently assembling the right multidisciplinary 

teams of individuals who understand customer needs 

and represent the top echelons of their individual professions, TCS 

Research has shown signs of extraordinary vision which, I believe, 

will help address global corporate and societal problems over the 

next decades, transforming it into one of the dominant research 

power-houses of the 21st century. 

V.S. Subrahmanian is Professor of Computer Science and Director of 

the University of Maryland’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. 

He is the author of over 100 journal papers in computer science and 

related fields and is one of ISIHighlyCited.com’s most highly cited 

authors in computer science. In addition to being a member of TCS’s 

Research Advisory Board, he serves on the Board of Directors of the 

Development Gateway Foundation. He has served on advisory 

boards for the US Government as well as several companies. 


14

Innovation Governance Boards 

Research Advisory Board (RAB) 

�Krithi 

Ramamritham, Dean – R&D, IIT Bombay 

�Jeffrey 

D Ullman - Emeritus Professor – Stanford University 

�VS 

Subrahmanian, Director – UMIACS – University of Maryland 

The Corporate Technology Board (CTB) 

The CTB consists of the R and D Committee, Innovation Lab Heads and Business Unit 

representatives, and is chaired by the Chief Technology Officer. 

R and D Committee 

Anand Sivasubramaniam 

Gautam Shroff 

Harrick Vin 

M Vidyasagar 

Rajesh Manshramani 

Lab Heads 


Arun Bahulkar 

Arun Pande 

BalaMurali P 

Debasis Bandyopadhyay 

Gautam Shroff 

Gautam Sardar 

Harrick Vin 

Kesav Nori 

M Vidyasagar 

Pradip 

Rajesh Manshramani 

Ashok Krish 

Business Unit Nominees to CTB 

Alok Kumar (Internal IT) 

Anantha Sekar (GCP) 

Behram Sethna (Telecom) 

Hasit Kaji (Energy & Utilities) 

Ian Pitt (TCS FS) 

Krishnaswamy Srinivasan (BPO) 

Phani Sistu (EIS) 

S Narasimhan (HR& OD) 

Santosh Mohanty (TEG) 

CTO Function Heads 

K Padmanabhan (ISU Interface) 

Shashi Bhushan (TEG Interface & iGTM) 

Balaji Ganapathy (CTO HR) 

Gautam Shroff (TCS COIN) 

Anita Nanadikar (Incubation Group) 

Madhura Wagh ( CTO Marketing and iConnect) 

Vijayalakshmi Gopal (Corporate Tools Group) 

S. Santhanakrishnan (Integration Lab, Strategic Alliances – COIN) 

Ajoy Mallik (VC – COIN) 

Vipul Shah (Academic Alliances – COIN) 


15

Themes

Themes 

This year, research at the TCS Innovation Labs gained 

a clear focus on current and future customer needs. In each 

domain and technology we review customer ‘jobs-to-bedone’, 

pain points, current and future needs and use these 

as springboards for research. 

Our research and our solution frameworks are aligned to 

outcomes which we spell out as “themes”. 

Five themes of research address business, 

organizational and social goals: 

�Promote 

Business Agility 

�Optimise 

Enterprise Knowledge 

�Conserve 

the Environment 

�Enhance 

Health Care 

�Manage 

Enterprise Risk and Compliance 

The other five themes address key expectations 

from IT: 

�Improve 

Operational Efficiency 


Engineering & Industrial Services 

�Simplify 

and Transform 

�Foster 

Information Ubiquity 

�Enable 

Understanding of Customers and Markets 

�Enrich 

User Experience 

TCS I Annual Research Report 2008-09 17

Promote Business Agility 

“As businesses grow, it is imperative to provide scalable IT solutions with acceptable 

response times for end users. In 2008-09, we have made significant advances in creating 

technology prototypes in our low latency lab for ultra high throughput and ultra low latency in 

the financial services market. This has been very well complemented by the use of performance testing 

frameworks that we have created for IT departments for all business verticals in TCS, in order to deliver high 

quality in the least amount of the time. The performance testing frameworks bridge the gaps between 

development/test and production environments, focus on reduction of cycle time in the performance 

testing process, and allow integration with popular load testing tools. The coming year will not only focus 

on all of these initiatives but also expand in the areas of multi-core for IT and software robustness, with the 

preliminary investigations having already been done this year.” 

We refer to business agility as the ability for IT systems of 

businesses to scale to meet the needs of rapid business growth. 

The last several years have seen an ever increasing demand on 

higher business throughput and lower latencies to end users. In 

the financial services sectors, latencies are down to milliseconds. 

The newer brand of multi-core servers has provided for vertical 

scalability but the downside is that CPU speeds are not increasing, 

which calls for a relook at the way legacy systems work. While 

businesses wish to grow fast, there can be no reduction in quality 

of service to end users. Creating a replica of a production 

environment for the purposes of testing is an impossible 

necessity. At the same time we also need to ensure that time to 

market of newer applications is as short as possible with the ideal 

situation being zero timefrom requirements to deployment. We 

address these challenges through solutions that we have created 

in TCS Innovations Labs. TCS has also contributed to research on 

business agilityat MIT Sloan School of Management. 

Low Latency Lab Innovations 

Rajesh Mansharamani, Head, TCS Innovation Labs - Performance Engineering, 

Theme Owner - Promote Business Agility 

TCS Low Latency lab has been created jointly with various 

hardware and software vendors. The first initiative in this lab has 

been to address the needs of the financial services industry for 

solutions that scale to hundreds of thousands of order messages 

per second at sub millisecond latency. We have successfully 

created and demonstrated solutions that perform order matching 

in excess of one million orders per second with 1:1 order to trade 

ratios and higher, and route point to point messages in excess of 

one million messages per second. The matching engine has 

evolved after several years of R&D and it uses TCS’s proprietary inmemory 

data structures to process an entire day’s orders (as of 

current stock exchange volumes in Asian markets) in less than 10 

seconds, while running as a single thread on a laptop. 

These innovations are being patented. A complete end to end 

stock exchange messaging prototype for algorithmic trading was 

built for a European customer around these innovations, which on 

commodity servers clocked in excess of 200,000 messages per 

second at sub millisecond end to end latency. The messaging 

prototype was then systematically tuned on the latest generation 

Intel multi-core servers to clock in excess of 350,000 messages per 

second on a single server. The prototype incorporates a full 

schematic of a stock exchange with standby components acting 

as message subscribers. These innovations are now being 

incorporated into TCS B? NCS Market Infrastructure Trading 

solution. 

Agility in Performance Engineering 

While there is considerable scope for innovation in technologies 

for high performance, there is an equally important area of tools 

and technology for incorporating high performance in the 

software development and maintenance lifecycle. One of the 

biggest pain points in the IT industry today is that performance 

testing yields optimistic results as compared to what really 

happens in production. This is because of significant gaps 


etween test and production environments, and very aggressive 

time to market schedules. To incorporate agility in the 

development cycle, TCS has created network and database 

emulators so that developers can transparently experience the 

size of a production environment at the time of development or 

unit testing. The WAN emulator (WANem) that we have created 

has been released to open source at 

http://wanem.sourceforge.net and it has been downloaded more 

than 60,000 times worldwide. WANem allows for easy replication 

of WAN characteristics such as latency, bandwidth, jitter, and 

packet and connection loss, and fits in seamlessly into a LAN. 

Similarly, we have created a database production emulator that 

allows one to emulate production database volumes on a 

development database environment. The emulator grabs queries 

in transit and delays them as if they would be running on larger 

database volumes. The emulator provides an interface to input 

projected number of rows per large table in the database, and one 

can also specify statistics of data distribution in the table. 

Empirical models have been built and tested on a number of 

applications to ensure that the estimation of query execution time 

is correct up to an order of magnitude. These emulators have 

proven very successful in risk mitigation of large system 

deployment both within TCS internal systems and client sites. In 

particular, a very large healthcare provider could clearly see where 

its database solution was a limitation and take corrective action 

early enough during the development cycle. 

While emulation helps to improve the quality of software being 

delivered during development and test, we also need to ensure 

that the test cycle time is fast enough to meet aggressive delivery 

deadlines. A lot of time in performance testing goes into test 

execution and analysis, as well as report preparation. To address 

these gaps, we have created a performance test framework called 

FASTEST. This framework allows common load testing tools to be 

integrated into the test cycle, incorporates the emulators 

mentioned above, provides holistic monitoring and analysis both 

across the network and within the servers, provides scheduling 

facilities to improve test cycle throughput, and provides for 

automatic report generation. FASTEST brings about a complete 

project management perspective into performance testing, and 

one can historically review past tests as well as track progress of 

the current test cycles. 

A number of proofs of concept have been done around FASTEST 

and a stable release of this tool is planned to be released before 

the end of 2008-09. Plans are in progress to incorporate several 

transformational features. For example, to extrapolate test results 

so that tests run on small number of users can form the basis for 

estimating response time and throughput for a desired larger 

number of users. Another important target is to incorporate open 

source scripting tools. The FASTEST framework segregates 

scripting from execution and analysis, such that any popular load 

testing tool can be used for scripting, but execution controls are 

simplified and analysis reports are automatically generated. R&D 

is being planned for auto optimization as part of FASTEST in the 

long term. 

TCS InstantApps Technology 

Time to market is one of the biggest challenges faced by the IT 

industry. The entire lifecycle of requirements specifications by 

users, business to system architecture and design by various 

architects, coding by programmers, testing by testers, and 

deployment by infrastructure experts takes it toll due to the rigour 

of the underlying processes and the multitude of personalities 

involved. How much simpler would all this be if business users 

could themselves define their requirements over the screen and 

get it deployed in production without writing a single line of 

code? This is exactly what TCS InstantApps Technology is all about. 

Through several years of research, TCS has created a platform for 

creating applications with no coding required along with hooks to 

integrating external business logic as well. The patented platform 

called TCS InstantApps Technology cuts down the cycle time of 

requirements, architecture, design, coding, testing and also 

deployment. Changes can be made while the application is 

running. A number of commonly used application behaviour 

patterns are available through drag and drop along with standard 

validations. Business users can easily extend and modify 

functionality with minimal effort, and no code. Business process 

definition and execution through workflow, as well as simple data 

manipulation through a visual language is included. Finally, TCS 

InstantApps Technology is a multi-tenant platform wherein many 

independent applications can be configured within the same runtime 

instance, thereby bringing economies of software-as-aservice 

style development to applications deployed within an 

enterprise as well. 

Building a Platform for Agility: 

Research at MIT Sloan School of 

Management 

TCS is a patron member of MIT Center for Information Systems 

Research (CISR) at MIT Sloan. MIT CISR has defined business agility 

as the use of existing IT, people, and process capabilities to 

generate new business value while limiting cost and risk. Earlier 

research at MIT CISR found that enterprise architecture maturity 

could enhance organizational agility. This research made the 


argument that the role of IT in creating business agility was to 

build a reusable foundation of IT-enabled business processes. The 

reusable foundation gives a firm the agility to launch new 

products, introduce business model changes, engage in 

continuous improvement, and acquire and divest businesses. 

They are currently exploring how companies are leveraging their 

digitized process platforms to empower decision making 

throughout the organization. Agility typically demands rapid 

decision making, but IT and business leaders have found that 

accumulating valuable decision making information, making it 

accessible, and then using it effectively is an enormous 

organizational challenge. 

New Areas of Focus 

During 2008-09, we have done pilots on two important areas that 

we will be investing into during 2009-10. First is multi-core for IT, 

wherein we have been conducting pilots to build and evaluate 

methodologies and tools for enabling IT applications to effectively 

use multi-core servers that will provide tens of cores on a single 

server. The pilots have proven very successful for legacy batch 

transformation with simple and minimal modifications. Second is, 

software robustness, wherein we have done pilots to address 

issues pertaining to software aging and rejuvenation. In particular, 

we are addressing memory leaks and ensuring how multiple JVMs 

can be run in parallel so that applications are always running with 

proactive rebooting of JVMs. 

Rajesh Mansharamani 


Optimise Enterprise Knowledge 

Dr. Gautam Shroff, Head, TCS Innovation Labs - Delhi, 

Theme Owner - Optimise Enterprise Knowledge 

“Information access and social networking over the Web are becoming as ubiquitous in 

modern society as telephony and electricity. The challenge is to bring these experiences to 

the workplace, so that enterprise data is easy to access and, co-creation of value with customers 

is enabled. Our research in natural language processing, search, Web 2.0, and the 3D Internet is aimed at 

applying these technologies to improve the creation, availability, and dissemination of enterprise 

knowledge across organizational and societal boundaries”. 

The corporate IT department has traditionally been the guardian 

of an enterprise’s information, and responsible for its security, 

accuracy, and availability. IT has traditionally dealt with structured 

information using databases. Apart from information critical to 

running an organization, we have increasingly come to recognize 

that significant value lies untapped in the vast amounts of 

unstructured information continuously generated and archived 

by modern enterprises, as well as tacit experience and expertise 

available with the people in an organization. Over the years, 

traditional IT principles have been repeatedly applied in attempts 

at ‘knowledge management’, to harness and make use of 

unstructured information as well as tacit knowledge; it is now 

widely accepted that many of these approaches have simply not 

worked. 

At the same time, we are now firmly in the Internet age – 

everyone uses a search engine, ‘to Google’ is a verb now, and one 

can find whatever one wants about anything by simply typing 

into that friendly little search box. But one comes to work and the 

world changes – suddenly important business critical information 

is not available to this now familiar friend; instead there are a 

myriad of confusing IT applications and it is virtually an art to 

figure out what information lies in which system, each with its 

peculiar retrieval mechanism, access rules and terminology! ‘Why 

can’t we Google the enterprise?’ Further, social networks have 

become part of an entire generation’s way of life – yet when one 

wants to find the ‘right’ person to help with a pressing business 

project need, the corporate world offers no equivalent – ‘why can’t 

social networking work inside an enterprise?’ 

What does it feel like when suddenly a highly relevant 

advertisement pops up while typing a friendly e-mail – who’s 

watching over the shoulder? Eerie, but useful! Why search at all? 

Why can’t the information or application’s services that we need 

come to us when we need them most, without us having to ask? If 

one is creating a report and types incorrect information, why can’t 

this be corrected just as a spell checker corrects our spellings? 

These questions, while intriguing, are all unsolved as yet, and the 

technology required is actively being explored through many 

research projects such as the TCS Innovations Lab that has created 

a number of social networking frameworks targeted at bringing 

these concepts within enterprises and large organizations, Knome 

is creating an integrated social networking framework for building 

an enterprise knowledge ecosystem, and idea management 

solution—Idefix—among others. Some of these frameworks have 

been applied in customer projects for creating next generation 

digital learning management systems. 

Digital distance education and collaboration is potentially a 

disruptive trend that is likely to become increasingly relevant, as 

travel becomes restricted in a contracting global economy and an 

uncertain security environment. We are utilizing our research in 

Semantic Multimedia Search towards enhancing Web 2.0 styled 

digital learning systems with facilities for multimedia annotations, 

authoring and personalized delivery, using and augmenting 

content even from public video sharing platforms such as 

YouTube. The aim is to work towards a next generation digital 

education platform that can support new business models in the 

education sector and make corporate learning effective through 

continuing education and collaboration. 

Collaboration across distances is a critical aspect of improving the 

knowledge levels in an organization. Web 2.0 tools are being 

increasingly used for this, but to take it to a new paradigm, talk of 

Web 3.0 – which could be 3D, using virtual worlds such as Second 

Life and its commercial and open source variants. Our exploratory 

research in graphics and 3D Internet is now crystallizing as the 


‘Virtual Collaboration’ research project where we aim to use 

available virtual world platforms for enterprise collaboration and are 

also creating a specialized virtual world platform integrated with 

Web 2.0 and emerging unified communications tools, optimized for 

enterprise collaboration. 

Returning to our earlier question – “why can’t we Google the 

enterprise?”, we propose a new research project in ‘Federated 

Enterprise Information Retrieval’, which will add a level of search and 

alert capability that integrates structured and unstructured data, and 

move towards automatically learning relationships based on data 

content; this project will reuse and build on technical ideas from our 

earlier work on the Natural Language Processing system (NATAS) for 

question answering, and integrate with search technology leveraging 

and building on open source tools extending these for structured 

data using techniques currently in the research domain. 

Specific Projects 

These research projects are to investigate and build techniques to 

leverage the power of social networks and unified enterprise search, 

to enable collaborative teamwork, intelligent work assistance 

framework, and interactive digital learning systems. 

Knome – Knowledge Ecosystem 

Enterprise knowledge has traditionally been restricted to 

documents, taxonomies and workflow. The arrival of social software 

on the consumer Internet and, the knowledge ecosystem it has 

fostered due to its participative, collective and freeform nature 

(wikis, blogs etc), have made enterprise knowledge management 

an archaic practice. Knome is an integrated, extensible platform that 

brings the best of consumer Web 2.0 knowledge patterns, such as 

�Social 

Q&A 

�Collaborative 

Ideation 

�Debates 

�Blogs 

�Wikis 

�Multimedia 

(documents, audio/video podcasts) 

�Microblogging 

(such as Twitter) 

These are built around a core framework that allows social 

networking, a reputation (karma) mechanism and a powerful 

search. A unique differentiator in Knome is its powerful crossreferencing 

trackback system, which constantly monitors content 

created and unearths similarities and connections between 

different types of content. For example, as and when a wiki page is 

being created and populated with content, the system will 

automatically pull related blog posts, ideas, questions, and media, 

without the user requiring to manually search and link them. 

Another unique feature is the semi-automated tagging mechanism. 

All content, in addition to being manually tagged, can also be 

automatically tagged using a word/term frequency algorithm (that 

uses the Porter Stemming algorithm). This is done to keep the 

quality of tags uniform. 

Knome has received a promising market response, with the small 

and medium businesses and several large customers doing pilots at 

the moment. The roadmap, going forward, will be to build custom 

verticalized extensions of Knome, such as for Learning Management 

Systems, or for social extranets. 

Idefix – Innovation Management 

Harnessing the collective intelligence of a large group of employees 

to drive process improvements and foster a culture of innovation 

requires more than just a straightforward ’Idea Box’ type setup that 

most enterprises tend to have. 

Idefix is a Web 2.0 styled idea management solution and an end-toend 

innovation lifecycle enabler that allows employees to submit, 

vote, comment, bet (idea markets), plan and implement ideas in a 

participatory ecosystem. The platform also enables senior 

management to influence the Idea selection and implementation 

process in powerful ways, with mechanisms to filter ideas not just 

based on popularity, but also ‘weighted’ popularity, where the votes 

of Innovation champions count for more, and give a more realistic, 

as opposed to ’populist’, view of ideas. 

Idefix also supports an InnoCentive styled ’Challenge’ mode, where 

ideators can submit ideas towards specific and well-defined 

challenges. 

The Idefix innovation lifecycle is modeled after Clay Christensen’s 

’Innovator’s Dilemma’ model and allows enterprises to implement 

an engaging and continuous innovation ecosystem. Idefix has been 

implemented for multiple clients now, and has constantly 

undergone improvements based on actual client feedback. We plan 

to add more functionality on the innovation financials perspective 

going forward. 

Semantic Multimedia Search 

Human knowledge in several walks of life, such as arts and culture, 

society and politics, news, science and medicine etc., are best 

expressed with data in different media forms, such as still image, 

speech, music and video. However, information processing in today's 

information repositories is primarily based on textual information, 

with media data being passively embedded. Though there is signal 

level processing of media data during acquisition, storage, 

transmission and playback, there is generally no semantic processing. 

Search and retrieval of the contents are generally based on metadata 

TCS I Annual Research Report 2008-09 000 22

and a media instance is produced to the end-user as an indivisible 

atomic entity. This results in inefficient retrieval and navigation in 

multimedia data stores, and inflexible presentation. The current 

research proposal is aimed to address these deficiencies in 

information portals that primarily deal with information in multimedia 

form. In particular, this research will address the needs of digital 

learning solutions, community portals and digital heritage archives. 

During the previous year, we have created Multimedia Explorer, a 

technology prototype that can be used to create content 

annotation from video. It enables content-based search (to 

complement traditional metadata-based search) based on semantic 

as well as media feature -based content description. Moreover, the 

technology prototype enables flexible presentation of video 

artifacts by creating dynamic presentations with scenes of interests 

from multiple video documents. The technology has been adapted 

to create a video documentary portal for Scholars Without Borders - 

our research partners. The portal provides means for the end users 

to conduct content-based search and has flexible preview for geotagged 

and semantically tagged video documentaries, thus 

enabling a more informed purchase decision. In the current year, 

the research focus will concentrate on integrating different types of 

media artifacts (going beyond videos only) to create more flexible 

presentations and application of Multimedia Web Ontology 

Language (MOWL) in enabling effective retrieval and navigation. 

Virtual Collaboration 

Virtual environments are becoming increasingly popular as tools for 

enabling collaboration in an enterprise. One of the biggest reasons 

for this is that significant operational costs can be brought down 

through the use of virtual environments. For example, travel costs 

can be greatly reduced by organizing meetings and discussions in a 

virtual environment, where the attendees log in from their 

geographically separated locations instead of traveling to one 

location. Also, collaboration between distributed teams can be 

facilitated by formal and informal interactions in virtual worlds thus 

providing for better team dynamics and efficiency. Although many 

tools that aid collaboration are available, none of them provide the 

feeling of immersiveness that virtual environments can. Further, 

virtual environments can be used to provide tacit real-world 

information that may, ordinarily, be hard or time-consuming to 

obtain, such as knowing if a person is in office on a given day, which 

location he is logged in from, or, whether he is available for a call. 

Information about assets and resources can also be incorporated in 

the virtual environment using sensors or RFID tags with real-time 

visualizations. The aim of this project is to build virtual world server 

and client software that enables such applications. 

In the last year, we have explored various open-source and 

proprietary virtual environments like OpenSim, RealXtend, Sun 

Wonderland, Open Croquet, Second Life, Qwaq and OLIVE. We 

surveyed the readiness of these environments as comprehensive 

tools for collaboration within an enterprise and also tried 

understanding what the expectations from a collaborative tool are. 

This was done through a series of experiments involving human 

participants in some of the virtual environments. The participants 

were required to participate in activities such as presentations, 

meetings and document editing in-world. Later, they had to answer 

a questionnaire on features offered by the environment and 

features important for collaboration. The results of these 

experiments will be published as a research paper. We have also 

started implementing our own virtual environment client and server 

software. These are being designed specifically for collaboration 

within an enterprise and to support collection of information from 

various sources and its dissemination in the environment. 

Federated Enterprise Information Retrieval 

Enterprise data is typically spread over various repositories 

containing both structured data (especially in databases, datawarehouses, 

and business applications), as well as unstructured 

data (those in documents, reports, notes, proposals, resumes etc.). 

Finding information from such repositories can be time-consuming, 

especially if a particular kind of data is spread over multiple 

repositories. For example, the employee skills data may be spread 

over the ’skills database’ as well as ’individual resumes’. While 

individual resumes may be updated periodically by each individual 

on completion of a project, the skills database may remain out-ofsync 

for quite some time. However, the Enterprise decision making 

process would have been better if both the skills data and 

individual resume data are considered concurrently. Many times, 

while enterprise users know that particular information exists in 

enterprise data repositories, they are unable to pinpoint to and 

extract it due to non-availability of semantic indexes and semantic 

correlation across data repositories. It is to address such problems 

that a Federated Enterprise Information Retrieval initiative is being 

proposed. The use of Domain Ontology to guide and navigate such 

a search and extraction cannot be understated. An effective process 

of enterprise information retrieval has to automatically use domain 

ontology to form semantically valid links across data repositories, 

index them and extract potentially relevant information from such 

repositories. Enterprise information-stores consisting of structured 

data and unstructured reports, will be processed and collated to 

extract relationships across data items. Patterns for extraction will 

be learnt automatically from the ontology and the values in the 

data stores. This process would have to be refined over time based 

on some kind of ‘ranking’ of the answers provided by the system. 

Dr. Gautam Shroff 


Conserve the Environment 

Climate change concerns, corporate social responsibility, growing public and political 

perceptions, market differentiators, and even the current economic climate to some extent, 

are all driving factors to going green. We are adding over six billion tones of CO2 to the atmosphere each 

year, over and beyond what the natural absorbers can remove, causing a rapid increase in atmospheric 

CO2 content. This is projected to increase temperatures anywhere between 2 - 6° C over the next few 

decades leading to disastrous consequences. While clean energy and energy mitigation measures were 

seen as an attractive alternative to high fossil fuel costs last year during the developing economy boom, 

the current economic slowdown continues to reiterate the importance of these measures from the cost 

reduction perspective. The newly initiated green theme in our R&D lab at Chennai has started several 

projects to address the business concerns and service opportunities in this area from the IT perspective. 

On the one hand, IT has become very instrumental and widespread in most organizations today and its 

operation can itself impose a tremendous energy footprint. Simultaneously, a whole new set of 

opportunities arise in industrial/engineering processes, retail, transportation, and other verticals, where IT 

can play a critical role to reduce the environmental impact. IT can also play an instrumental role in 

monitoring, measuring, and managing the carbon footprint of organizations. In the coming year, we will 

be rapidly ramping up these projects, developing tools and competencies in these areas as well as 

pursuing pilots both internally within TCS and externally with clients to validate these ideas. 

Information Technology (IT) has, without 

doubt, substantially improved business 

productivity and enhanced the overall 

quality of our lives. Consequently, there 

has been a proliferation in the number and 

size of IT facilities, and the equipment and 

people working in these facilities. This 

growth is placing a tremendous burden on 

our environment, both in the consumption 

of natural resources such as fuel, water and 

other raw materials, and, in greenhouse 

gas (GHG) emissions. This phenomenon is 

raising several concerns, especially 

following the Kyoto protocol, in the minds 

of corporate executives, governmental 

organizations, environmentalists and the 

broader public. Therefore, there is an 

Prof. Anand Sivasubramaniam, Head, TCS Innovation Labs - Infrastructure Services, 

Theme Owner - Conserve the Environment 

urgent need to make IT infrastructure 

green. 

Data centers, for example, require high 

levels of cooling and, thereby, more power. 

New servers may look compact and spacesaving, 

but generate much more heat than 

the old servers. Many techniques such as 

virtualization, efficient data storage, and 

optimal management of power and 

cooling are being considered for green 

solutions. 

TCS Innovation Labs - Infrastructure 

Services is working on innovative solutions 

for power reduction in IT Infrastructure, 

data centers, etc. and also the 

development of practices and processes 

for carbon credit accounting and 

management. 

At TCS, we classify our initiatives into two 

broad categories, which together capture 

our view of Green IT: 

�How 

can we mitigate the 

environmental impact caused by the 

growth in IT 

�How 

can we use IT to enhance the 

environment and to mitigate the 

environmental impact of other 

industrial, logistic and business 

processes? 

Research at the lab is focused on four 


Infrastructure - 

Facilities 

(B) 

Clean 

Energy 

IT 

Infrastructure 

(A) 

Green 

Datacenters 

Green 

Services 

Multicore 

Carbon 

Accounting 

Application Development 

and 

Maintenance 

(D) 

Figure 1: Research Categories with 'Green' theme 

broad categories keeping 'Green' as the 

main theme (Figure – 1). 

A. IT Infrastructure: Traditionally, 

research in this area has focused on areas 

like server monitoring and data center 

activities with the goal of meeting Service 

Level Agreements (SLA) at minimum cost. 

However, with the increasing cost of 

powering data centers (and the associated 

concerns of GHG emissions), monitoring 

server power consumption and managing 

data centers with power minimization as 

an added goal has become a subject of 

intense research. 

We have developed a power dashboard 

which gives a multi-dimensional view of a 

data center's power consumption and 

utilization at the individual server level at 

various time granularities. This dashboard 

collates information gathered by 

deploying intelligent Power Distribution 

Units (PDUs). These PDUs can be polled 

over the network to measure the power 

delivered by them to each IT device 

Business 

Processes 

(C) 

Figure 2 : Power Utilization and Variation 

connected to them. The dashboard also 

analyzes historical power data to predict 

short-term power consumption. 

In the absence of measurement PDUs, we 

are developing methods to estimate the 

power consumption at the server level 

accurately. Specifically, we collect 

performance metrics on servers (such as 

utilization of CPU, memory, network, etc.) 

and use them as inputs to a mathematical 

model that predicts power consumption. 

This technology has been designed to be 

light-weight enough to be deployed in 

real-world data centers. As an illustration, 

Figure 2 shows the variation of the power 

(with time) of a server along with the 

changes (with time) in some of the 

measured performance metrics. Note that, 

in this case, the power consumed appears 

closely correlated with the CPU utilization. 

Likewise, in general, we can obtain the 

power consumed as an empirically 

obtained function of several utilization 

metrics 


Figure 3: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Modeling of TCS Mumbai Datacenter 

Sometimes, we find that the cost of 

cooling a data center exceeds the cost of 

powering the IT equipment in it. Therefore, 

it becomes equally important that we 

know how to go about cooling our data 

center. This improves the Power Usage 

Effectiveness (PUE) of the data centers. 

The TCS R&D team at Pune (India) has 

created Computational Fluid Dynamics 

(CFD) models for thermal analysis of data 

centers. Considering the wide variety of 

layouts and equipment in use, the aim is to 

develop CFD models (figure 3) that can 

handle a range of configurations and, 

thereby, form an integral part of the 

design/re-design process for both new 

and existing data centers. Future work 

would focus on development of transient 

CFD models, and their integration with 

suitable control strategies, which would 

then provide a truly well-rounded solution 

scheme for improving energy efficiency in 

data centers. 

B. Infrastructure - Facilities: Our focus in 

this area is on improving the infrastructure 

efficiency. With growing demand on 

electricity and restrictions on usage from 

the grid, power conservation and 

alternative sources of energy are gaining 

utmost importance. 

In this context, we have taken a threestepped 

approach: 

1. Minimize power consumed by 

the Infrastructure facilities: 

We are monitoring the efficiency of 

electrical equipment and taking steps to 

adopt the best practices to improve the 

efficiency of the electrical equipments and 

minimize the power consumption. Some 

of them may involve investments in which 

case Return on Investment (ROI) is worked 

out to make decisions. As an initial step, 

these activities are being initiated in few 

TCS centers. The lab is aiming at an 

electrical modeling of the data center 

which will give a dynamically varying Data 

Center infrastructure Efficiency (DCiE). 

2. Alternative sources of energy: 

We have initiated the analysis of suitability 

of alternative (clean) energy sources for 

our facilities such as wind turbines, solar 

power and biomass. There is no 

comprehensive tool to plan for the 

capacity requirement / energy mix of a 

facility based on energy consumption 

pattern, available technologies, locality 

specific constraints, government policies 

and incentives. At the lab, we are 

designing an energy capacity planning 

tool which can compute the optimum 

energy provisioning with the details of 

investment and ROI based on user inputs 

and preferences. 

3. Carbon footprint estimation: 

Power reduction scenarios and 

investigation of greener energy resources 

automatically led us into carbon footprint 

estimation. As a pilot study, we have 

initiated this in one of our TCS centers. We 

are differentiating our footprint estimator 

from the existing tools in the market by 

looking into emissions generated by 

different processes, activities and creating 


different what-if scenarios. 

C. Business Processes (carbon 

accounting and management): With the 

proliferation of GHG emission calculators, 

companies have several options for 

reporting their carbon footprints. 

However, a common limitation of these 

calculators is that they report emissions at 

a macro level. As a result, while companies 

know how much of their emissions come 

from sources such as electricity or 

transportation, they have no details on the 

break-up of emissions among the different 

business processes. 

We are developing an emission 

management system based on activitybased 

costing, a standard methodology for 

allocating costs among the different units 

in a business. This approach allows one to 

slice and dice the emission data and report 

emissions at business process, activity or 

resource levels, and simulate the effects of 

different organizational changes on 

emission levels. This is not only a carbon 

accounting mechanism but also helps us 

in better decision making towards Greener 

Business Processes. 

D. Application Development and 

Maintenance (multi-core): The non-linear 

increase in power consumption and the 

diminishing gains in performance from 

increasing the processor frequency have 

led to the advent of multicore processors. 

A multicore processor combines two or 

more independent CPU cores in a single 

chip, with the CPU cores accessing a 

shared memory. This architecture scales 

well, while keeping the power 

consumption at manageable levels. 

There has been an increasing emphasis on 

multicore chip design, stemming from 

thermal and power consumption 

problems posed by increases in processor 

clock speeds. However, the extent to 

which software can be multi-threaded to 

take advantage of this new architecture is 

likely to be the single greatest constraint 

on computer performance of the future. 

Green Technologies for Water Purification 

Access to safe potable water is a basic 

human need. Yet, most people in India and 

around the world do not have ready access 

to clean water. The water purification 

group at TCS's TCS Innovation Labs - 

TRDDC in Pune has been working on using 

rice husk ash, an agri-waste, for the 

purification of drinking water in rural and 

semi-urban areas. These efforts resulted in 

the gravity-driven inexpensive water filter 

Sujal which was distributed to thousands 

of households in villages across India. 

During the past year, the group has 

focused on developing novel surface 

treatments for rice husk ash for enhancing 

its purification capabilities. The lab has 

patented technologies for removal of 

harmful compounds such as arsenic and 

fluoride from drinking water, and recently 

filed a patent for inactivation of disease 

causing bacteria and viruses present in the 

water. The group is now looking forward to 

developing point-of-use products based 

on these technologies. 

The lab will continue to focus on 'Green' as 

a theme. Our research would analyze each 

facet of an organization's operations, 

business processes and IT environment to 

reduce energy consumption and calculate 

carbon footprint, thereby providing a 

holistic Green solution for IT and non-IT 

infrastructures. 



Enhance Health Care 

Dr M Vidyasagar, Head, TCS Innovation Labs – Hyderabad, 

Theme Owner – Enhance Health Care 

“Health care is often thought of as a ’recession-proof’ industry, because the vast majority 

of health care expenditure is not optional but compulsory. Nevertheless, the cost of 

health care in both developing as well as developed nations has been growing at about twice 

the rate of the economy as a whole. As a consequence, the percentage of the GDP of any country that 

goes towards health care has been increasing at a frenetic pace. For instance, in 2007, the USA spent 17% 

of its GDP on health care, and this figure is expected to rise to 21% by 2011. Clearly, this kind of increase is 

not sustainable. Providing better health care for everyone at an affordable cost is a challenge that needs 

to be addressed using a variety of approaches. As India’s leading IT company with a global presence, TCS 

is doing its share to improve health care in both the curative (after the fact) and preventive (before the 

onset of disease) regimes.” 

Recent advances in biology coupled with the increasing use 

of informatics are, at last, making possible the dream of 

universal personalized medicine and health care. At TCS, 

we are committed to developing and using the latest 

algorithms and analytical methods, coupled with experimental 

advances made by our R&D laboratories around the world, 

so that the dream becomes a reality as quickly as possible. 

Towards that end, we have assembled a multi-disciplinary 

team of about 40 persons, including about 12 Ph.D.s from 

a variety of backgrounds. We take pride in the depth and 

breadth of our team and their actual achievements to date. 

But bigger challenges lie still ahead. 

During 2008-09, the R&D activities in the broad theme of health 

care were aimed at: 

�Enabling 

the drug discovery community to cope with the 

explosion of information and the rapidly increasing volume 

of published literature, 

�Automating 

the piecing together of disparate bits of 

information from scattered sources to make a coherent 

whole, 

�Understanding 

the role of individual characteristics and 

individual variations in disease mechanisms and the actions 

of drugs, and as a prelude to all this, 

�Understanding 

how a vast variety of organisms survive 

in extremely hostile environment; be it the highly 

acidic environment of the stomach, or the elevated 

temperatures of a sulphur hot spring. 

Information Search and Retrieval Using Natural 

Language Processing (NLP) with Applications to 

Drug Discovery 

One of the consequences of the rapid advancement of scientific 

research is that new information is being added to the scientific 

literature at a dizzying pace, so much so that individual 

researchers are unable to piece together all of the information in 

their heads. Even research groups working in close coordination 

are unable to keep pace with the latest developments in their area 

of research. 

And yet there is help available in the form of Natural Language 

Processing (NLP) technology. By accessing research literature in 

electronic form, NLP techniques can be used to reproduce a 

significant part of the human thought process. Much of drug 

discovery is dependent on understanding the cause and effect 

relationships between various enzymes and proteins in the body, 

and externally introduced drugs. The main source of difficulty is 

that the relevant information is scattered over many research 

publications, and is not found in a single place. We have 

developed a very systematic approach to the problem of 

constructing these so-called ‘signal transduction databases’ and 

have also built very intuitive visualization tools for viewing these 

databases. Finally, we have also developed a very natural query 


front-end that mimics the way in which a life sciences researcher 

thinks, and goes well beyond mere ’string matching’ as is common 

with most search interfaces. 

Our solution is code-named ’Bio-Appliance’ and consists of a great 

deal more than just NLP technology applied to scientific literature. 

In addition to constructing signal transduction pathways 

automatically, we are also able to provide a very large number of 

public databases after pre-processing, and update them at regular 

intervals. The Bio-Appliance also incorporates our award-winning 

software Bio-Suite. 

PK/PD Modeling 

PK stands for ’pharmacokinetics’ while PD stands for 

’pharmacodynamics’. Simply put, PK refers to what the body does 

to a drug, while PD stands for what a drug does to the body. 

Together, PK and PD constitute an important and vital part of 

computational approaches to drug discovery. 

The overwhelming majority of failed drug candidates get rejected 

for reasons of toxicity and not efficacy. In other words, a potential 

drug candidate is far more likely to get rejected because it has 

unwanted side effects, than because it fails to achieve the desired 

therapeutic effect. By modeling how a drug passes through the 

body, specifically by studying the so-called ADME (Absorption, 

Distribution, Metabolism and Excretion) of a drug as it passes 

through the body, we can get a handle on how the drug gets 

absorbed by the body and what effects it is likely to have. By 

studying the penetration of the blood-brain barrier by a drug, we 

can also aspire to predict its toxicity. 

The study of PK/PD requires a combination of a wide variety of 

techniques such as modeling via ordinary and partial differential 

equations, numerical solution of Ordinary Differential Equations 

(ODE) / Partial Differential Equations (PDE), pattern recognition, 

and machine learning. 

Metagenomics 

Most of the interesting life forms cannot be synthesized but are 

found naturally in various locations, many of which are extremely 

hostile to “normal” forms of life. Two well-known examples are the 

human stomach, which has a highly acidic environment, and the 

hot sulphur springs which are at an extremely high temperature 

and also contain many substances that would normally be 

poisonous to most life forms. By studying how various kinds of 

bacteria adapt themselves to survive in such hostile 

environments, we can gain some understanding of the robustness 

of life itself. 

The first step in studying a novel life form is find out its ’genome,’ 

that is, its DNA sequence. Unfortunately, when one extracts DNA 

from the stomach, for example, what one actually gets is a mix-up 

of the DNA of several hundred organisms, namely the various 

bacteria that live in the stomach. Disassembling the DNA 

fragments and assigning them to the right organism, and then 

assembling these fragments to obtain the entire genome, are 

extremely challenging computational problems that require novel 

algorithms in stochastic modeling and string matching. As a byproduct 

of such studies, we are also able to make predictions of 

which organisms are likely to be pathogenic and which are 

benign. 

During the coming year, we plan to continue the above activities. 

We also plan to initiate some activity in bio-simulation, that is, 

modeling the human body as a dynamical system, at various 

levels: the whole body, one specific organ, or one cell within a 

specific organ. 

Dr M Vidyasagar 


Manage Enterprise Risk and Compliance 

Dr M Vidyasagar, Head, TCS Innovation Labs – Hyderabad, 

Theme Owner - Manage Enterprise Risk and Compliance 

“With the world being completely connected through the Internet, and with many office 

desktops running relatively insecure operating systems and insecure applications, esecurity 

has been and will remain a paramount concern for every enterprise. In addition, recent 

events in the financial world have highlighted the need to have reliable measures of the risk an enterprise 

faces, be it economic risk or security risk. One way to mitigate risk is to ensure that data is as private as 

possible. Eventually all of these activities will serve to ensure that an enterprise will comply with all 

prevailing regulations, and can move up to the next level of compliance requirements with minimal 

rework. These are the objectives of this theme.” 

Piracy Detection and Enterprise-Level 

Rights Management 

By now, the problem of secure communication between 

individual computers and between various applications running 

on those machines can be treated as a solved problem. The next 

set of challenges arises from a broad area that can be roughly 

termed as ‘enterprise-level’ digital rights management. This 

includes piracy prevention and detection. Past experience shows 

that ’preventing’ piracy by preventing the user from doing certain 

things is inevitably doomed to failure. A far more effective 

approach is piracy detection, meaning an unimpeachable 

technological solution that can be used to show that only one 

person, and no one else, indulged in the act of pirating 

copyrighted or otherwise protected material. We, at TCS’s 

Innovation Labs, achieve this through a novel approach to Digital 

Watermarking (DWM). Most existing DWM methodologies tend to 

be somewhat limited in terms of the set of attacks that the 

watermark can withstand. In contrast, our method offers 

resistance against a wide variety of attacks. There is also a limited 

amount of adaptation built into the DWM algorithm so that the 

algorithm can be adjusted to counter any (even partially) 

successful attacks. Along the same lines, we believe firmly that 

Digital Rights Management (DRM) solutions that are based solely 

in software cannot serve the purpose adequately. In order to 

achieve proper enterprise-level rights management, one needs to 

have control over both the hardware and the software. By 

adopting this approach, we are able to come up with a versatile 

and highly customizable rights management utility. To cite a few 

examples, it is possible to permit a user merely to view a file on 

the screen but not to print it, or to view it and print it but not to email 

it (it will appear to be gibberish to the recipient), and so on. 

Risk Assessment 

The recent turmoil in the world’s financial markets has again 

underlined the essential requirement for estimating risk of various 

kinds, so that the institutions can be required to provide margins 

or other protections against these risks. Much of the turmoil can 

be traced to the unregulated nature of most financial instruments 

that have been created and are being freely traded. While simple 

human greed was undoubtedly a key ingredient in this fiasco, 

equally important was the lack of proper mathematical analytical 

techniques to compute the amount of money that was at risk, the 

likelihood of certain adverse events happening, and strategies for 

reducing (if not completely eliminating) the uncertainties 

involved in various transactions. Using highly advanced 

probabilistic models and original analytical tools, we have come 

up with some new methods for minimizing the variance of 

derivative instruments, even when one is able to implement the 

hedging strategies only at discrete instants of time. Going 

forward, we plan to examine numerical implementations of the 

methods we have developed. 

Data Privacy 

In this age of globalization, organizations need to publish 


their microdata owing to legal directives or share it with 

business partners in order to remain competitive. This puts 

personal privacy at risk. Sharing some fictitious data with 

business partners may not work as it would hardly have any 

utility for the purpose. Thus, there is an inherent trade-off 

between the utility that databases can offer and the privacy 

they offer to their constituents. 

As a part of our research in data privacy, we are studying this 

trade-off formally, attempting to understand the relationship 

between privacy and utility. We will like to find a comfortable 

position between the extremes of fully disclosed and completely 

withheld data. This has a lot of relevance for TCS given that we 

often work with the client data either on-site or off-shore. Ideally, 

we would want to keep our experience certainty promise (and, 

therefore, we need high utility data to work with anywhere) and 

also help our clients remain competitive (may mean more offshoring) 

while maintaining their goodwill (no privacy breaches). 

Based on our research, we are also developing Privacy Enhancing 

Technologies (PET) that can make the TCS delivery platform more 

privacy compliant. For example, our research in data privacy has 

resulted in a data masking tool called Masketeer which helps in 

generating production like high utility privacy compliant test 

data. It has already been used in many client projects as an offshoring 

enabler. We are also working closely with a TCS Banking 

and Financial Services account to develop an on-the-fly masking 

solution framework named ‘SafeMask’ which enforces privacy 

policies on the data that is being fetched from database before it 

is shown on the screen to operators. Given that there is a growing 

demand for privacy in the BPO space, SafeMask as a privacy 

enhancer should have a big role to play in TCS BPO not only as a 

differentiator but also as a business enabler 

During the coming year, we hope to turn at least some of these 

research results into commercial offerings. In the coming year, we 

would be closely working with TCS BPO and deploying SafeMask 

technology to effectively address their specific privacy 

compliance needs and challenges. We also plan to customize 

Masketeer to address compliance needs of some specific verticals 

like BFS and Health. 

Dr M Vidyasagar 


Improve Operational Efficiency and Productivity 

in Application Development and Management 

Arun Bahulkar, Head, Software Engineering Group, TCS Innovation Labs - TRDDC, 

Theme Owner - Improve Operational Efficiency and Productivity in 


“Application development and management is at the core of TCS’s business and the 

effectiveness with which it is done is critical to being competitive. We have identified 

product development, requirements specification, software evolution, and software verification as key 

areas where we seek to make a significant difference. We have focused on the needs of TCS’s products, 

embedded software development, and the generic application outsourcing business. 

The model driven development approach has been institutionalized. We are now working on addressing 

configurability and customizability of products along all possible dimensions. 

The work on collaborative requirements specification has gained wide field acceptance. We have started 

working on domain knowledge based requirements specifications. 

We have scaled up our verification tools so that critical real life applications that could not be analysed 

until now by any industry tool can now be analysed. We will continue to increase the scalability to match 

the growth of application sizes in the future and also the sophistication in the types of analysis we can do. 

In the testing area, we have concentrated on coverage-based testing and regression testing for efficiency 

and effectiveness. 

We have started work in the software evolution area by focusing on refactoring to improve the ability to 

make changes and system models that enable more accurate change specification. 

We have successfully piloted our approach for semantic integration of enterprise. We plan to apply it to 

more scenarios such as reporting, warehouse creation, data migration, and propagation, and going 

beyond relational databases.” 

Operational efficiency is central to application development and 

management and there is scope to improve it at all stages of the 

software development life cycle. Some of the major opportunities 

we have identified as our focus are: 

�Ensuring 

the system requirements provide maximum value 

and are identified completely and consistently so that there 

are fewer iterations to getting them right 

�Enabling 

the delivery of customized solutions at ‘product 

price’ 

�Enhancing 

the ability to make changes to software while 

getting them right the first time 

�Guaranteeing 

critical properties of systems and moving to a 

’zero defect’ culture 

�Enabling 

organizations to improve their operational efficiency 

by a systematic approach to integration. 

This has led to initiatives in the following areas: 

�Requirements 

Specification - Eliciting and specifying 

requirements at a higher level of domain expertise 

�Product 

Engineering Platform - Dramatically changing the 

way vertical business products are designed, built, configured, 

and supported so that customers can assemble systems on 

demand 

�Software 

Testing - Making testing more effective and 

systematic during fresh development or while making 

changes 


�Zero 

Defect Software - Helping to move critical embedded 

software systems closer to a goal of zero defects 

�Software 

Evolution - Making a difference to the way 

software evolves 

�Model 

Driven Approach for Enterprise Data Integration - 

Addressing the challenges of integrating applications and 

data in the enterprise with an initial focus on data. 

Each of these initiatives is described below. 

Requirements Specification 

One of the major hurdles in the requirements specification 

process is the ability to identify the ’unobvious’ requirements. This 

difficulty is further compounded when the stakeholders are 

globally distributed. 

We observed that many of the unobvious requirements can be 

discovered by correlating inputs across stakeholders. We have 

now extended our requirements development method and 

toolset—MAPAGILE—to enable collaborative requirements 

development and review across stakeholders. 

This method and tool have been used across more than 150 

projects, and some business verticals in TCS have even adopted 

them as standard practice. 

Continuing the work on requirements further, our interactions 

with different internal business units in TCS have revealed how 

domain knowledge is crucially important while defining 

requirements. In our future work, we will develop a method and 

framework to enable domain knowledge assisted requirements 

evolution. This approach starts with a reasonably-sized ‘seed 

requirement specification’. The seed contains structured domain 

knowledge as represented by core elements such as business 

events, actions and decisions (as captured in business processes), 

business constraints, and analysis patterns derived from various 

resources. Each time a new software application is to be 

developed, we can ‘evolve’ the seed by way of altering and adding 

to the core to get to the final requirement specification. The 

semantic assistance comes from domain ontologies. Domain 

experts can collaboratively evolve the ontologies and maintain 

the currency of knowledge. We expect that this approach would 

yield sizeable efficiency in the requirements definition phase by 

‘jump-starting’ projects, improve quality of deliverables by 

providing domain knowledge assistance to requirements analysts, 

and enhance customer confidence in terms of domain knowledge 

residing within our organization. 

Product Engineering Platform 

Our earlier work in model driven development has led to success 

in being able to achieve ’separation of concerns’ with respect to 

architectural and technology dimensions. This found major 

success with the TCS products business and other large 

development efforts. 

Once launched, a product finds many varied types of users who 

require customizations and extensions to it. From one product, 

another variant emerges for a different market segment. 

Managing all these variations, extensions and customizations can 

lead to large costs and management issues almost defeating the 

very purpose of having a product. We are now focused on being 

able to develop and support a family of products across a large 

number of customers in an efficient manner. We seek to create a 

product engineering platform and methods with the following 

capabilities: 

�Ability 

to view the product family as a set of features which 

can take parameters 

�Ability 

to define and configure ’business products’ (for 

example, insurance policy types) 

�Ability 

to configure business processes 

�Ability 

to customize user interfaces (and other external 

interfaces) 

�Methods 

to design and assemble implementation 

components 

�Self-assembly 

based on configuration definitions 

�Ability 

to easily upgrade an already installed configuration 

when the next version of the product is made available 

�Choice 

of platforms, architectures and implementation 

strategies 

�Ability 

to recognize and integrate with pre-existing software 

�Ability 

for a customer to override and extend the product 

To achieve this, we would leverage and build upon existing work 

on feature models and composition techniques. 

We have already implemented this concept partially as a Proof of 

Concept (POC) treating out Model-Driven Development (MDD) 

toolset—MasterCraft—as an exemplar. We have been able to 

package code generators of more than 60 variations of 


MasterCraft installed base as a common platform, from which the 

desired set of architectures and platforms can be supported 

through a feature tree based configuration mechanism. 

We work closely with the TCS products business to ensure that we 

address all the complexity of the problems and that the tools get 

used on a large scale. 

Software Testing 

Software testing constitutes a major percentage of effort while 

producing a software release. Despite all the human efforts that 

are put in, the quality of the software as well as the effectiveness 

of testing remains lower than expectations. As a part of research 

related to Software Testing, we are focusing our efforts along the 

following themes: 

�Regression 

testing 

�System 

testing 

Regression Testing 

We carried out several studies and pilots to help understand the 

regression test cycle across several industry domains. The studies 

helped us identify several ways to improve the efficiency of the 

regression test cycle and we will be exploring these further. 

Creation and maintenance of test messages for testing messagebased 

applications has largely been manual and, as a result, 

tedious and time-consuming. We have developed a specification 

driven test data generation approach (Testify) to generate 

messages that adhere to standards like SWIFT. 

In collaboration with Georgia Institute of Technology, we have 

continued the work on adequacy of regression test suite and 

subset selection. Several papers have been published in top-tier 

conferences. While these techniques have been tried on products 

and tools and have shown a lot of promise, they are yet to be tried 

on business applications. We have initiated such pilots within TCS. 

System Testing 

Based on interaction with a cross-section of large projects across 

TCS, we found that System Testing is being conducted manually 

and, therefore, creation of a test bed with appropriate data and 

the entire test execution cycle takes considerable time and effort. 

To address these aspects, we have devised a strategy using: 

�Workflow 

based approach to achieve better specification and 

more functional coverage 

�Data 

generation that covers the test conditions 

�Test 

automation for reduction in test planning and 

execution effort 

This approach was further refined. We are currently building a 

POC using a model checking tool—SAL—for data generation and 

Selenium for test automation. 

Zero Defect Software 

As a part of embedded software research, we continue to focus on 

the zero defect software initiative to address some of the key 

challenges currently faced by TCS’s clients in the embedded space, 

such as: 

�Meeting 

safety critical quality standards even as the size and 

complexity of embedded software grows 

�Improving 

productivity and quality amidst constantly 

changing technologies and platforms 

�Exploiting 

the product line nature to improve productivity, 

quality, and certifiability of products 

We have built a state chart analysis tool that can analyze up to 100 

state charts. This has been achieved through a combination of 

engineering and implementation of optimization techniques like 

slicing. We are now exploring techniques to enable analysis of 500 

state charts as this is the size of the largest specifications we have 

encountered. 

We have also built a prototype tool that automatically generates 

test data for MCDC coverage from C source code. This is being 

applied to application code from the automotive domain. In 2009- 

10, we will work on improving the scalability of this tool. While 

there are many tools in the industry, they do not scale up 

sufficiently and cannot be used effectively for real-life 

applications. Our work on scaling up bridges that gap and helps 

to enable the use of sophisticated techniques to be applied for 

verifying properties of critical software and eliminating hard to 

detect defects. 

We are also working on extracting state charts from C code so that 

we can generate test cases or verify system properties from the 

state charts. This is a practical requirement since state charts are 

not available for a large class of applications. 

Our program analysis tool is being successfully applied to detect 

genuine bugs. The tool has scaled up to 10 million lines of code. In 

2009-10, we will focus on combining our scalability with modelchecking 

techniques to build a tool that is both scalable and 

precise in its analysis. We will also work on inventing a property 


specification language that can be used by average software 

engineers or domain experts to specify properties of business 

software, and build tools that will analyze large business 

applications for satisfaction of these properties. 

Software Evolution 

While businesses require a lot of new software, managing the 

evolution of existing software and, ability to quickly and correctly 

change it to meet the agility of businesses is a critical industry need. 

Over the past year, we have built a toolset for reverse engineering 

of AS/400 applications. The toolset breaks the monolithic code 

into transaction services which are further broken into validations 

and computations to facilitate understanding at a specification 

level. The toolset captures a process model created by experts and 

maps process steps to the transactions. 

Using this method, reverse engineering for the freight 

management system (RPG on AS400 platform) of a large logistics 

company was executed with excellent productivity gains. For 

another pharmaceutical distributor, a full-fledged reverse 

engineering project was executed to deliver the extracted design 

models. 

Our program analysis and transformation technology found an 

interesting application in terms of identifying issues when a major 

banking product was migrated and compiler differences in 

handling spaces caused unexpected program crashes. 

Going forward, the lab plans to focus on how to incorporate new 

functionality and functionality changes in existing software 

systems. Two major sub-problems that we plan to explore are 

Change Specifications, and Refactoring to improve changeability. 

We plan to guide both of them using empirical analysis of change 

and defect data. 

We plan to express the Change Specifications as a variation over 

the business functionality stated using Features, Processes, and/or 

Activities, and analyze its impact on design and code using trace 

of functionality to design and code. 

We plan to study the impact of complexity measures (like 

coupling, size, cohesion) and code smells (like nesting depth) on 

the cost of making big changes, leading to identifying places in 

code where refactoring is required. 

We aim to study the business needs of service enablement of 

existing software systems. Defining alternative methods to create 

services in existing systems is the primary objective of the 

exploration. 

We also continue to exploit our experience with representation of 

programming languages at the standards formulation body OMG, 

where TCS is designated as the Chair for the Finalization of ASTM 

(Abstract Syntax Tree Models) standards. 

A Model Driven Approach for 

Enterprise Data Integration 

Enterprises have to deal with a large number of diverse data 

sources that are produced by different processes. Obtaining a 

unified view of this data is critical for decision making. This 

requires one to capture, understand, and reconcile the semantics 

of different sources, and then translate this understanding into a 

suitable integration solution. There exist a number of wellestablished 

integration technologies in the market such as ETL, EII, 

and MDM, but they only provide implementation level solutions. 

They do not provide a conceptual framework to deal with the 

semantics of data. Also, different technologies are better for 

different needs and these needs keep changing. What one needs 

is a flexible integration architecture that enables such changes to 

be effected transparently, with minimal effort and impact. 

We are developing a model-driven approach that aims to address 

these issues and provide an architecture for a more flexible and 

error-free integration of an enterprise’s data and processes. 

Essentially, the idea is to separate out implementation aspects 

from conceptual aspects and use semantically rich conceptual 

models as the medium for specifying and integrating data. We 

provide an extensible, multi-layered, conceptual modeling 

framework that can be used to specify a unified, enterprise 

reference conceptual model at the top level, context specific 

conceptual models at the next level optionally, and map these 

conceptual models to implementation models such as physical 

data models, service models, and so on. These models can then be 

used as the foundation infrastructure to derive platform specific 

integration solutions, using model-driven techniques. We are 

doing a couple of POCs with a large financial services organization 

to validate the overall approach. As part of this, so far, we have 

developed tools to automate the following: 

�Translation 

of queries specified on the unified conceptual 

model into equivalent platform-specific implementations 

�ETL 

generation 

Going forward, we plan to extend this work to cover more aspects 

of integration in more practical settings. 

Arun Bahulkar, Smita Ghaisas, Vinay Kukarni, 

Sachin Patel, Deepali Kholkar, R Venkatesh, 

Shrawan Kumar, Ravindra Naik, Sreedhar Reddy 


Improve Operational Efficiency and Productivity 

in Engineering & Industrial Services 

“Manufacturing industry has to constantly optimize product/equipment design as well as 

plant operations with respect to one or more of the following goals: quality, 

productivity, energy efficiency, scalability, cost of production and environmental compliance. Our efforts 

are aimed at providing cost-effective solutions which are optimized for certain objectives specified by our 

clients/partners and which utilize state-of-the-art simulation tools either commercially available and/or 

those developed in our Innovation Labs. We have now taken up the challenge of integrating different tools 

to be able to solve more complex problems in an holistic manner such as component design based on 

advanced high strength steels involving secondary steel making, continuous casting, sheet metal 

production followed by stamping. Based on our experience with metals industry we have made 

considerable progress this year on our efforts to develop similar solution methodology for solving 

challenging problems facing the engineering polymers industry.” 

Over the years, the manufacturing industry 

has made significant progress in steadily 

improving efficiencies in operating plants 

with the help of sustained engineering 

innovations. However, some unsolved 

engineering challenges still exist due to 

which the industry is unable to bring 

down operating costs. For example, as 

against a theoretical energy requirement 

of 436 Kcal per kilogram of Portland 

cement, the most modern cement plant 

today consisting of an energy efficient 

cement kiln with suspension pre-heaters 

and highly optimized cement grinding 

mills and with state-of-the-art process 

instrumentation and control solutions 

installed in the plant, consumes around 

650 Kcal per Kg. The relatively older plants 

consume anywhere from 1000 to 2000 

Kcal of energy per Kg. The discrepancy 

between the theoretical requirement and 

actual consumption even in modern 

cement plants is due to sensible heat lost 

at relatively low temperatures of around 

100 to 200 degree centigrade. The heat 

Dr. Pradip, Head, Process Engineering Group, TCS Innovation Labs – TRDDC, 

Theme Owner - Improve Operational Efficiency and Productivity in Engineering 

& Industrial Services 

recovery at relatively lower temperatures 

remains an unsolved engineering 

challenge. 

A host of tools, technologies, processes 

and decision support systems have been 

developed to help make improvements in 

the efficiency of manufacturing processes 

and thus bring down the operating costs. 

TCS’s Engineering and Industrial Services 

(EIS) group and Innovation Labs (TRDDC - 

Process Engineering Lab, Innovation Lab - 

Cincinnati, USA, and Innovation Lab - EIS) 

have provided innovative solutions to the 

industry in this domain. TCS has also 

undertaken several new initiatives to help 

sustain the competitive edge to our clients 

and industrial partners as well as to 

respond to new challenges such as 

environmental compliance and reducing 

environmental footprint. 

Our research initiatives are specifically 

aimed at enhancing operational efficiency 

of our manufacturing industry with 

respect to reduction in energy 

consumption, cost of production and 

environmental footprint. Our programs are 

aimed at addressing problems related to 

design as well as process optimization and 

control of operating plants. Some of them 

are briefly described in the following 

sections to illustrate our approach. 

Integrated 

Computational Materials 

Engineering 

Integrated Computational Materials 

Engineering (ICME) is a relatively new and 

promising engineering approach to enable 

the optimization of materials, 

manufacturing processes and component 

design in an integrated fashion with the 

help of advanced tools, technologies and 

material information available today. ICME 

can help reduce component design and 

process development costs, reduce time to 

reach the market with new products, 

improving the prognosis for materials and 


component life (National Academies 

Report on Integrated Computational 

Materials Engineering, 2008). Our research 

program is aimed at developing several 

tools and technologies for specific 

industrial products keeping in mind the 

ICME framework for integration. 

Multi-scale Modelling of 

Solidification - i2STEEL 

under Metal Innovation 

Program 

The Steel industry has been introducing 

new alloys for automotive applications to 

improve the product performance and to 

meet the challenges posed by other 

materials. Introduction of new and 

improved alloys such as Advanced High- 

Strength Steel (AHSS) requires enabling 

technologies to reduce the cost and lead 

times of the development. The 

performance of a formed sheet 

component in an automobile is influenced 

by the entire life cycle the material has 

gone through in its production. Starting 

from the chemistry and cleanliness of the 

molten steel, the casting, rolling, heat 

treatment, forming, and other processes, 

influence its properties and performance. 

Tracking the evolution of the properties 

and determining the cause of a particular 

property is a challenging task, especially 

when diverse manufacturing processes 

influence them. The concept of “Through 

Process Modelling”, which enables use of 

sophisticated mathematical models to 

predict the evolution of microstructure 

and properties during the production of 

sheet metal, can be used to build a 

suitable platform to facilitate production 

of new grades of steel sheets to meet the 

requirement of downstream processes. 

The goal of TCS’s i2STEEL program is to 

facilitate the attainment of suitable 

properties of the sheet metal which is 

dictated by the downstream processes 

such as stamping. The i2STEEL platform 

would facilitate steelmakers and 

automakers to obtain the desired grade of 

sheet metal. The program aims at the 

development of an Integrated Process 

Models based platform to cover the entire 

production cycle of sheet manufacturing 

consisting of secondary steelmaking, 

continuous casting, reheating, rolling and 

annealing; models would predict the 

evolution of microstructure at different 

stages of processing. Existing models 

(ladle furnace operation, slab caster 

tundish, continuous casting, reheating 

furnace, heat treatment and thermal 

processing) are being upgraded, 

customized and integrated with the 

i2STEEL program, and new models are 

being developed and added to make it 

more comprehensive. 

To enrich the on-going program on 

process modelling in steel, work is in 

progress to develop comprehensive model 

for casting to improve microstructure and 

eliminate defects (such as using 

electromagnetic stirring). Casting 

processes are multi-scale in nature and 

have an influence of phenomena 

Process Design 

• Sequence Selection 

• Die Design 

• Tolerances 

Knowledge base 

from designers 

Design 

Specifications 

Product & 

Process Design 

Synthesis 

Figure 4: Schematic of the tool 

Have sufficient experience 

Quick Stamping 

Analysis Tools 

occurring at different length and time 

scales. However, the modeling approach 

capturing multiple length scales in single 

modeling framework is rare and difficult at 

this point of time. For industry sized 

problems, it is not possible to resolve all 

length and time scales with the current 

computational power. In this scenario, the 

best approach going forward is to have 

macro-micro modeling approach which 

allows capturing microscale physics. One 

of the important aspects of interface 

morphology is microsegregation which 

requires tracking the evolution of solutal 

field. We are currently working on the 

development of macroscopic model for 

macrosegregation which accurately 

accounts for the microsegregation at 

dendritic length scale and application of 

this model for different flow conditions. 

Also, the macro/micro modeling 

framework is being developed with the 

possibility to enable additions of more 

microscale physics later. The emphasis is 

on microscale phenomena such as back 

diffusion, eutectic solidification, and 

dendrite coarsening and remelting, which 

Quick Product 

Performance 

Analysis 

Traditional strength areas 

Enhanced 

Simulation Tools 

add Knowledge 

Detailed Stamping 

Simulation & 

Analysis 

Product Design and 

Performance 

• Geometry, material, 

• Stiffness 

• Crash Safety 

• Fatigue 


are analyzed considering appropriate flow 

conditions under the influence of natural 

(double-diffusive and shrinkage) and 

forced convection. 

Intelligent Integrated 

Stamping Process Design 

Tool 

This TCS internal research program on 

stamping envisages an intelligent and 

interactive design tool for the sheet metal 

industry to help component and 

manufacturing process designers 

automate the design process and reduce 

the dependence on knowledge residing 

with experts. Special emphasis will be on 

AHSS where such established knowledge 

base is yet evolving. Figure 4 provides an 

overview of the tool. 

This tool will address the following key 

scenarios: 

�Given 

a final geometry of a component 

to be produced, design the most 

effective process sequence checking 

for formability and plant constraints 

while meeting product characteristics. 

�Given 

a broad outline and constraints 

of the product to be designed, evolve 

the remaining geometry to meet the 

specifications of product 

characteristics. 

�Optimize 

the entire product 

development process covering the 

above two aspects. 

The development of this tool involves 

research on two key fronts: 

�Design synthesis for component and 

process: This involves capturing the 

conventional design knowledge 

through ’knowledge base engineering’ 

tools supported by quick analysis tools 

for advanced materials. The tool will 

construct graphs of various 

design/process routes, analyze them 

and rank the feasible designs using a 

KBE engine and host of optimization 

techniques. 

� Process modeling for material 

response: These tools look at 

multilevel materials modeling based 

on advanced material models for 

rolled AHSS sheets for detailed 

deformation analysis and will also form 

the basis for building knowledge 

base as well as quick analysis tools. 

During the current year, the team has 

developed a detail tool requirements 

document in association with various end 

users and also developed preliminary 

prototypes. A typical simulation with 

prediction of thickness strain is given in 

Figure 5. 

.073576 .169212 .264848 .360484 .45612 

.121394 .21703 .312666 .408302 .503938 

Figure 5: Contours of Triaxiality Factor - a Key Failure Criterion for AHSS 

Pradip, A K Singh, B P Gautham, 

Ravindra Pardeshi, and Pradip Dutta 


Simplify and Transform 

Dr. Harrick Vin, Head, Systems Research Lab, TCS Innovation Labs – TRDDC, 

Theme Owner - Simplify and Transform 

“During the past two decades, many enterprises have transformed from ‘Businesses 

facilitated by IT’ to the paradigm where ‘Business is IT’. Today, enterprises not only relay 

on IT to obtain and deliver insightful, timely, and accurate information for managing their 

operations, but also to provide competitive differentiation, to support business agility and growth, and to 

improve profitability. Unfortunately, the growing complexity of the IT environments operated by the 

enterprises is becoming a key obstacle in sustaining this vision. In fact, addressing the complexity of large 

IT systems has been identified as a grand challenge in computing. At TCS, we are exploring a long-term 

R&D agenda to address this challenge.” 

A defining characteristic of the information age is our reliance on 

vast, complex, and intertwined information technology (IT) 

plants—consisting of large numbers of heterogeneous, highcapacity 

computing, communication, and storage systems as well 

as wide-range of software components. Unfortunately, the 

complexity of these IT plants has been increasing steadily and is 

fast approaching a barrier. We believe that continuous evolution is 

a key contributor to this complexity. Unlike traditional 

engineering artefacts that don’t change much over time, IT plants 

evolve continuously to accommodate new software and hardware 

technologies, application functionalities, user requirements, as 

well as changes in operating conditions (workload, faults, etc.). 

The main objective of the “simplification” R&D theme at TCS is to 

conquer this complexity by developing methodologies and tools 

to design simple yet efficient systems and to manage system 

evolution. These methodologies and tools will facilitate reasoning 

about various system properties—correctness, security, privacy, 

scalability, performance, availability, and reliability—even in the 

presence of evolution. 

Our approach—instantiated as the TCS Sense-Understand- 

Respond (SURe) framework—is based on the observation that to 

derive a simplification strategy, one must first understand the as-is 

state complexity. To understand the as-is state, the SURe 

framework collects, integrates and analyzes data from “monitoring 

probes” placed at various locations and tiers of an IT plant, and 

derives models for infrastructure and application inventory, 

dependency, cost, workload, request flow, performance, causality, 

among others. These models are then used to conduct “what if” 

analysis and to predict the impact of change and derive a 

simplification and optimization strategy. The selected strategy is 

then implemented by leveraging many of the emerging 

technologies. 

The “simplification” theme is a long-term agenda being pursued at 

TCS. In what follows, we discuss some of the specific projects 

being pursued under this broader umbrella. 

Design of a Domain-independent 

Sense-and-Analyze Platform 

A domain-independent sense-and-analyze platform consists of 

three components: 

�A 

data preparation system – that supports mechanisms to 

ingest structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, 

cleanse the data (perform data and referential integrity 

checks, identify and handle missing and erroneous data, 

transform data, among others), and then prepare data for 

further analysis. 

�A 

data analytics system – that supports text mining (to handle 

unstructured data) as well as techniques for analysing three 

types of structured data: relations (tables), graphs, and timeseries. 

�A 

visualization system – that supports efficient techniques to 

present analytics results using the most appropriate data 

visualization metaphors; and to organize the visualization 

metaphors in an easy-to-understand and insightful manner. 


The goal of this research project is to develop high-level 

abstractions and methodologies that simplify the construction of 

sophisticated sense-and-analyze solutions for various domains. 

This platform forms the foundation of conducting “as-is” state 

analysis for all of our “simplification” domains. 

Simplifying Infrastructure Design 

(iDesign) 

Today, we are surrounded by a plethora of infrastructure 

optimization techniques, including: 

�Server 

virtualization technologies that facilitate consolidation 

of several as-is-state physical servers into one target-state 

physical server, and thereby reduce infrastructure footprint. 

�Storage 

optimization techniques—such as SAN-based storage 

consolidation, storage virtualization, thin provisioning, tiered 

storage and information lifecycle management (ILM), diskbased 

virtual tape libraries, to name a few—that can 

dramatically reduce the total cost and complexity of storage 

environment. 

�Cloud 

services that simplify the deployment and launch of 

applications, while minimizing the overhead of running a 

custom infrastructure. 

Yet, most organizations are suffering from (and struggling to get 

out of) poorly designed, managed, and high cost infrastructure. 

This is because, while many of these “how to optimize” 

technologies are getting commoditized, the biggest challenges in 

realizing the “optimized and agile infrastructure” dream seems to 

be in addressing the "what", "when" and "why" questions. In 

particular, one needs to address questions such as: ‘What 

techniques and technologies to use?’, ‘What class of applications 

and infrastructures should one target first?’ And ‘what is benefit of 

doing so (over the as-is state)?’ Unfortunately, these questions 

have proved quite difficult to address because “one-size-does-notfit-all”; 

answers to these questions depend much on the details of 

the as-is infrastructure, application characteristics and SLA 

requirements, as well as growth projections. 

Today, many of these decisions are taken manually based 

primarily on intuition. Because of the scale and complexity of 

most IT infrastructure setups, this approach often leads to 

significant “realization” challenges and hence fails to achieve the 

potential (there are many examples of failed infrastructure 

transformation initiatives!). 

The goal of this project is to formalize and automate the process 

of addressing the “what”, “when” and “why” questions for 

infrastructure simplification and transformation. 

Optimizing Infrastructure Operations 

Support (iSupport) 

Most organizations collect enormous amounts of historical data 

about their business operations, transactions, employees, etc. This 

includes not only the structured data (e.g., in databases) but also 

document repositories (such as reports, proposals, notes, emails, 

etc.). Such historical repositories can be analyzed to improve 

operational efficiency. 

As a first step in this direction, we have begun analysing records 

from ’ticketing systems’ used to log infrastructure support 

requests. These records contain information about support 

requests, as well as their resolution details including the time 

spent by each resolver on the ticket, the route the ticket followed 

prior to being resolved, and the solution offered to the problem. 

The iSupport tool uses text and data mining techniques to derive 

the following types of insights from historical databases of past 

tickets, and thereby optimize the operations support activity: 

�Identify 

support process steps that are candidates for 

automation; 

�Identify 

opportunities for reducing the effort and time 

required to service tickets by: 

�Automatic 

identification of experts and appropriate 

routing of tickets. 

�Identifying 

opportunities for training to improve resolver 

productivity. 

�Capacity 

planning for support teams to minimize ticket 

wait-times; among others. 

�Identify 

opportunities to reduce number of tickets. 

Predictive Control of Infrastructures 

(iControl) 

In this project, we focus on the following two related problems: 

�Proactive 

performance and capacity management: Today, 

many IT organizations collect and archive data about 

workload, application performance as well as infrastructure 

utilization. But most rely on manual processes—that involve 

“eyeballing” of measured data collected in Excel spreadsheets 

or other dashboards—to detect “interesting” changes and 

measure their impact on system parameters. Though such an 


approach can be effective for small IT plants, it does not scale. In 

this project, we are developing algorithms for automated 

construction—using a combination of graph and time-series 

analysis techniques—of dependency, workload and performance 

models for large systems. These models can then be utilized to 

perform tasks such as: 

�Characterization, 

prediction and correlation of businesslevel 

and server-level workloads; 

�Bottleneck 

identification, headroom estimation, and 

determination of time-to-saturation; and 

�Support 

for “what if” analysis based on growth plans. 

�Fault 

detection and localization: With the increasing scale and 

complexity of data centers, detecting and localizing 

performance faults in real-time has become both a pressing 

need and a challenge. While several approaches for 

performance debugging in data centers have been proposed, 

these techniques do not assume any constraints on the 

availability of operational data needed to detect and localize 

faults. We argue that collecting such operational data often 

requires significant instrumentation or intrusiveness, which is 

difficult to realize in production data centers. For performance 

debugging to become practical and effective in real-world 

systems, one needs to develop techniques that are “more 

effective” with “less instrumentation and intrusiveness”. In this 

project, we are developing a collection of such “more-withless” 

techniques for detecting and localizing faults is largescale 

systems. 

Simplifying the Design of Software 

Control Systems for Large Sensor- 

Actuator Networks 

Distributed computing systems involving multiple sensors and 

actuators are everywhere – from manufacturing systems to large 

scientific apparatus, and from surveillance systems (such as, for 

identifying fraud in financial trading or detecting an intruder for 

military environments) and sensor networks to systems for 

managing large-scale networks and data centers. Today, each 

such environment develops, with a significant amount of effort, its 

own custom control system that collects data from sensors, 

performs real-time analysis of collected data, archives data for offline 

historical analysis, as well as controls and reconfigures the 

operations of the system at various time-scales. 

In this project, we ask the following fundamental questions: Is it 

possible to design an “operating system” for a general class of 

multi-sensor-actuator systems? What set of abstractions should 

such an operating system support? How can the design of this 

operating system be made both platform- and domainindependent? 

How difficult would it be to create custom 

deployments of the control system for specific platform and 

domain? 

In 2008-09, we began by gaining first-hand experience in 

designing control systems for two large-scale multi-sensoractuator 

systems: the International Thermo-nuclear Experimental 

Reactor (ITER) [in collaboration with the Indian Plasma Research 

(IPR) Institute, Ahmedabad]; and the Giant Meter-wave Radio 

Telescope (GMRT) [in collaboration with the National Center for 

Radio Astrophysics (NCRA), TIFR, Pune]. For instance, for GMRT, we 

have developed a model-driven development framework that 

automatically generates much of the control system software for a 

telescope. The design of our model-driven development 

framework is guided by the observation that, independent of the 

specific designs and configurations of their antennas, the control 

system software for telescopes performs the same set of functions 

- communicate, verify, translate and execute commands - at 

various antenna sub-systems (actuators); and collect, process, 

transmit, visualize and archive data produced by antenna subsystems 

(sensors). 

We are now generalizing this approach to develop a specificationdriven 

software control system generator. If successful, we believe 

that we can dramatically simplify the field of designing control 

systems for multi-sensor-actuator environments. 

Dr. Harrick Vin 


Foster Information Ubiquity 

“'Pervasiveness while on the move' is probably one wish on everyone's wish-list in our 

life that all of us nourish in our heart. The emerging mobile and wireless communication 

technology with smart sensors at the field are increasingly supporting all pervasive real life applications. 

Ubiquity is seen as the 'third wave' of computing wherein one person handles many computers or one 

computer at many places, and is a disruptive move from eras of mainframes and personal computers. 

Technology is increasingly being integrated into the 'real world' with its users, taking the concept of 

'access to information' away from the workstations/consoles, and spreading it into everyday life - anyone, 

anytime, anywhere access through any device. 

The emerging mobile and wireless communication technologies are increasingly supporting all-pervasive 

real-life applications with enabled mobility and robustness against changing location, time, environment, 

user preferences and capabilities. However, the real adoption of the same among the masses will happen 

when the users will experience true seamless ubiquity without being aware of how it is achieved at the 

back ground.” 

Ubiquitous computing is all about access 

to information anytime, anywhere, by 

anyone and in any situation. The final goal 

of ubiquitous computing is to bring in a 

better end-user experience primarily 

through the concept of 'information 

reaching consumer' rather than 'consumer 

reaching for information'. This means a 

convergence of networks, devices and 

content into a seamless information 

highway. Users could be both man and 

machine who require this information for a 

specific reason and are authorized to 

access it. Major classes of consumers are 

people who are on the move, work at 

multiple locations, and access multimodal 

information from multiple sources. 

Consumers can also be machines, such as 

robots or vehicles, which access 

information for autonomous control. 

Ubiquity enhances operational efficiency 

and user experience with enabled mobility 

Debasis Bandyopadhyay, Head, TCS Innovation Labs - Kolkata, 

Theme Owner - Foster Information Ubiquity 

through cost effective integration of 

computing, communication and user 

interfaces. 

Ubiquitous services and applications are 

beneficial to users who need it in various 

circumstances. In fact, ubiquity leads to a 

de facto blurring of space boundaries, 

such as office/home/car/field, and is aimed 

towards enhancing operational efficiency 

and user experience with mobility 

enabled. The key facets of ubiquity 

applied, as depicted in figure 6, are context 

awareness, ubiquitous communications, 

and intuitive user interfaces implemented 

over familiar user devices. 

Thanks to the new standards, the ubiquity 

of the Internet and the growing adoption 

of wireless data networks in the home has 

become a reality. The traditional world of 

entertainment video will enable services in 

healthcare, banking, agriculture and more. 

The impact of ubiquity is multifold. This 

includes logistics management, 

telecommuting, tele-monitoring, tracking, 

personal health monitoring, coordination 

of mobile workforce, emergency and 

disaster management, location based 

services and many more. Information 

access through simple and familiar devices 

like mobile phones, TV and radios have a 

major potential. 

TCS's award winning mKrishi is a 

mobile phone based agro advisory 

system for farmers and is a significant 

step towards integrating the farmers 

with the agro industry of India. On the 

personal healthcare front, the cardio 

monitor is a wearable device with 

wireless communication capability for 

ubiquitous health monitoring. It is a 

system consisting of pervasive devices, 

communication networks, user interfaces 

and embedded intelligence. 


Any Situation 

Context 

Awareness 

through 

Information 

Processing 

All encompassing User Experience through Ubiquity 

Any Body 

Simple but 

enriched User 

Interface 

Pervasive Consumer Devices 

(Mobile Phones, TVs, PCs, PDAs, Sensors and Actuators) 

Figure 6: Key facets of Ubiquity Applied 

Key Challenges 

The key challenges in Information Ubiquity 

are: 

�Communications/networking 

challenge 

�Designing 

hierarchical, distributed, 

decentralized and adaptive 

protocols for dense wireless 

networks and integrating efficiently 

with the future Internet as a whole. 

�Computational 

challenge 

�Calls 

for advanced signal processing 

techniques and their real-time 

implementation for providing the 

context awareness feature 

�Security 

and Privacy considerations 

�Schemes 

involving optimum 

tradeoff for security and privacy in a 

personal and ubiquitous network 

�Cost 

Viability 

�User 

Interaction 

�Social, 

perceptual and cognitive 

aspects are important to the study 

of applications and how end-users 

would interact with pervasive 

systems 

Any Time, 

Any Where 

Ubiquitous 

Communication 

as Enabler 

A few of TCS’s innovations in the 

ubiquitous computing area are described 

below: 

mKRISHI – Mobile Agro Advisory 

Device 

The Mobile Agro Advisory System named 

mKrishi, developed by TCS Innovations 

Figure 7 : The mKRISHI System 

Mobile based 

Agro Advisory 

System 

Platform 

Lab - Mumbai, connects farmers with an 

ecosystem that empowers them to make 

sound decisions about agriculture, drive 

profits, and conserve the environment. 

Farmers can receive information on 

microclimate, mandi price (market price), 

and several other relevant information on 

their mobile phones. It also enables 

farmers to send queries specific to their 

land and crop to receive personalized 

replies from agricultural experts, on their 

phones. Using sensor networks, mKrishi 

transfers the farmers’ environment to the 

consultant. Farmers can also send pictures 

of their crops and pests captured with 

mobile phone cameras; sensors provide 

farm specific soil and crop data; weather 

stations provide microclimate details. 

Using this multi-cue data about the 

farmer’s environment, experts guide them 

directly, on water, pesticide and fertilizer 

usage, helping farmers save money, effort 

and the environment 

The Mobile Agro Advisory System 

demonstrates how several stakeholders 

such as farmers, government, research 

institutes, agro-based industries and 

content providers can be connected for 

mutual benefit. It uses an IVR type 

platform called PIM2R developed 

S. no 

1 

2 

3 

4 

5 

6 

7 

8 

9 

10 

11 

12 

13 

Information and Advice 

Fertilizer 

pesticide / Insecticide 

Farming Best Practices 

Herbicide 

Micronutrients 

Availability of the products (1-6) 

Yellow Pages 

Govt. Policies 

Loans and Insurance 

Alert Services 

Health Care 

Education 

Railway and bus timing 


internally by TCS, which uses the 

inexpensive data channel for transferring 

rich content. 

Cardio Monitor for Ubiquitous 

Heart Monitoring 

Heart related ailments are one of the major 

killer diseases world-wide. Many a times, it 

is beneficial to observe the heart 

functionality continuously for a day to 

detect any anomaly that may potentially 

cause cardiac problems in future. The 

Cardio Monitor is a wearable device for 

ubiquitous monitoring of ECG allowing the 

convenience of free mobility to the user. 

The current version of the device supports 

three lead acquisitions and has a storage 

capacity for 18 hours of ECG data. It has a 

Bluetooth interface for emergency alert 

service through a mobile phone placed in 

the proximity. This is a collaborative 

development between TCS Innovations 

Lab - Bangalore and Indian Institute of 

Technology (IIT) Mumbai. 

The complete solution involving this 

device include ECG data analytics and 

visualization software as a tool to help the 

doctor in accessing and examining the 

ECG records from the Cardio Monitor. It 

incorporates algorithms for detection of 

various anomalies in ECG and appropriate 

alert generation. Future enhancements 

will include various value added features 

to this device. 

Figure 8: The Cardio Monitor Screen 

Web-SenseScape - Data 

Aggregation, Monitoring and 

Visualization tool for Wireless 

Sensor Networks 

The use of wireless sensor networks for 

real-time data collection from physical 

world to IT systems is getting attention in 

many application areas. Web-SenseScape 

is a host based application framework for 

acquiring, analyzing, visualizing, 

monitoring and controlling a set of 

heterogeneous wireless sensor network 

nodes addressing multiple applications. 

It has facilities for specifying the network 

configuration with node/sensor labels. The 

display of the deployment configuration 

and sensor data is available in a text form 

as well as graphical rendition. The 

incoming data is stored in a database for 

further queries and processing. A rulebased 

event definition is provided to 

monitor certain events of interest. 

Subsequently, an action can be linked to 

an event which includes audio-visual alerts 

and messaging. A text-to-speech 

converter is included to deliver an alert in 

speech form. This tool could be configured 

for addressing multiple applications. Some 

of the applications demonstrated are 

forest monitoring and environment 

monitoring with IEEE 802.15.4 compliant 

communication radio nodes. 

TCS's User Experience (UX) Lab supports 

Cluster 

Node0 

Sensor(Temp) 

Sensor(Pressure) 

Sensor(Humidity) 

Node1 

Node2 

Sensor(Temp) 



Node3 

Node4 

Sensor(Temp) 



Web-Sensescape 

an In 

iraz 

Ad 

awh 

Dubai 

United Arab Masqut 

Emirates 

Oman 

“Event 

Name” 

Figure 9: Web-SenseScape 

the User Experience initiative in place for 

various customers across industry 

verticals. This state of the art laboratory 

offers testing solutions for measuring the 

usability of software applications and 

handheld devices. We also have a portable 

lab capable of conducting testing at any 

location globally. Our UX testing 

capabilities include multiple observational 

data collection and analysis, handheld 

device testing, expression mapping, eye 

tracking and physiological data capture. 

These capabilities are well-backed with 

excellent hardware and software 

applications that can be customized to 

include inputs from additional external 

hardware equipment as well. 

TCS has been actively involved in its Global 

research programs in advanced wireless 

technologies. The pursuit will be 

continued in a focused manner to address 

open problems in ubiquity taking the 

following approach - track and develop 

next generation wireless radio technology; 

implement truly ubiquitous applications 

for masses in entertainment, healthcare, 

agriculture and education; and address the 

challenge of providing ’technology 

invisibility’ without compromising on ’user 

privacy’ through focused R&D on secure, 

adaptive and autonomic systems. 


Afgnanistan Islamabad 

Gujranwala 

Bathinda 

Faisalabad City 

Lhasa 

Pakistan 

New Delhi 

Nepal 

Jaipur Barabanki 

Biratnagar Bhutan 

Kanpur 

Karachi 

Sylhet 

Varanasi 

Patna 

Bangladesh 

Ahmadabad Bhopal 

Durgapur 

India 

Sabroom 

Vadodara Indore 

Kolkata Barisal 

Myanmar 

Bagasra Surat 

Nagpur 

(Burma) 

Mumbai Nasik 

Pune 

Vishakhapatnam 

Hyderabad 

Chengdu Chon 

Guiyang 

Guiyang 

Kunming 

Nguyen 

Binh 

Dien Bien Ha N 

Phu Yen 

Hai Phon 

Laos Nam Dan 

Viang Do 

Chan 

Vijaywada 

Yangon 

Hua 

Bengaluru 

Channei 

Stoeng 

Thalland Treng Viet 

Bangkok 

Cambodia 

Koh kong 

Thrissur 

Jaffna 

Ha Tien Tha 

Madurai Mullaitivu 

Thi Xa 

Ho 

Sri Lanka 

Kalutara 

Bac Lieu 

Balangoda 

Malaysia 

Medan 

Sensor 

id 

High Temp C1_N0_S0 > 

“Condition” “Value” “Alert Message” 

20 

Singapore 

Palembang 

Temperature Exceeded 

Limit 

Jakarta 

Bandu 


Enable Understanding of Customers and Markets 

Dr. Gautam Shroff, Head, TCS Innovation Labs - Delhi, 

Theme Owner – Enable Understanding of Customers and Markets 

“The potential for analytical techniques in business remains hugely unexploited. 

Traditional business intelligence in practice has largely been limited to slicing and dicing 

of data, and remains an analyst driven activity, with generation of reports as the goal. That much 

more can be done is known, e.g. market basket analysis, alert generation, fraud or anomaly detection in 

general etc. But these techniques, being less widely understood, are also applied less. We are applying 

these 'predictive modeling' techniques in specific domains, such as social network analysis, multimedia 

analysis and the detection of anomalous behavior (fraud etc.).” 

Leadership decisions require foresight, and decisions based on 

data are preferred where possible. Tools that analyze past 

behavior and assist in predicting behavior are, therefore, 

increasingly in use. Traditional business intelligence (BI) products 

provide many of these capabilities to our customers across 

markets, supporting their decision-making. These solutions are 

primarily focused on data warehousing followed by OLAP tools 

enabling slicing and dicing of data-cubes based on historical data 

usually maintained internally by large enterprises and 

organizations. 

At the same time, markets and marketplaces are changing rapidly 

owing to global-local influences, demand-supply variations, 

increasing range of goods and services, innovative modes of 

marketing, display, sale and payment. In particular, social 

networks have become popular amongst a large section of 

citizens, including consumers as well as employees. Consequently, 

online marketing using advertising as well as soft marketing using 

blogs and social networks are being explored. Online advertising 

also presents a new business opportunity for many organizations 

especially those having sophisticated IT systems and expertise 

and/or access to data on consumer behavior. To support customer 

interest as well as business opportunities in this area for TCS, we 

are investing in a research project on ‘Ontology Driven Text 

Analytics’, wherein we have developed tools for mining topics and 

opinions from a variety of online sources. 

The past year has seen dramatic events including the global 

financial crisis as well as the worsening of major geo-political 

security challenges. While fraud detection was always an 

important part of our analytics research, we foresee a resurgence 

of interest in this area; our earlier research on e-mail mining 

especially in the context of large scale fraud, is now directed at 

more general ‘Social Network Analysis’, wherein we have 

developed tools for visual analytics as well as automatic anomaly 

detection. Tools that can detect such anomalous behavior can also 

be applied to online / electronic activities in general, so as to 

provide opportunities for detection of security threats or possible 

fraud or dangerous behavior at enterprise as well as societal 

levels. 

Online data is increasingly comprising `multimedia data’, with 

video and photo sharing becoming an integral part of the social 

networking arena. Video surveillance is being deployed more 

widely than ever, driven by security concerns, and with increasing 

use of video conferencing, a large volume of stored video data is 

becoming available to exploit. Through our ‘Multimedia Analytics’ 

research project, we are adapting computer vision techniques 

such as activity monitoring and crowd behavior analysis for 

surveillance applications. Our video surveillance solutions 

automate detection of anomalous events in video records, leading 

to time savings and deeper understanding of threats as well as the 

ability to model user behavior in public areas such as stores, 

offices etc. for a variety of applications. We are also adapting 

speech tools developed in TCS to augment this analytical 

capability to support a variety of speech analytics, including 

speaker, language, keyword and eventually emotion detection. 

Given the large volumes of data in modern enterprises, even after 

traditional business intelligence tools or more sophisticated 

predictive analytics, data mining, or anomaly detection 

techniques are applied, a large number of ‘potentially interesting 

data points’ remain. Examples are problems in business 

performance for a certain segment, geography and product 


category, a temporary behavior trend arising in a segment of the 

market, or suspicious behavior of any kind. Even after these events 

are processed by human analysis, decision making needs to be 

done using the aggregate of many such ‘validated events’ rather 

than each event in isolation. We propose research in the area of 

‘Data Fusion’ towards combining such information based on prior 

models of belief, or on automatically learning these models from 

past events and their consequences. While this is a new area of 

work, our earlier research in a seemingly unrelated area, that is, 

identifying concepts in natural language queries, offers some 

unique opportunities for idea re-use which, if combined with 

traditional Multi-Sensor Data Fusion (MSDF) techniques, is likely to 

lead to new insight into the creation of usable tools as a byproduct. 

Specific Projects 

These research projects are to investigate and build techniques to 

rapidly analyze online data to enable creation of a larger picture 

highlighting the hidden associations and correlations in the data, 

detect outliers and anomalous behavior in the data, and enable 

new relevant data to be ‘pushed’ to the user based on the hidden 

associations and correlations in the data. 

Ontology Driven Text Analysis 

Organizations are increasingly encountering the challenge of 

extracting information from unstructured repositories like reports, 

e-mails, open sources on the Internet etc. For marketing 

researchers, the Internet has turned out to be a virtual gold mine 

of knowledge about consumers. Information embedded in emails 

help management gain crucial insight into organizational 

process management, customer-relationships, employee 

satisfaction factors etc. People post their opinions, perceptions 

and experiences on various things including products or events. 

These sites record very high footfalls indicating their importance 

in shaping the opinions of users world-wide. One of the reasons 

for more and more people getting hooked to the Internet is the 

easy accessibility and virtual absence of any regulation on 

authoring techniques. However, this also poses a major challenge 

to information extraction since most of the Natural Language 

Processing technologies that exist today are designed to work 

with noise-free text. Noisy text analytics is a relatively new area of 

research that attempts to address the issues of knowledge 

extraction from noisy text sources like blogs, e-mails, chats, SMS 

etc. In this project, we propose to look at an ontology-driven 

approach to extract knowledge from noisy data sources. Ontology 

represents unstructured domain knowledge within a structured 

framework. The ontology helps in designing linguistic and 

semantic principles for knowledge extraction. We propose to 

develop a semi-automated framework which will aid the analysts 

to provide domain knowledge for knowledge extraction. The 

framework is also equipped with a learning mechanism which 

simultaneously learns patterns from the training data and 

extracted knowledge to identify possibly useful information, to be 

vetted by the analyst before including in the knowledge base. The 

extracted knowledge can be mined and results can be presented 

at different levels of specificity as directed by the ontology. There 

is lesser work in statistical modeling of noisy text from various 

sources. As an off-shoot of this project, we intend to come up with 

some statistical models for blog data. 

In 2008, we developed a basic framework for crawling data from 

blogs/e-mails/news and extracting opinion-related phrases from 

these. The opinion extraction framework works correctly for clean 

data. Basic work on cleaning noisy data and then applying the 

opinion mining was employed with some success. 

Social Network Analysis 

Social network analysis is aimed at analyzing social structures 

made of nodes which generally represent individuals, 

organizations or events. Different types of interdependencies that 

may exist among these nodes are studied to extract information 

about friendships, kinships, dislike, conflict, trade, financial 

exchanges, and also similarities in values, ideas or vision. Social 

Network Analysis provides inputs to various important fields of 

knowledge discovery including unearthing evidences of fraud, 

terrorism and other kinds of malicious behavior. Social network 

analysis views social relationships in terms of nodes and 

semantically labeled edges between nodes. The resulting graph 

structures can become very large and complex. Extracting hidden 

relationships among nodes is consequently a highly complex task. 

Most of the existing social network analysis systems built to date 

have concentrated on providing good visual aids to analysts for 

accomplishing complex tasks. Exploratory data mining aims at 

analyzing these relationships for insightful information about 

patterns and trends. The aim of the project is to work on 

automated techniques for identifying interesting patterns in social 

network data. Interesting patterns could be either frequently 

occurring patterns or anomalies depending on the task at hand. 

The system will employ a dual representation scheme to store 

patterns of interest. One of the aims is to learn patterns from past 

actions of analysts. Another is to identify interesting patterns in 

terms of structural parameters. A major limitation of the existing 


network analysis systems is that they primarily work on structured 

data. The other major aim of this project is to integrate aspects of 

statistical text mining with social network analysis which will allow 

analysts to have more semantic information about the hidden 

relationships that may exist among nodes. 

Multimedia Analytics 

Affordable technologies for capture and storage of still images, 

speech and video have resulted in creation of large professional 

and amateur multimedia archives. These multimedia recordings 

hold enormous wealth of information regarding human behavior. 

The goal of this research project is machine processing such 

media recordings to interpret human activities, thereby reducing 

manual efforts and resulting in more reliable systems. 

In the past year, we have successfully built a technology prototype 

of a visual surveillance system with core computer vision 

techniques developed by our research partner - IIT Delhi. The 

system can track human beings in the field of vision of a 

surveillance camera and can detect certain events, such as, 

movement through pre-defined entrances / exits, and record 

them in a database. It is possible to query the database for specific 

types of events and view the visual recordings. The system 

generates some statistical reports too. Visual analytics has also 

been successfully tried out in Shopping By Example and 

Advertisement Analysis technology prototypes (the latter for 

Nielsen Media Research). We have also created algorithms for 

Static Hand Gesture Recognition using computer vision technique 

(on naked hand – without using any implants) and demonstrated 

the same to Nissan Automobiles. 

In the next year, we propose to extend the scope of the research 

to other media forms analytics, especially speech, which has 

strong implications for national security. We would like to extend 

the visual surveillance technology to object detection (baggage, 

guns, etc.), flexible queries, off-line analytics, crowd behavior 

analysis, surveillance data visualization and correlation, and 

analytics like user behavior classification and abnormal behavior 

detection. 

Data Fusion 

Collating and analyzing data collected from different sources to 

create useful ‘information’ is complex and knowledge intensive. 

Such a task has to deal with varied inputs, some of which may be 

incomplete or inconsistent. Data Fusion aims to combine data 

from multiple sources to perform inferences that may not be 

possible from a single source alone, to enable automatic 

identification of entities, their activities, the relationships, and the 

possible ‘cause-effect’ scenarios. Data fusion techniques will have 

to be built to align data from various sources, create fused 

identities of entities involved, map out the entity-relationship 

chart, and associate events by determining the hidden links and 

sequence between entity groups. The output of data fusion will 

help evaluate possible situations that can arise from multi-entity 

activities. The techniques need to have the ability to work with 

large amounts of data and make quick classifications, so as to 

identify potentially undesirable situations, before they actually 

occur. 

Dr. Gautam Shroff 


Enrich User Experience 

“Growth of business and demand in the market go hand in hand. While customer's 

needs and customer satisfaction are the key mantras for demand creation, it's the 

'Richness of experience' that the users feel at the end, be it product or service, which is the fundamental 

criterion for sustenance and growth of an enterprise. 

The experience of the end-user is increasingly becoming critical for any IT / software / system solution. The 

key differentiator to accomplish success in today's competitive business world is to enhance and enrich this 

experience of the end customers. 

Our quest for innovation and strategy of research work are to address the subject that will enhance the 

user's experience of one customer and customers of customers. 

The main challenge of providing 'quality user experience' lies in making the technology unobtrusive (and 

almost invisible) to the end-user. 

TCS has launched a set of initiatives that attempts to enhance the experience of TCS customer or TCS 

customer's customer through - designing and developing novel input devices, designing newer User 

Interface techniques that are more intuitive to the end-user, creating best practices for Usability design and 

methodology for collecting user feedback, and enhancement of User Experience through automation.” 

User experience is an integral and natural 

outcome of ubiquity; ubiquity enhances 

the user experience of a mobile/nomadic 

user through cost-effective integration of 

computing, communication and user 

interfaces. Building a better customer 

experience has been forecasted as the 

leading market driver followed by cost for 

adaptation of new technology and 

services. Customer experience creates a 

sense of bonding between the service 

operator and consumers and is critical for 

building long-term relationships with 

consumers. 

Even though ‘user experience’ has a much 

bigger and broader coverage, from the TCS 

perspective - the focus needs to be into 

building enriching solutions and 

Debasis Bandopadhyay, Head, TCS Innovation Labs - Kolkata, 

Theme Owner - Enrich User Experience 

applications for the user through 

innovative use of the ubiquitous 

communication technology. In this 

context, one can think of communication 

as the technology enabler for information 

access at anytime and from anywhere. The 

other requirement that this information 

can be used by anybody in any situation 

leads to addressing context awareness and 

usability issues effectively. 

The impact of this spans across multiple 

verticals including logistics management, 

telecommuting, tracking and surveillance, 

personal health monitoring, workforce 

automation, industrial automation, 

disaster management, location based 

services, entertainment and many more. 

Information access through simple and 

familiar devices like mobile phones, TV and 

radios has a major potential in addition to 

building innovative devices that fill in the 

gap between computers and the popular 

consumer electronic devices. 

The best user interfaces are the ones that 

users don’t need to pay much attention to. 

They make sense to the user and provide 

the functionality that users expect. When 

an interface is easy to use, one can utilize 

one’s time doing quality work instead of 

searching through the interface for the 

right button or key to press. It's almost 

transparent - one can see right through 

the interface to one’s own work. 

From the design viewpoint, the user 

experience can bring in a paradigm 

shift and this starts with the perspective 


that user is always right. If there is a 

problem with the use of the system, 

the system is the problem, not the user. 

This vision guides the product plan. The 

user should be the master of software 

and hardware technology and not viceversa. 

Building a better customer 

experience has been forecasted as the 

leading market driver followed by cost 

for adaptation of new technology and 

services. Customer experience creates a 

sense of bonding between the service 

operator and consumers, and is critical 

for building long-term relationships 

with consumers. 

Innovation at TCS has added new horizons, 

through Home Infotainment Platform, 

Driver Alertness Monitor and Multimedia 

Toolbox assets, to give the market a 

compelling but simplified User Experience. 

The learning from these initiatives can be 

taken to create a best practice and process 

for ’User Experience’ that can be deployed 

in various TCS businesses. Even in 

traditional service-centric business of TCS, 

a new differentiator can be brought by 

designing the final solution that enhances 

the end-user (or the Customer’s customer) 

experience. 

A few of TCS’s innovations in the User 

Experience domain are described below: 

Home Infotainment 

Platform (HIP) 

Home entertainment is at the threshold 

of an exciting transformation. The 

quality, magnitude and variety of 

services beamed through the television 

to homes around the world are 

growing exponentially. TCS offers 

service providers and entertainment 

equipment manufacturers, a Home 

Infotainment Platform in the form of a 

Set Top Box (STB) to empower 

subscribers to get the best of this 

DTH 

Terrestrial 

Antenna 

Figure 10 

home entertainment revolution. 

This product addresses the challenge 

of low cost computing over a low 

bandwidth network. The current 

version combines the functions of a 

TV and a computer, providing a host 

of exciting value added features for the 

end user. Figure 10 provides a 

diagrammatic representation of 

this product. 

Features of HIP are: 

�Viewing 

TV content with blending of 

TV and Graphics 

�Web 

Browser 

�Media 

Player for playing audio and 

video content, and viewing digital 

pictures 

�Low 

bandwidth Video Chat 

�SMS 

on the TV 

Conventional 

Set Top Box 

�Remote 

Upgrade, Provisioning 

and Authentication 

Televison 

Browser 

Audio/ 

Video chat 

Media 

Player 

TCS Value Add 

Broadband 

ADSL 

Modem 

Ethernet & 

PPPoE Driver 

USB Modem 

Driver CDMA 

/ WiMax 

USB Drivers 

Keyboard 

Driver 

An overview of how the TCS Interactive Set Top Box Solution add value to users 

A Case Study 

The TCS Innovation Lab - Kolkata 

has created a new ecosystem to license 

this IP to a service provider in India. 

The ecosystem involves consumer 

electronics manufacturer from China, 

leading semiconductor chip vendors and 

a few third party software vendors. There 

are plans to take the same solution to 

markets outside India. 

Roadmap Features 

�Place-shifting 

from PC to TV and 

Mobile to TV 

�IPTV 

features like Video on Demand, 

content hyperlink 

�Novel 

HMI - Gesture and Audio 

Cue/Command based UI 

�PVR/DVR 

support with Summarization 

�WLAN 

Support 

�HDTV 

support 

CDMA/ 

WiMax 

CDMA/ 

WiMax 

Modem 

USB Device 

Storage 

IR Keyboard 

�Vision 

Enhancement for people 


with low-vision 

The plan for the next two years includes 

diversification of this platform for a TV 

banking and Thin Client for SMBs. 

Driver Alertness Monitor 

Today, traffic safety bodies are under 

pressure to implement improved safety 

controls. A few automakers build in 

expensive sensor-based sleep detection 

solutions, but they add to the vehicle 

prices, which consequently lead to 

decreased sales. TCS Driver Alertness 

Monitor is a cost-efficient robust solution, 

which aids in lowering accident levels 

substantially by implementing an 

intelligent vehicle control system. TCS 

Driver Alertness Monitor uses an 

innovative concept based on the Skin 

Segmentation Algorithm. It also factors in 

gaze determination and head pose 

estimation concepts that evaluate driver 

alertness. Detecting fatigue and 

inattentiveness, the solution prompts 

drivers to focus and avert mishaps. 

The Driver Alertness Monitor is an infra-red 

(IR) based solution, which allows detection 

even in low visibility conditions. The 

system gets activated only in the presence 

of a driver and provides real-time 

detection. This low-cost solution with a 

host of advantages, also: 

�Provides 

high accuracy levels; 

�Works 

in visible and IR lighting; 

�Has 

a simple and robust design; 

�Is 

a lightweight, portable solution. 

TCS's expertise in the area of image 

processing provides us with the early 

mover advantage. Driver Alertness 

Monitor utilizes TCS's Multimedia Toolbox 

Figure 11 

Camera infront 

of driver 

platform for image acquisition and 

processing. The platform also provides TCS 

with the option of solution customization 

in order to cater to the ever-changing 

needs of the customer. Figure 11 provides 

an overview of the offering. 

Multimedia Toolbox – a 

set of algorithms to 

provide better User 

Experience 

Multimedia Toolbox is a cost-efficient, 

innovative, bundled offering that has 

multiple capabilities. It encompasses 

features such as content-based video 

retrieval, video summarization, dynamic 

logo insertion, and missing object 

detection and notification. It enables 

advanced video compression, image 

recognition and analysis, and image preprocessing 

and enhancement. The Toolbox 

also functions as a low-level re-usable 

library for multimedia applications. The 

business imperative of the toolbox is to 

automate the decision making process 

based on the audio-visual signals. From 

advanced multimedia techniques for 

process improvement in Healthcare, to 

An overview of the offering 

Driver image 

passed to 

detector 

Image 

Processing 

Image 

matching 

algorithm 

Driver found drowsysystem 

issues 

warning signal 

excellent quality-control aids for 

Manufacturing, the solution has tools that 

also cater to industries looking for 

marketing initiatives such as logo insertion 

on images and target segment advertising 

over broadcast video. 

The toolbox uses existing standard 

algorithms in order to minimize the 

development timeline and avoid rework. 

�It 

is a hardware-agnostic, platform 

independent framework; 

�It 

uses image-based search mechanism 

aiding applications, where tracking 

miniscule items becomes a challenge; 

�Can 

be seamlessly integrated with 

third party applications as a plug-in. 

Figure 12 provides a diagrammatic 

representation of the Multimedia toolbox. 

To summarize, the toolbox provides the 

solution developer with a basic framework, 

based on efficient and judicious use of 

solution algorithms, to develop innovative 

applications as per specific business 

requirements, thereby helping him to 

achieve optimum RoI due to quick 

turnaround time. 


Application 

Layer 

Middle 

Utility 

Layer 

Multimedia 

Algorithm 

Layer 

Content 

Based 

Media 

Retrieval 

Figure 12: Representation of Multimedia Toolbox 

User Experience Lab 

Advanced 

Video 

Compression 

The User Experience Laboratory supports 

the User Experience initiative in place for 

various customers across industry 

verticals. This state of the art laboratory 

offers testing solutions for measuring the 

usability of software applications and 

handheld devices. We also have a portable 

lab capable of conducting testing at any 

location globally. Our User Experience 

testing capabilities include multiple 

Server 

Customized Applications 

Digital Rights 

Management 

Image, Video and audio processing Algorithms 

Connectivity 

Media 

Trans Coding 

Connectivity 

Client 

External 

input and 

outputs 

Pre and 

post 

processing 

Connectivity 

observational data collection and analysis, 

handheld device testing, expression 

mapping, eye tracking and physiological 

data capture. These capabilities are well 

backed with excellent hardware and 

software applications which can be 

customized to include inputs from 

additional external hardware equipment 

as well. 

All the above-mentioned initiatives are the 

initial baby-steps towards TCS Innovation 

Labs’ commitment to do value-adding 

R&D in the area of User Experience. In the 

future, the lab will create User-centric 

iterative design principles that will rely on 

effective collection of user feedback. This 

can be the foundation on which all TCS 

software solution and offerings would be 

able to provide better 'Experience' to the 

end-user. 



Business Unit Labs

TCS Innovation Labs - CMC 

The CMC division of Tata Group has its Innovation Labs set up 

based on the various Practices or Units in the division. These labs 

operate from the R&D Centre of CMC Limited, located in 

Hyderabad, India. The activities taken up by these labs are 

described below. 

Biometrics Practice 

During 2008-09, the Biometrics R&D Lab of CMC Limited initiated 

the development of Palm Print Identification system that has four 

major functions namely: 

�Palm 

print to palm print matching 

�Latent 

palm to palm print matching 

�Palm 

to latent palm matching 

�Latent 

palm to latent palm matching. 

Out of these four functions, latent palm to palm print matching 

use case is completed. 

The lab also released newer versions of Fingerprint Analysis and 

Criminal Tracing System (FACTS), an advanced automatic 

fingerprint identification system, indigenously developed by CMC 

using its proprietary high-speed and high-accuracy unified 

matcher algorithm (UMA). FACTS offers state-of-the-art digital 

image processing, neural networks and pattern recognition 

techniques, as well as automatically extracts fingerprint features 

for matching. 

In the next year, the lab aims to complete development of FACTS 

and the Palm Print Identification system. 

Games & Events Management System 

CMC Limited has been involved in implementation of IT services 

that are increasingly being used in the conduct of games for 

judging to information management. The Games & Events 

Management System (GEMS) Practice of CMC is a focussed effort 

to revamp and upgrade the solution both in terms of technology 

and improved functionality since the last one year. 

Highlights of 2008-09 include: 

�� 

Development of a prototype for Volunteer Management 

System 

�� 

Migration of Accreditation system to a Web based system 

�� 

Development of a prototype for handheld results capture 

system for Field Events in Athletics 

The lab also bagged a project for turnkey implementation of IT 

solution for the 34th National Games, India to be held in late 2009. 

During 2009-10, the lab aims to take GEMS to cater to top level 

international games and also to serve as tool for Event 

Management. 

Mobile Computing Technology 

Solutions (MCTS) Group 

The Mobile Computing Technology Solutions (MCTS) Lab has 

developed handheld based products in the health sector and has 

used RFID technology on handheld for building new solutions. 

During 2008-09, the lab initiated development of: 

�� 

Census application for data capture on OLPC in JAVA 

�� 

Finger print identification system on Windows CE 

handheld device 

�� 

Transport Logistics Application 

Plans for 2009-10 include: 

�� 

Enhancing the Finger print identification system on Windows 

CE handheld device by developing different applications like 

Micro finance application for rural banking, Criminal tracking 

application and User authentication system 

�� 

Developing Family Welfare & Health Information Monitoring 

System (FHIMS) in Java as Web based project 

�� 

Implementing RFID in Library Management 

Nirdeshak, CMC 

Nirdeshak, the Automatic Vehicle Location System of CMC 

Limited, was designed and developed (both hardware and 

application software) for the mining sector to be used as the 

Operator Independent Truck Dispatch System (OITDS). Nirdeshak 

has been positioned in the Public Transport sector as Automatic 

Fleet Management System and Real Time Passenger Information 


System. In the Logistic Sector, Nirdeshak has been implemented 

as pilferage monitoring system. 

During 2008-09, the activities included: 

�� 

�� 

Development of Compact Vehicle Mounted Unit (CVMU) with 

built-in battery: This Unit comprises of LCD (32 characters) 

and keypad (16 keys) in addition to the main processor based 

PCB with GSM and GPS on board. 

Development of Vehicle Mounted Unit with built-in RFID 

Reader: This Unit has been developed keeping in mind the 

huge requirement in BPO sector and the security concern of 

the BPO employees commuting during late evening and early 

morning hours. This Unit serves as the attendance recording 

and employee identification systems capable of intimating 

the employer about the attendance of employees as soon as 

they get into the pick-up vehicle. This also enables the 

employer to ascertain the security of its employees till the 

point of drop-off. 

Plans for 09-10 include providing Nirdeshak as a shared service to 

small and medium businesses, obtaining FCC and CE certifications 

for Nirdeshak from the regulatory authorities in USA and 

European Union respectively to launch it internationally, and 

integrating Nirdeshak with 802.11 Wireless Communication 

System (Wi-Max and Wi-Fi) to cater to the high-end market in the 

mining sector. 

Printing & Imaging COE, CMC 

TCS and CMC have been working on product development for 

printing, imaging, office automation and document management 

with global majors since many years. To grow up the value chain 

in these segments, and scale up the offerings in the dimensions of 

complexity and strategic importance of engagements, the 

dedicated Printing & Imaging COE focuses mainly on competency 

building and asset development to help the existing delivery 

teams as well as offering cost-effective solutions to customers. 

During 2008-09, the center has focused on areas like Program 

Analysis, Localization, Printer Language drivers, Document 

Management and Network Management, and developed the 

following prototypes: 

�� 

XHTML-Print to PS converter 

�� 

XPS to PS converter 

�� 

OpenDocument to PS converter 

�� 

Matlab model for Motion control for Print transfer mechanism 

�� 

TTF rendering component 

Plans for 2009-10 include developing solutions in the areas of 

printer simulation, wireless / mobile printing, workflow solutions, 

Optical Character Recognition and Raster Image Processing. 

NN Murthy, N. Kameswara Rao, Roy Sastry, 

CBM Mishra, and N Sasidhar 


TCS Innovation Labs - Engineering & Industrial Services (EIS) is 

working towards developing solutions for the application in 

Engineering domain. The focus of the lab is on application of 

various techniques of modeling, control, optimization, fault 

diagnosis, soft-sensing, and data analytics. The lab collaborates 

actively with TCS’s different labs in the CTO organization, business 

groups/practices within EIS as well as external research and 

academic organizations. Members of this group actively 

participate in client projects, mainly for the manufacturing, 

medical, defence, and utilities domains. Following paragraphs 

briefly describe some of the recent work carried out: 

Mathematical Modeling for Medical 

Devices 

Leg Length Estimation: During hip or knee surgery, precise leg 

length measurement is very critical to avoid any biological 

disorders. The lab is working with a leading medical device 

manufacturer to design a non-invasive technique for leg length 

estimation during surgery. The simulation framework comprises of 

leg model, movement patterns, sensor models, and estimation 

algorithms. A sensitivity analysis evaluates impact of number of 

sensors, their types, locations, and noise characterizations on 

estimation accuracy. 

Throughput Enhancement of Blood Analyzer: The lab is 

developing a process model for a Healthcare Company in an 

attempt to increase the throughput of its existing blood count 

analysis system. To begin with, only the critical flow cytometer is 

modelled and the effect of various phenomena such as sensitivity 

to input flows, transition to turbulence and limiting values are 

considered. The simulation would enable a design and 

operational parameter based simulation and virtual feedback 

control for the system. 

Optimization under Uncertainty 

Uncertainty issues associated with linear/ nonlinear processes 

have been traditionally addressed using the scenario based two 

stage stochastic programming approach. While this approach 

scores in terms of decomposition, the large computational 

complexity leads to huge processing time and inability to use 

standard solver environments. In order to overcome these issues, 

the Lab has explored different approaches such as Probabilistic 

Programming, Fuzzy Logic and approaches based on Robust 

Optimization. Addressing uncertainty issues in product demands, 

machine uptime, inventory safety target, and cost coefficients in a 

multi-site, multi-product supply chain planning problem, leads to 

evaluation of multi-objective tradeoffs among cost, reliability and 

demand satisfaction. The analysis is demonstrated on mid-term 

planning problem and mixed integer dynamic optimization 

problem from literature. 

Multi-product Optimization 

For product companies, offering variety to the customers at 

reduced cost has become the need of the hour. This forces the use 

of a basic design for a product family from which variants can be 

derived. The objective is to identify the right set of parameters 

that forms this basic design and assign best design values for 

optimal performance. The Lab’s multi-product optimization 

approach offers many formulations to optimally decide platform 

parameters and distinct (non-platform variables) parameters 

along with optimal numerical values. The single step approach 

determines the value of non-platform variables simultaneously 

with optimal platform variables. In a two-step formulation, the 

gradient-based approach first finds the optimal set of platform 

variables and then determines the non-platform variables to 

optimize different variants performance. 

Asset Management 

For customers in the Oil & Gas, Transportation, Utilities, and other 

asset intensive industries, asset reliability and life-cycle 

management is a largely unsolved and critical area that is often 

addressed through ad-hoc approaches relying on expertise within 

the organization. The Lab is working towards engineering 

solutions for characterization of the drill response as a function of 

environmental attributes and key drilling parameters, assessment 

of tool damage during a drilling run, and development of 

solutions for estimating the reliability of drilling tools. The goal is 

to help drill operators understand the risks associated and select 

the right combination of tools for a given drilling run. 

Phanibhushan Sistu 


55

TCS Innovation Labs - Retail 

The TCS Innovation Labs - Retail Smart Store - a physical store 

present on TCS premises - is built over the latest, cutting edge 

technologies. The Smart Store provides the closest possible 

orientation towards addressing individual customer’s 

expectancies and enhancing their shopping experience and 

making it more easy using latest technologies. 

Initiatives During 2008-09 

The TCS Smart Store has been technologically enabled to 

minimize external manual intervention in the shopping process. 

Some of the innovations available and initiatives taken in the year 

2008-09 for improving the customer shopping experience include: 

�� 

Digital Personal Shopping Assistant which helps 

the customers locate products, find item information, scan 

items, find the easiest path through the store and access their 

personalized shopping list. 

�� 

Loyalty Framework developed by TCS which helps in 

tailoring personalized promotions and in rewarding customer 

loyalty. 

�� 

Digital Signage including plasma screen and touchscreen 

kiosks which provide store-wide promotion 

information, advertising messages and gift information 

�� 

Smart Checkout Systems including a TCS developed 

Point of Sale (POS) system and an e-wallet for better 

payment options. 

�� 

People Counter which helps in queue management, 

people counting and also has its own security applications. 

�� 

IR Beacons which help in aisle-wise product promotion by 

identifying the Customer location. 

�� 

Radio Frequency Integration Device (RFID) Tags 

which are tied to an asset at the item level. 

The store also showcases the best in class technologies aimed at 

enhancing retail operations and thereby improving store 

profitability. Some of the innovations available in the smart store 

for improving store operations include: 

�� 

Galleria – Space Optimization which helps in the 

utilization of space on retail shelves thereby improving 

merchandise and assortment planning 

�� 

Workforce Management System developed by TCS 

which improves workforce scheduling and utilization at the 

store level thereby enhancing profitability 

�� 

Enterprise Project Management System, which 

guides the store manager in the opening of a new store with a 

detailed template providing the resources, tasks, 

dependencies and milestones. 

�� 

Personal Digital Assistant used by the store assistant 

for accessing inventory related alerts at the shelf level 

�� 

Master Data Management acts as a single, composite 

repository for item information, price details, product details 

and employee information 

�� 

KSS PriceStrat is a price optimization tool which helps in 

dynamic pricing based on business objectives and demandsupply 

fluctuations. 

�� 

Retek Management System is a core merchandising 

solution aimed at maintaining inventory, order management 

and deciding price for specific merchandise. 

We have also worked on an Assortment Dashboard which is a 

collaboration tool that enables users (assortment planners and 

category managers) to have a single view of all the information 

needed for decision making for assortment of the inventory. 

It could be deployed over the retailer's current technology stack. It 

integrates services from reporting tools like micro-strategy, various 

SAS analytics outputs (product affinity, store clustering, customer 

segmentation and so on), Buzz analytics and embeds the existing 

planning tools available with the retailers. It incorporates Web 2.0 

features to give a user friendly, next gen interface. With map 

information embedded, users can view information such as 

competitor’s info, special events, store performance, and market 

data based on the chosen locations on the map. The workflow and 

Web 2.0 collaboration features enable users to seamlessly interact 

with each other, and share information and documents through 

built-in chat and desktop share features. The organization-wide 

integrated calendar enables users to set events like assortment set 


56

date based on pricing set date. 

Future endeavors (2009-10) 

Enhancing the capabilities of the TCS Smart Store is a continuing 

exercise. The plan for the next year is to add some more 

innovations that will be present in the TCS Smart Store including: 

�� 

Intelligent Scales - to identify the product and 

automatically generate the correct bar-codes 

�� 

Electronic Shelf label - to enable retailers to provide 

100% price integrity to their customers and also information 

which customers can use to make better buying decisions 

�� 

Electronic Displays - to bridge the gap between 

advertising and promotion. It can be used to effectively 

communicate promotional messages. 

Some of the focus areas within the TCS Innovation Labs - Telecom 

in the last year are: 

adPlus: Ad+ is an advertisement supported business 

model which features non-intrusive, opt-in, profile-specific 

nature of the ads served to the end user. Ad+ can be 

leveraged to bring about increase in customer base and 

customer satisfaction for a telecom operator, brand 

awareness and increased market share for an advertiser, 

and reduced phone bills and an opportunity to avail 

retail attractions for end user. 

Seamless Mobility: Location- 

based session mobility is a type of ubiquitous service. Seamless 

Session mobility is achieved by users’ ability 

to use their terminal to move across (heterogeneous) networks 

while having access to the same set of subscribed services. 

IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and Session Initiation Protocol 

(SIP) can be used to address each of these mobility aspects in 

the context of maintaining mobile multimedia sessions while 

roaming. 

�� 

PSA on Mobile Phone - to enable the customers locate 

products, find item information, and all other important 

transactions through their mobile phone. 

�� 

Social Shopping - is a method of e-commerce and of 

traditional shopping in which consumers shop in a social 

networking environment similar to MySpace. Using the 

wisdom of crowds, users communicate and aggregate 

information about products, prices, and deals. The technology 

behind this system uses RFID. 

�� 

NFC based Payments - Near Field Communication (NFC) 

is a short-range high frequency wireless communication 

technology which would help customers make payment 

through their mobile phone if it s NFC enabled. 

Siddharth D. 

Similar to Personal Mobility, Terminal Mobility can be provided in 

SIP through 

the use of the SIP Registrar and 

Redirect Server. 

iGen: Capitalized on the customer behaviour towards cross- 

channel 

shopping, we have come up with an innovative idea of 3-screen 

shopping 

which brings shops to the customer if 

not vice versa. The concept proposes the idea of front-end 

uniformity in shopping experience over the three end-user touch 

points that are TV, PC and mobile phone, and single master 

customer repository 

at back-end for personalized 

shopping experience. 

m-Collaborator: This is a mobile application which will 

increase the productivity of field force agent. The application 


57

enables simultaneous processing, that is, simultaneous syncing of 

data during 

data collection with the central repository. It has the 

provision of real time work list and productivity meter, and 

various innovative features like optimum route selection, 

master find and maps. 

IP Based Technologies 

The Lab acts as a hub for incubation of new ideas based on IP 

based technologies primarily in Content Delivery of video and 

other rich media and Digital Surveillance System domain. 

The lab has built IPTV content delivery workbench, which includes 

customised middleware and new services which demonstrate the 

seamless mobility of an IPTV session from wireline broadband 

network to a mobile wireless network. The lab researchers work 

on the various components of the IPTV network such as set-topboxes, 

decoders and encoders, and middleware and OSS/BSS 

systems. The lab understands that today "content is the king" and 

hence it has customized its middleware and services for high 

definition content along with the integration with a high 

definition set-top-box. 

A leading telecom provider in India has evaluated these services 

and has plans to implement them on their network. The lab, using 

its vast experience in network analysis, has also evaluated the 

network for quality of experience for IPTV services. 

The lab’s researchers have built expertise in IP based Digital 

Surveillance Systems using video analytics by developing assets 

and artefacts that act as solution accelerators for retail and 

transportation domains. 

For retail, the lab has developed artefacts like video 

analytics based inventory management system which 

raises an alarm when the inventory in the shelf goes Figure below 13 

a pre-defined level. This system when integrated with the 

retail management system will alert the store manager of 

non-availability of a product in the front store. The lab has 

also developed assets for business intelligence systems 

for a retail store like customer flow analysis which gives 

the flow of customers across various departments and 

people counting system to understand the customer 

high and low times over a period of time. 

For transportation domain, the lab has developed 

vehicle direction detection, speed detection, vehicle 

identification, and traffic flow analysis systems based 

on video analytics which can be used for traffic management 

In large cities or for fleet management. 

The lab has also developed some generic applications 

such as perimeter protection, and object tracking 

through multiple cameras which forms the key component 

of Digital Surveillance System. 

Corporate Sustainability Activities 

The Lab has developed Web-based applications for AFLATOUN 

Child Savings International (AFLATOUN) and CHILDLINE India 

Foundation (CIF) 

AFLATOUN is an international organization headquartered in 

Amsterdam. The Aflatoun concept is that, by teaching a 

curriculum which combines Social and Financial Education, one 

can empower children to become change makers and break the 

global cycle of poverty. The plan is to derive Social Return on 

Investment (SROI) based on the survey analysis. 

The lab has developed a Web-based flexible application system 

using open platform to capture various types of surveys planned 

to be conducted at each of its locations globally and bring all the 

information centrally at Amsterdam for analysis. All 

questionnaires, question types, screen titles and so on could be 

changed and the survey screens are generated on the fly. The 

system supports location specific questionnaires, multilingual 

help and reports. 

CIF is a non-profit organization that functions as a nodal agency 

for Government, NGOs and Partners across India. It is operational 

in 81 cities in India, has responded to over 13 million calls and has 

helped 3 million children so far. 

The lab has re-engineered CIF’s CHILDLINE application 

system using open platforms and made it flexible and user 

friendly, addressing to their changed requirements. The 

system consists of compact screens containing specially 

designed expandable scroll-boxes enabling multiple selections 

with highlight and data entry. Data transfer from cities to 

a central server is achieved using Secured File Transfer 

Protocol (SFTP). The system can be easily adopted for their 

Centralized Call Center which has been modelled effectively 


for the western region. The lab has designed and tested 

a model for converging various call centres in multiple 

cities of CIF into a single regional hub, not only to handle 

the call itself but also to facilitate the intervention that 

may be required to help a child at a particular location. 

The Lab has developed a Web-based Donor Management System 

(DMS) for the CIF. DMS is used to track donors, budget for projects, 

funds and assets received as donations. The system could be 

tailored for any other organization’s requirements and is 

considered for Mumbai Mobile Crèches. 

The lab plans to do research in areas of home networking, by 

leveraging their research in content delivery and digital 

surveillance domain. The lab also plans to do research in 

multiscale tracking of objects across multiple IP cameras and 

video analytics using thermal cameras. 

Our immediate concepts would be focusing on 

converged services, Open Source technologies like 

Android while coordinating with the Development of Mobile 

Applications (DMA) team, and work on a Mobile Service Delivery 

Platform to enable new value-added services seamlessly 

integrated into the operator environment and offered to end 

customers. 

Aman Nangia, Suyash Tiwari, Vivek Lotlikar, 

Keyur Dhaky 


59

The TCS Innovation Labs – Travel, Transportation & Hospitality 

(TTH), having been established with aspirations to support and 

enable airlines in tougher business situations, continued its 

innovation path from its earlier themes of ’Enhancing Customer 

Experience’ and ’Enabling Airline Enterprise’ to the current theme 

of ’Measuring and Optimising the Enterprise’. Focusing on the 

above mentioned challenges faced by airlines, the Lab has 

initiated programs in the following areas: 

�� 

Integrated Merchandising Framework - 

A framework that will enable airlines to maximize ancillary 

revenues while retaining passenger confidence by having an 

integrated product life cycle management: 

�Provides 

more visibility to airlines about fulfilment of the 

purchase made 

�Integration 

with reservation web site enable airlines to 

target passengers booking tickets with contextually 

relevant merchandise 

�Process 

Driven Tactile Interfaces - Applications in 

the airline industry are gradually emerging out of the Green- 

Screen-Terminal look to richer Web application looks. Our 

current endeavour is to evolve a Tactile Interface Framework 

that will extend intelligent support to users with apt 

understanding of the process context and mined behavioural 

information of users. 

�� 

Seamless Flight Disruption Notification 

Framework – Effective Disruption Management System 

that will enable Airlines to provide disruption related 

information timely to passengers in their preferred channel of 

interaction based on the passenger history available with 

Airlines. Similarly, with a disruption management system 

integrated with the merchandising and loyalty programs, 

airlines will be able to offer alternate attractive product 

services to passengers. 

The last year also witnessed the translation of the assets of the TCS 

Innovation Labs - TTH into beneficial customer engagements and 

reinforced the philosophy of ‘Innovation Continuum’ practiced by 

the lab. Some of these are described below: 

�� 

�� 

Travel Service Platform (TSP) is being evaluated by 

leading global airlines for evolving their Integration 

Framework as part of their multi-year transition plan of IT 

systems and one of them is conducting Proof of Architecture. 

TSP provides reference architecture with assets and solutions 

that enable building a SOA based comprehensive middleware 

solution extending connectivity among the airline systems inhouse 

and the external community. 

As part of our theme of Enhancing Customer Experience, we 

envisaged Web browser based light-weight check-in 

application to be deployed in the self-service kiosks of the 

airlines. Aptly titled as Web Kiosk, this technological 

innovation is currently being utilised for building the selfservice 

network of a leading American Airline and a leading 

alliance of airlines is evaluating adoption of the same as part 

of their common infrastructure strategy. 

The Lab’s focus in the next year is around Aircraft Maintenance 

and Airline IT Infrastructure. The lab will be working on evolving 

an Ubiquitous Information Fabric using Virtualisation and Cloud 

Computing. The lab will also be working on a Mobile based 

solution for Aircraft Maintenance, Repair and Overhauling (MRO) 

system. 

Sriram Chattyvnsh 


TCS Innovation Labs - Insurance 

The TCS Innovation Labs - Insurance creates a funnel of pain areas 

and potential solutions from various sources such as TCS’s 

Insurance Practice team, TCS Innovation Labs, the Insurance 

customers, and the TCS project teams. 

Based on the inputs received from various sources, the lab 

identifies specific problem areas and develops innovative 

solutions to address them in the disruptive and platform types of 

innovation. 

The Lab’s areas of work include: 

�� 

Improving operational efficiency of IT systems and optimizing 

cost using rapid prototyping tools , testing tools, and use of 

standardization 

�� 

Exploring ways to optimize business processes, thereby 

improving resource utilization, customer service, and reducing 

processing time 

�� 

Enabling enterprises to improve their service channels by use 

of Web 2.0 based portals, speech enabled call centres, and self 

service kiosks 

�� 

Empowering insurance companies to streamline service 

processes, eliminate paperwork and increase customer 

satisfaction through mobile-based services 

�� 

Enabling the insurers to innovate in the creation of new 

products to meet the changing market needs, and in the 

process of designing and launching new products 

�� 

Utilising advances in wireless sensor technology to monitor 

driving patterns and vital health parameters for innovative 

insurance products. 

The Lab developed the following Innovative Solutions in 2008-09: 

�� 

Business Process Optimization through BPM Tools: 

Business Process Management (BPM) Tools can lead to 

productivity improvement ranging from 15 percent to 150 

percent, flexibility to introduce new processes, and 

ultimately 

to innovate new products and services. The Lab has 

developed a methodology to model and simulate business 

processes for legacy systems to identify and implement 

business process improvements in a phased manner and 

move to Straight Through Processing (STP). 

�IT 

Optimization through Standardization - ACORD 

Migration: Cost optimization in IT can be achieved by 

introducing industry standards in the IT systems and 

communication with business partners. The Lab has 

developed a solution accelerator for enabling insurers to 

reengineer their IT systems to be ACORD (insurance data 

standards) compliant. The ACORD Solution Accelerator can 

provide a productivity gain of 50 percent or more. 

�� 

Product Co-creation: The Lab has conceptualized and 

developed Product Co-Creation, a Web 2.0 solution enabling 

the customer to provide inputs to the product creation 

process. The product development team can also collaborate 

and track the progress of the development activity and reduce 

the turn around time of product launch significantly. 

�� 

Product Lifecycle Management: The Lab has developed a 

PLM framework to create and manage products based in a 

centralized repository from ideation, design, product launch 

through retirement. The framework also has the ability to 

collaborate with all stakeholders at all stages of the product 

lifecycle, to view all product related information in one place, 

and to integrate with other enterprise systems. 

�� 

Customer Centricity/Experience Enablers: The Lab seeks to 

help organizations as they embark on a transition to a more 

customer-centric enterprise and improve customer 

experience. The lab’s offerings include Web 2.0 enabled portals 

to service agents and policy holders, self-service kiosks, and 

speech-based applications to automate call centers. Other 

solutions developed in the lab enable customer centricity by 

improving the underlying process effectively, and enabling 

faster and innovative product introduction. 

In addition, the lab has developed various solutions such as 

mobile devices based agency management, claims and advisory 

insurance systems, telematics-based systems for distance and 

driving habits based premium computation, and Web 2.0 based 

collaborative agency management system. 

M Somasundaram 


Innovation Functions

The TCS Co-Innovation Network (COIN) is anchored at TCS Innovation Labs and encompasses entities such as academic institutions, start-up 

companies, venture funds, global IT market leaders, multi-lateral organizations, and key clients to bring forth true synergies. We, at TCS COIN, 

have a well-articulated innovation sourcing strategy with broad and holistic goals, and flexible processes to manage the richness and diversity 

of our COIN partners. 

Each COIN channel networks with the bestof-breed 

institutions. Sourcing innovation 

from varied entities requires a customerconscious 

focus in particular, with minimal 

scope for risks and challenges. So COIN has 

put in place a stringent process to monitor 

innovation diffusion. 

This process involves: 

1. Origination - Discovery and selection of 

prospect organizations (including academic 

institutions and start-ups) through existing 

relationships, through relationships with 

customers, VCs, innovation events, and our 

research watch list. 

IdeaFunnel and Filter. 

Innovationlabs, IdeaStorm, 

COIN -100’s of ideas 

Filtered set of options for 

3 innovation Categories - 

10’s of projects 

Opportunity Screens - 

few funded initiatives 

Breakthrough Derivative 

2. Diligence/Alignment - Consists of three 

Figure 14: Innovation Adoption - The COIN Engagement Model 

steps, namely, Technology diligence 

Business diligence and Market diligence, 

carried out by a team of partner solution managers. 

Commercialization and 

scale-up 

Train schedule - 

Multi-year Projecting 

3. Solution Incubation - An offering is prepared for joint IP development and recommended to customers by initiating the necessary 

legalese for a formal partnership. Marketing, pre-sales, sales, and delivery activities begin for the offering. 

4. Steady State - Solutions are deployed to address customer requirements and periodic reviews are held within the COIN team and 

the TCS Corporate Technology Board members to assess the partnership. 

Emerging Technology Companies 

Platform 

Derivative 

Platform 

Breakthrough 

“COIN-Venture Capitalist (VC) Alliance has come a long way since its inception in 2005. In 2008, the global 

network reached a significant level of maturity; such that any technology request, interest, or investment, 

from within or outside the organization, had at least one corresponding co-innovation entity in the global 

ecosystem. Any globally branded VC was just a degree of separation from the COIN-VC Ecosystem team. 

RFIs, and interest from TCS's internal core business units, customer accounts, or other technology groups, had 

the most success in leveraging the ecosystem for revenue top line (pull approach). For 2009, the focus and 

more importantly, the approach, are going to change from specific point companies to aggregating a specific 

business unit solution from the COIN-VC asset base, to further facilitate success with pushing appropriate 

solutions to the core business.” 

- Ajoy Mallik, Head, Venture Capital (VC) Initiative, COIN 

“Through TCS COIN, we have been able to extend our innovation capability by tapping into a much wider 

network and a larger pool of ideas. We have already completed many successful innovation demos, proofs-ofconcept 

and pilots, improving our confidence in COIN's delivery capability.” 

- Matthew Palmer, Head, IT Future, Norwich Union Life 


Work with Emerging Technology 

Companies 

As financiers of the next generation of technologies, VCs provide a 

key connect to innovation. Our COIN-VC ecosystem has built a 

global network of VCs across the US, Europe, UK, Israel, India, 

China, and New Zealand. Our relationship with the COIN-VC is 

based on access to their portfolio, and their upcoming 

investments while providing their portfolio of companies an 

opportunity to partner with a global services provider. However, 

that is just the tip of the iceberg. There exists a strong bidirectional 

information flow between the VC and the COIN-VC 

team. This information flow into and out of the COIN-VC revolves 

around insights into market trends, competitive analysis, 

networking with entrepreneurs and other VCs, customer buying 

trends, facilitating their participation to the TCS Innovation 

Forums, and access to specific companies that may be part of an 

overall prospective TCS business relationship. 

We have established alliances with several start-ups working with 

COIN-VCs. We also work with academic incubators in India. Some 

of the incubators that were signed up for partnerships this year 

include: 

�FITT 

at IIT Delhi 

�SINE 

at IIT Bombay 

Keen eye for companies globally 

A market leader strategizes differently from a start-up. Today's 

competitive environment, however, demands for an established 

company to know the ideas at work in start-ups – the niche 

products they make, the new markets they create and their 

potential for breakthrough or disruptive innovation – and support 

the promising ones. 

COIN-VC has a lineage of picking winning companies globally. Six 

of the COIN-VC partners have been acquired by big global 

corporations. Many diligence companies which are prospects for 

potential partnership with COIN have made successful exits 

through IPOs and acquisitions. As a testimony, one of the COIN-VC 

partners, was featured in the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise 

Governance, Risk and Compliance Platforms in June 2008 by 

Gartner Research. This exemplifies our keen eye for spotting star 

companies from startups globally. Similarly, many companies 

from across the globe and spanning varied technology areas have 

been put through our stringent de-risking process through COIN 

to work on innovative solutions with TCS and its customers to 

form our start-up alliances. COIN connects with these start-ups, 

focusing on new and exciting technology areas such as: 

�Data 

Center Optimization Solutions 

�On 

Demand Distributed Software Development Solutions 

�Compliance 

Cost Reduction Solutions 

Some of the areas for which partnerships were forged this year 

included: 

�Enterprise 

Social Collaboration 

�Asset 

Tracking leveraging RFID and GPS technology 

�Dynamic 

Pricing and Analytics Solution 

This year, TCS Infrastructure Services Innovation Lab, along with a 

startup, agreed to work on a prototype to study the emissions 

footprint at one of the TCS offices in Chennai. The pilot is expected 

to be completed by March 2009, and will help TCS develop a 

compelling case study to present to potential customers. 

Norwich Union Life (NUL)—a market leader in life assurance and 

pensions, based in UK—employs the 'Innovation Delivery 

Framework' to evaluate and prioritize their in-house innovation. 

However, to help NUL optimize its delivery framework and 

improve the number of innovations that could be explored and 

reviewed, NUL IT engaged TCS to leverage our partner networks 

and COIN. This was essential for maximizing the value of their 

investments in innovation. COIN helped NUL's IT department 

create the roles, processes and roadmap required to develop a 

culture of innovation. Through TCS COIN, NUL is now able to 

harness a prioritized stream of business ideas. The COIN network 

helps exponentially increase the 'Think' and 'Ideation' capabilities, 

and thereby, also increase the number of ideas available to the 

business. NUL and COIN have delivered proofs-of-concepts and 

pilots for many projects ranging from small incremental 

improvements through to more ambitious innovations. A major 

success has been a podcasting site for Independent Financial 

Advisers. A pilot website has also been developed aimed at 

improving customer experience by providing useful information 

in an intuitive and preference-driven manner. 

The COIN-VC ecosystem is going to evolve to support three 

primary value additions to the TCS businesses and our COIN 

partners: 


• A broad base technology scan that is both global in nature 

and comprehensive in its depth, industry-wise and by technology 

offering, which will provide continuous updates on a revamped 

TCS-COIN portal 

• Specific solutioning exercises targeting specific solutions for 

specific TCS internal business Units (such as Enterprise 

Governance, Risk and Compliance Management solutions (GRC), 

Strategic Alliances 

“TCS has been having strategic relationships with various global technology vendors. These relationships 

have been in various dimensions such as Customer, Service Provider, Supplier, and Alliance Partner. 

Extending to make the relationship more holistic meant that both TCS and the respective global technology 

vendors collaborate on joint research leveraging each other's strengths to research and develop best-ofbreed 

offerings to the market. 

The intent is to define and develop solutions with associated services and offer the same as an integrated 

business model to customers.” 

- S Santhanakrishnan, Head, Strategic Alliance, COIN 

Intel 

Intel and TCS provide information technology products and 

services that complement each other. The companies are 

engaging in a technology alliance model in which the two 

organizations collaborate on research and develop solution 

offerings to deliver customer-specific solutions to the marketplace. 

This alliance has matured over the last two years of collaborative 

work, with the companies implementing a well-defined model for 

collaboration using a three-stage approach: 

�joint 

innovation engagements 

�defining 

new or improved solutionsand 

�joint 

go-to-market strategies for the solutions. 

The companies have completed two significant virtualization and 

balanced compute research projects with these objectives: 

�Virtualization: 

Demonstrate server consolidation through 

virtualization using multi-core Intel® Xeon® processors and Intel® 

Virtualization Technology on a real-life customer application to 

Mobile Computing, Enterprise Search), Web 2.0/Enterprise 

collaboration and Green IT. 

• To position itself to respond efficiently, comprehensively, and 

quickly to complex technological requirements in TCS's 

businesses while TCS attempts to leverage the innovation 

ecosystem to win large complex deals or to respond to large 

complex innovation led requirements. 

Ajoy Mallik 

reduce total cost of ownership. 

�Balanced 

Compute: Demonstrate and validate balanced 

compute model usages in real end-user scenarios, showcasing 

central manageability and client side computing using a 

combination of OS and application streaming technologies on 

Intel® vPro technology-based platforms. 

More research projects are underway and some new ones are 

being identified as part of strengthening the research alliance to 

other areas of technology and business domains. 

SAP 

SAP as a leading technology and product vendor is one of the key 

partners of TCS. The partnership with SAP has been a longstanding 

one and multi-dimensional. Leveraging and extending 

this existing partnership to collaborate for joint research and 

innovation was a logical next step for both SAP and TCS. 


Senior Research Scientists of SAP and TCS initiated this 

collaboration setting the objectives and defining the modus 

operandi for carrying out research in a collaborative manner. And 

they committed to cause by undertaking the responsibility to be 

Executive Sponsors in the respective organizations. 

Collaboration with SAP Research was initiated after detailed 

discussions and exchange of research interests from both SAP and 

TCS. Identified areas include Model-driven Architecture and 

Integration of Enterprise-Data, Web 2.0, Internet of Services, and 

Internet of Things. 

All the identified areas were then detailed further with active 

participation from researchers of both organizations to identify 

and define the details of possible research and innovation. 


Hewlett-Packard 

HP and TCS have initiated discussions for joint research in the 

areas of SaaS, Power Management & Cooling, Utility/Grid 

Computing, Cloud Computing, Green IT and Next Generation Data 

Center. Some of the potential research initiatives could also 

involve development of market-specific offerings based on valueadded 

services, using products and solutions from HP. 

2 EMC 

2 

With TCS being an IT solutions and services provider, EMC and 

TCS have conceptualized IT solution architectures for specific 

2 

industry-domains integrating products from EMC and software 

platforms from TCS. 

S Santhanakrishnan 

“Collaboration between TCS and academia is critical in delivering a shared vision of Innovation to our 

customers. By working together we make it possible to apply next generation technology to solving real 

world problems faced by our customers.” 

- Vipul Shah, Head - Academic Alliances Group, COIN 

“TCS has been a research patron of the MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) since 2004. 

MIT CISR is funded by a consortium of more than 70 companies worldwide in support of research on how 

organizations generate business value from IT. It is a pleasure to work with TCS as part of CISR's research 

process, on executive programs for CIOs and at other events.” 

- Dr Peter Weill, Chairman - Center for Information Systems Research & MIT Senior Research Scientist, 

MIT Sloan School of Management 

“It has been a great pleasure to collaborate with TCS over the last few years. Our research group at Stanford 

has learned about exciting new problems through our interaction with TCS and its customers, both through 

visits to TCS sites in India and participation in TCS events in the US. We hope that our work here, and the 

results we share with our TCS collaborators, will help solve future problems involving data privacy, 

compliance, and healthcare and financial information systems.“ 

- Dr. John Mitchell, Professor, Computer Science Department at Stanford University 


As a market leader in a knowledge 

economy, TCS believes in investing in early 

stage research. COIN, therefore, 

collaborates with leading academic and 

research institutions worldwide. These 

alliances become important in research 

contexts that require a longer time frame 

and a space protected from business 

pressures. TCS's collaborations with these 

institutes meet the need for TCS to have 

timely access to upcoming and future 

technologies and expertise. Academic 

collaborations are key drivers to the TCS 

innovation. For TCS, such long-term 

commitments offer access to trained 

students and the creativity of academic 

research. For universities, they promise 

student and faculty exposure to real-world 

problems. The TCS-university 

collaborations go well beyond the 

traditional research relationships. They 

may include university-based research 

parks and incubators, short- and long-term 

research agreements or exchanges of 

faculty and industry personnel. 

Our academic alliance programme is an effective conduit 

between academic research and real world scenarios, bringing 

academic research closer to TCS clients and projects. It is a highly 

interactive collaboration encouraging a continuous flow of ideas 

between academia and TCS that enriches our innovation 

landscape. 

TCS has joined MIT's Industry Liaison Program (ILP) this year and 

plans to hold the next TCS Innovation Forum jointly with ILP. This 

year also saw a spurt in exploratory visits to academic institutions 

in Europe and Asia Pacific with the objective of broadening 

academic collaborations to these regions. The visits have helped 

us build a very healthy collaboration proposal pipeline and should 

see several new collaborations in the coming years. 

Highlights of research activities through our academic 

collaborations are: 

Stanford University 

We have now completed three years of productive interaction and 

collaboration between TCS and the Stanford team of the National 

Science Foundation (NSF) Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure 

Institution Research areas 

Anna University, Chennai Image Retrieval, Sensor Networks 

Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi Media Lab: Multimedia, 3D Graphics, 

Video surveillance 

Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur Center for Algorithms 

Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai LIS - Laboratory for Intelligent Systems: 

Large Scale Hybrid Intelligent Systems, 

Networking 

Indian Institute of Information Intelligent Interfaces, Enterprise Search 

Technology, Hyderabad 

Stanford University, Stanford Data privacy & Security 

Center for Information Systems Research, IT Governance, IT Risk, Enterprise Architecture 

MIT Sloan School, Cambridge 

Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta Regression testing, Enterprise data integration 

University of Massachusetts, Amherst Process Design and Engineering 

University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Business Components 

Columbia University, New York Nano Technology 

University of Waterloo, Waterloo Quantitative Finance 

Technology (TRUST) Center. TRUST is an NSF Science and 

Technology Center devoted to development in the areas of security 

and privacy. The Stanford team is involved in efforts to improve 

World-Wide Web authentication and security, manage privacy, 

support privacy-preserving database operations, and improve 

network and computer system security. TRUST privacy work also 

involves collaboration with the Stanford Law School, the UC Berkeley 

School of Law, and the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. 

In 2007, the Stanford–TCS team, including Stanford graduate 

students and TCS researcher Ms. Sharada Sundaram, had built a 

demonstration system to demonstrate automated policy 

enforcement. The Stanford-TCS team has continued to work on 

formalizing larger segments of the Health Insurance Portability 

and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy legislation in a declarative 

form, using the Prolog language. The goal of this work is to 

provide a common understanding of this important privacy 

regulation that can be used by organizations for automated 

operational compliance. 

Substantial progress was made in 2008, including formalization of 

several main parts of HIPAA, construction of a Web interface to the 


Prolog engine, and construction of a sample messaging system 

resembling the MyHealth@Vanderbilt patient portal built by the 

medical privacy collaborators at Vanderbilt University Medical 

Center. This will provide a basis for integrating a compliance 

checker into the medical system built and tested in the research 

group at Vanderbilt. 

The research was presented at various conferences and forums 

like Dagstuhl Healthcare Privacy symposium, TRUST meetings, 

Stanford Engineering Symposium India and PanIIT conference. 

Georgia Institute of Technology 

TCS and Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) have been 

collaborating in the area of software testing for four years. Till 

date, the collaborations have resulted in a number of techniques 

and evaluations for regression test selection and prioritization. In 

2007, Georgia Tech-TCS team, including Georgia Tech graduate 

students and TCS researcher Pavan Kumar, carried out research in 

the following areas: 

�Regression 

testing on system requirements 

Because practitioners often have little time to perform regression 

testing after changes, they often use a random-testing approach 

or perform little regression testing. To improve the efficiency of 

the regression testing, and thus enable its use before release, a 

technique was developed that selects and runs only those test 

cases that are related to the changes or prioritizes the test cases 

based on criticality or perceived importance. Instead of using a 

system model or the source code, the technique uses the system 

requirements and their associated test cases, which are typically 

available to developers/testers. The approach uses the set of 

system requirements, usually in natural language or some 

informal notation that represents what is to be tested about the 

system. The technique uses these requirements, along with the 

set of test cases and their criticality that are associated with the 

requirements, to select test cases for use in regression testing. 

�Test-suite 

augmentation 

Based on feedback from TCS about regression testing, Georgia 

Tech-TCS team began working on the problem of augmenting the 

test suite after changes are made to the software. This test-suite 

augmentation assesses the effectiveness of testing with respect to 

changes and it will (semi) automatically generate new test cases 

where needed. 

The technique was implemented in a tool called MaTRIX, and 

initial case studies have been performed. 

University of Waterloo 

TCS has entered into a multi-year strategic collaboration with 

Institute for Quantitative Finance (IQFI), at the University of 

Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada. In the current times, financial risk 

management has become an extremely important discipline – for 

corporations, financial institutions and many government 

enterprises. The projects chosen for funding were closely tied to 

our own research interests in Hyderabad, and focused on the 

following areas: 

�Pricing 

and hedging of exotic options 

Hedging the sensitivity of the market value of the financial 

contracts to the volatility is an important issue in the current 

economic environment. Accounting standards are currently 

changing. Regulators are enforcing companies to report their 

annual accounting standards of the balance sheet at the market 

value. Thus, it is important for companies to be able to stabilize 

the market value of their liabilities against fluctuations in the 

market and volatility changes in particular. The liabilities of the 

companies are the commitments to the policyholders and are the 

future payoffs of the contracts sold. The research will look at 

dynamic hedging of such contracts. 

�Portfolio 

optimization 

The present turmoil in the financial markets can be traced to poor 

modeling of liquidity risk, solvency constraints, and price impact. 

Standard hedging strategies assume, for example, that it is always 

possible to buy or sell assets at the current quoted price. However, 

in a market with poor liquidity, this means that the action of 

buying/selling will impact the price. The research is directed 

towards developing efficient numerical methods for optimal 

portfolio selection with liquidity risk and solvency constraints. 

�Robustness 

of option pricing under uncertainty 

The research is focused on building an asset and liability 

management model that is developed within the robust 

optimization framework. The model implementation targets asset 

and liability managers, who are tasked with the responsibility of 

managing the financial portfolio to achieve stable net interest 

margins and a longer-term health in the composition of the 

portfolio. 

Vipul Shah 


Incubation 

The Incubation Group is TCS's investment for the future, founded with the mission of 'Incubating and Sustaining Big Bets for TCS'. The intent is to 

have a sustained, first-mover advantage and open new markets for TCS. The group nurtures ideas from 'Inception to Implementation'. It is 

focused on creating innovative business models, assets and solutions to achieve non-linear growth for TCS. Expertise in R&D, technology, 

business solutions and consulting services is combined with the Co-Innovation Network (COIN) to identify and grow emerging opportunities. 

“One of the charters of the group is to look at opportunities created as a result of analog to digital media 

transition. The group is focusing on providing online, mobile, digital advertising and Web platform solutions 

to a marketplace that consists of TCS Customers, Advertising Agencies, and partners such as Microsoft, 

Google, Nielsen and TATA Group Companies.” 

- Anita Nanadikar, VP & Head Incubation Group, TCS. 

Achievements in this area include signing up a customer within 

the first four months of operations with a mandate to build a rich 

media campaign for a leading US advertising agency. With the golive 

of critical phases achieved in 8 weeks, the campaign was a 

huge success, exceeding the key performance indicators - with 

over 7,500,000 votes, an increase of 175 per cent compared to 

previous year's campaign. In addition, over 130,000 stories have 

been logged by users and the campaign has helped to create a 

compelling engagement between the consumers. 

The Incubation group has also partnered with a leading Media 

research firm to develop a pilot for All Media Analytics, along with 

one of its partner companies for a leading public service 

advertising organization. This service will enable the marketing 

team or the CMO to view, measure and track the campaign spend, 

and reach across multiple media. 

We have developed a comprehensive Digital strategy for a 

healthcare portal, offering an online medical consultation and 

comprehensive healthcare services. The site has been re-designed 

and optimized for search engines (SEO), and advertising with 

interfaces to social networks. As a result of our work, the traffic to 

the site has doubled within six weeks of roll-out. 

The roadmap for the group focuses on solutions for Enterprise 

Marketing, and Advertising, wherein TCS could provide the 

platform similar to what it is doing today for the Banking and 

Financial Services Industry (platform plus services business 

model) using TCS's well-recognized GNDM model. The areas of 

focus are platform and services around online advertisement 

platforms, mobile advertising, brand monitoring, and media 

analytics. 

Anita Nanadikar 

Leveraging Innovation for Market-Oriented Offerings 

The true measure of successful innovation in an organization is the 

application of research and its outputs – to address market 

requirements. The research (and the outputs created thereof) can 

be done wholly by the organization itself or in collaboration with 

its co-innovation partners. The key to success is to understand 

market requirements; then, based on market needs, enhance the 

output (from research) to deliver a positive solution that meets 

customer/market requirements. In the process, the innovation 

provides a balancing value for all stakeholders encompassing 

customers, shareholders, suppliers and partners, employees, and 

society at large. 

Towards this objective, Innovation at TCS has three well-defined steps: 

�Integrate 

the research and co-innovation partners' outputs (or 

assets) into a holistic product-cum-service offering 

�Interface 

with customer/market-facing Industry Solution Units 

(ISU) in TCS to formulate effective solutions 

�Deliver 

the derived offerings to our customers through a 

Go-To-Market initiative 

Accordingly, these three distinct, and yet fully aligned and 

integrated set of activities, are carried out in an efficient and 

effective manner to maximize the benefits from research. 


Integration Lab 

Integration Lab is the 'Service Delivery' arm of the CTO / R&D organization in TCS. Translation of requirements from ISU Interface to define, 

design, and deliver market-oriented solutions that facilitate a unique competitive advantage to TCS, is its raison d'être. 

“For Integration Lab, the past year has been a defining one towards the creation of enhanced offerings that 

directly benefit customers as well as internal stakeholders of TCS. 

The benefits to a customer's organization has been a combination of agility, improved and predictable quality 

of data to be used by various applications, ability to leverage a flexible and yet powerful security mechanism 

for carrying out its business in this all-pervasive Internet-enabled world. 

While the journey has begun, the plethora of opportunities that can be garnered to create and deliver 

effective and efficient market-oriented solutions will become more challenging and yet - paradoxically - more 

rewarding to be serviced through holistic solutions.” 

- S. Santhanakrishnan, Head – Integration Lab, Corporate Technology Office 

Integration Lab has achieved the following milestones this year: 

�Creation 

of a fully configurable Data Cleansing utility that can 

detect data duplication and recommend 'cleansing' of such 

data that has a uniform meaning in the context of all 

applications that form the Information Systems Portfolio in 

the customer's organization. The candidate data that can be 

“serviced” could be in the form of a business anchor such as 

“Client” or “Part” or “Service” etc. 

�Definition 

of an IT Architecture Framework for a Workforce 

Management System that has the flexibility to adapt to everchanging 

business scenarios and “learn” from previous 

experiences of deviations between planned and incurred 

workforce. 

�Facilitation 

of a role-specific single-window dashboard that 

integrates as a “one-stop shop” for an employee to carry out 

one's work in the organization - leveraging Web 2.0 

technologies. 

�Conceptualization 

of a fully configurable security framework 

for enabling secure platform for carrying out customer-centric 

core banking activities over Internet. 

�Design 

and development of an application to capture data 

related to electrical power consumption for an office building 

(or a sub-unit of the same) to facilitate data analysis and 

integration of the same into a holistic solution of “Green 

Services” framework. 

�Development 

of fully functional prototypes of portable 12lead 

ECG devices that can be deployed at various places such 

as private clinics of general physicians and/or cardiologists, 

hospital's ambulances, small-time hospitals, and even be 

operated at home by cardiac patients themselves. 

Going forward in the immediate future, Integration Lab will 

develop more solutions in line with the market needs determined 

through ISU interface. Some of the plans include: 

�Developing 

and enhancing solutions in the areas of “search” 

and “analytics” on unstructured data and information catering 

to the needs of a variety of industries and business 

applications. 

�Implementing 

formal project management to co-solutioning 

initiatives. 


Business Linkage and Innovation Go-to-market 

A critical area of the entire innovation process is the integration of the different research and co-innovation partners' outputs into a value 

adding solution that could be taken out to the market place. The ISU interface team in TCS works closely with the other teams in the CTO 

organization to understand the needs of the different Industry Solution Units (ISU), and conceptualize effective solutions that can either be built 

by the ISUs themselves, or by the Integration Labs. The requirements for applying research and innovation outputs to conceptualize offerings 

that have the potential to create value-added benefits to our customer's customers is the overarching foundation based on which the various 

activities are carried out. 

“One of the most challenging, but also rewarding, issues is to take highly technical inventions from the 

world of technology, and bundle them into a viable solution that meets the needs of one or more end 

customers.” 

- K. Padmanabhan, Head – ISU Interface, Corporate Technology Office 

The ISU Interface team in TCS has successfully deployed a process 

for eliciting the needs and devising solutions through 

collaborative co-solutioning workshops which are held with the 

various ISUs and business units in TCS. The iGTM and Integration 

Lab teams have then used these co-solutioning workshops to 

deploy the solutions to various customers. 

Innovation-Go-To-Market (iGTM) is the “Consultative Sales” arm of the CTO / R&D organization in TCS and focuses on Research and Innovation 

commercialization. The iGTM team, spread across geographies and locations, engages in consultative sales, and customer interfacing, to drive 

the adoption of TCS's Innovations by customers - internal and external. 

“For iGTM, FY2008-09 has been the first full year of its existence in the current form (it was perhaps the first 

time 'Selling' Innovation was defined as a full-fledged organization with a purpose and focus), so it has been 

a gratifying experience in more ways than one. We focused on three broad aspects, namely, adopting a 

formal business-plan oriented portfolio approach to picking stuff that we wanted to take-to-market, 

building active links into our Businesses and establishing mechanisms by which we collaborated and cocreated/co-solutioned 

with them, and implementing a BSC-driven governance model to bring metrics into 

our 'neural system'! We owned business targets (although currently they are 'soft' targets.) 

These seem to have paid off reasonably well. Can we do better? Definitely yes. We have learnt our way 

through this 'definition phase' of our existence and we have identified initiatives we would work for during 

FY09-10. I am confident we are poised to leapfrog to the next level of performance and sophistication in the 

way we take our Innovation to our Customers for mutual value.” 

- Shashi Bhushan, Head – Innovation Go-To-Market, Corporate Technology Office 


On Innovation Days from Clients: 

"In the history of our organization, this is by far the most strategic partnership event held. I have never seen 

any vendor bring in such value and innovative ideas to us.” 

- Vice President - IT Value Management, Financial Services organization, USA 

“We must continue to innovate to succeed. As Partners we must bring value to our customers in new ways. 

Some of these will be breakthroughs that shake the industry and create disruption. Others will be 

continuous improvements in our products, quality, processes, customer experiences and all aspects of our 

company. We need to do this as a partner. I am delighted with commitment and professionalism of TCS 

which reflects as true partner for us.” 

- Senior Vice President and CIO, Major Automobile manufacturer, USA 

On Collaborative Partnership: 

"…. - The TCS team did a great job on the bad debt challenge …… what I have come to know – that TCS can 

be a great collaborative partner in innovation – I am indeed looking for to the visit – I have visited several of 

the labs in India and enjoyed myself a great deal.” 

- Head, Group Architecture and Business Improvement, a leading Bank, UK 

Set up in April 2008, the ISU Interface and iGTM teams have 

achieved the following milestones this year: 

�Established 

effective and formal linkages into TCS Businesses 

in conjunction with the CTO's interface organization for 

industry specific business units 

�Adopted 

a 'Business Plan' approach to commercializing 

Research through 'Portfolio Management' 

�Engaged 

deeply with key customer accounts through 

Innovation-day events and helped establish TCS's Thought 

Leadership position in these accounts 

�Leveraged 

businesses to scale up delivery and GTM of select 

research outputs (for example, Set-top-box through 

TCS's Telecom business unit) 

�Focused 

on commercialization of non-linear assets, namely, 

Bio-Suite & Bio-Appliance, mKrishi Set-top-box, Silicon 

Locket, and Water Filter 

�Implemented 

a systematic metrics-driven and result-oriented 

framework for measuring influence of our R&D and Innovation 

to TCS's revenue and profitability 

�Engaged 

with TCS's internal business units in co-creation and 

co-solutioning initiatives; currently, there are 50+ exercises in 

progress. 


FY 2009-10 will see these teams raise the bar to: 

�Further 

systematize nurturing of TCS's existing accounts 

�Tighten 

alignment with new sales and large deals, to help TCS 

position Innovation as a win theme 

�Strengthen 

focus on deriving increased overall business value 

from our Co-Innovation (COIN) program. 

ISU Interface and iGTM work with business units, customers, 

partners and researchers to align innovations to market needs. To 

succeed in this pursuit requires a 360º view and relies on different 

intelligence sources – network of TCS Lab Business Development 

Managers (BDM) who drive business development activities for 

labs in the Innovation network, Geography Heads who operate in 

different regions and with different customers, TCS's Business 

Units' Heads who predict industry trends and needs, customer 

specific innovation days, industry focussed road shows and 

workshops, and joint innovation programs - to provide that 

knowledge. 

'Innovation days' remain iGTM's trademark way to connect with 

existing customers, understand their interest areas and pitch 

innovations or co-solutions. 2008-09 saw over 20 innovation days 

being conducted for customers in the US, UK, APAC, Europe and 

other geographies. Such innovation-focused efforts are not 

limited to existing customers. The group has influenced some new 

customer wins, by showcasing Innovation as a value-add, through 

presentations, demos and pilots, and proposal responses. 

Positioning innovation in business proposal responses has 

enabled TCS to be viewed as a valuable vendor partner and 

clinched many large deals across various businesses. 

During mid-2008, iGTM adapted its research promotion and 

commercialization activities to align with TCS Innovation themes, 

both business and IT. Subsequent quarters saw the launch of 

some major initiatives with business units and clients: Set top box 

with Telecom Unit, Cardiac devices and Bio-Appliance with Life 

Sciences and Healthcare Unit, and TCS InstantApps Technology for 

various other Units. The group's excellent work in metrics 

collection and reporting has resulted in attributing quantitative 

values to many activities that were prior considered intangibles. 

Both internal (TCS) and external customers have benefited from 

iGTM's efforts. A few noteworthy ones are: 

�Survey 

analytics tool used to analyse survey responses for an 

Insurance customer and for TCS's employee satisfaction 

survey responses 

�Social 

networking applications from TCS Innovation Lab 

Web2.0 for use within TCS 

�Performance 

Engineering tools for efficiency improvement of 

TCS Internal IT 

�MasterCraft 

– an integrated framework for application 

development – as an enabler for TCS Financial Services 

�Ticket 

Analysis tool to automate ticket analysis for a leading 

retail client 

�TCS 

InstantApps Technology improved the time-to-market by 

about 30 per cent of those projects that used TCS's proprietary 

platform 

�Over 

60 per cent cost savings to a retail client, due to adoption 

of multimedia research for image resizing and refinement 

�iGTM's 

efforts resulted in some major awards and 

achievements being accrued to TCS 

Learning along the way, we at iGTM have identified certain areas 

where we could do better. Follow-ups after innovation days, 

systematic program management approach to growing the 

adoption of innovations, and focus on introduction of new 

offerings to businesses are some of the major improvements we 

will address as we draw up our blueprint for 'iGTM 3.0'! 


iConnect is the internal and external marketing and branding arm of the TCS CTO R&D structure. 

iConnect has established an interlinked web of all internal stakeholders- ISUs, TCS Innovation Labs, customer accounts, and associates for better 

leverage of research at TCS and tapping innovative ideas. iConnect handles the external marketing and owns the mandate of positioning TCS 

as an innovative organization. This involves activities like media and analyst relations, online marketing, sales collateral support, participation 

in strategic events. 

“One of the major focus areas for TCS Corporate Technology Office has been aligning to the TCS Business 

and iConnect was launched to bridge the chasm between the TCS business units and research. 

TCS Businesses are a key point of contact with the customers, and sustained interactions with internal 

stakeholders has helped in building the internal Innovation brand, fostering the innovation culture, as well 

as reaching out to existing customers. 

We have also focussed this year on improving our Innovation positioning with the external stakeholders and 

one of the first steps towards this has been the launch of TCS Research Beta site – 

http://www.tcsinnovations.com and enhancing the research section on the TCS Web site: 

http://www.tcs.com/about/tcs_difference/innovation/Pages/default.aspx 

In the next year, we plan to further improve the Innovation Branding of TCS through closer alignment with 

TCS Corporate Communications and Marketing, leverage the existing channels and introduce new channels 

for internal connect, and also improve coverage within and outside TCS. “ 

- Madhura Wagh, Head – iConnect. 

iConnect has interconnected with TCS Businesses at all levels - 

from new recruits to the senior management to facilitate better 

usage of innovations developed in TCS and for fostering 

innovation culture. We have used multiple channels - face to face 

meetings, campaigns, and newsletters. Special emphasis is laid on 

customization of our innovation focus and stakeholder interest 

areas. 

During the last year, we have set up a two way information flow 

between the Labs and businesses. 

iConnect and TCS Maitree Group joined hands to host Innovation 

Technology Day in Mumbai for propagating TCS's Innovation 

message across the locations. The day saw eager participation 

from enthusiastic TCS associates. They exhibited keen interest in 

the message on Corporate Technology Office initiatives, TCS 

Innovation, activities and events. It provided a great interaction 

opportunity and a brilliant platform to connect with fellow 

associates. After a series of sessions across Mumbai, iConnect is 

reaching out to associates and teams across Bangalore, Chennai, 

and Delhi. The idea is to help spawn a culture of innovation across 

the organisation and propagate the TCS Innovation message. 

iConnect Program Managers engage associates from varied teams 

in a session for exchanging ideas and discussing the TCS 

Innovation Story. It is yet another effort from iConnect to establish 

communication with fellow TCSers. 

Our strategy was to create a significant online presence for TCS 

research and strong focus on projecting our offerings. Innovation 

is one of TCS's three key differentiators and an enabler for the 

Experience Certainty Proposition. TCS Innovation Labs and the 

COIN network are the key constituents of this differentiator and 

hence we have revamped the TCS Innovations Web site. This new 

Web site would provide a deep dive into TCS Research and 


Innovations and provide an engaging platform for our Customers, 

Partners and Labs to interact.Some of the other highlights during 

the year have been: 

�Effective 

usage of internal channels of mass communication 

like intranet (Ultimatix), our Knowledge Management Portal 

(Knowmax), internal magazines (@TCS), etc 

�Successful 

execution of many internal e-campaigns such as 

TCS Top 10 and various solutions from the labs. These 

campaigns have helped spread awareness of the various tools 

and helped in lead generation. 

�Setting 

up of an organized collateral support process which 

has resulted in significant improvements in marketing 

collaterals like Brochures, Offering fliers, White Papers, and 

Case Studies. 

�Ideation, 

creation and the introduction of Innovation – CTO 

video in TCS's induction program (ILP) to ensure awareness 

among all new recruits 

�Conceptualization 

and production of the TCS Annual Research 

Report which is the comprehensive report for all our 

stakeholders of the achievements and updates in the last 

one year. 

�Active 

engagement with media and analysts to create the 

innovation brand image in line with our activities. 

�Facilitated 

national and international recognition for our 

research initiatives; examples are Wall Street Journal 

Innovation Award, Golden Peacock, and InfoWorld. 

�Planning 

and execution of strategic internal and external 

Innovation events and sponsorships 

In the coming year, we would focus on improving our internal and 

external branding and marketing to reiterate the Innovation 

branding in the minds of internal and external stakeholders. 

Madhura Wagh 


People 

The TCS CTO has two key people mandates: 

�Attract, 

retain, nurture and build great technology/research people 

�Spread 

the culture of innovation across the organization 

Over the last three years, the CTO HR function has been acting as a prime mover for this mandate by creating a nurturing ecosystem for 

researchers and embedding innovation in the organization's DNA. 

“FY09 was a big leap year for us, with the organizational restructuring providing a great opportunity for 

embedding innovation into TCS's Industry specific business units and independent operating units. The CTO 

HR strategy for FY09 was two-fold: 

�Lean, 

agile, innovation engine delivering and supporting business outcomes 

�Continued 

focus on attracting, retaining and nurturing experienced researchers 

This year, we have doubled the no of PhD’s in TCS Research in the last 2 years, and for the second year in a 

row, our niche campus hiring across the IITs and IISc saw us select 13 IIT students from over 1500 applicants. 

The 12 MBA campus hires who joined us from top-tier institutes were put through a special induction 

program leveraging on technology to connect them with all the lab/functional heads and give them a real 

world feel. 

The 13 IIT/IISc campus hires were also put through a special two-tier induction program, with a week long 

business orientation in the TCS Corporate Learning Centre, Trivandrum, and a customised research 

orientation in the Innovation Labs based in Pune and Bangalore. 

In FY10, our focus will be to promote team collaboration, align individual contribution with research 

objectives, instil a culture of peer reviews, institutionalize a mentoring progam and enhance research quality.” 

- Balaji Ganapathy, Head HR – CTO. 


“Working on the broad area of power measurement and management in data centers, I am considering the 

problem of server power estimation when power metering facility is not available. Key challenges in this are 

identifying the parameters that impact server power, such as CPU utilization, disk, network I/O, etc., and 

quantifying the impact of these parameters on power. 

My research in College Park focused on performance modeling and wireless networks. I was quite sure of 

returning to a research career in India. I may have ended up in the academia, but for an email from Prof. Anand 

Sivasubramaniam (Head, Innovation Labs - Chennai). 

I find several factors unique to research in TCS. First, the sheer range of TCS clients ensures that we have a 

perennial source of interesting "real world" research problems. Second, in addition to our lab colleagues, there are 

several opportunities to interact with peers across TCS Innovation labs with expertise in various domains. Third, 

we have close interaction with the academia both from India and abroad; the distinguished lectures hosted by the 

Chennai Mathematical Institute at TCS, Chennai and the TECS week at TCS Innovation Labs -TRDDC (Pune) 

regularly feature world leaders in research. Further, we have a vast talent pool to tap when it comes to prototyping 

research ideas and turning them into market offerings. 

I look forward to closer alliances with academia in relation to my work. While I am aware that TCS has a large 

research community, exposing select TCS trainees to the basics of doing research-oriented development could 

further strengthen the research focus of TCS.” 

- Arun Vasan, Ph.D. - Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, TCS Innovation Labs- Chennai 

“I lead the newly created Quantitative Finance (QF) initiative to perform research in both fundamental and 

practical aspects of quantitative methods in finance. It is always challenging to establish a new group in a new 

subject. 

The QF group initiated its research efforts with five researchers (Professor Sanjay Bhat in our team is from IIT 

Mumbai, on TCS' unique sabbatical programme).Within the span of only eight months, the group has managed 

to discover some fundamental new results in the area of hedging of complex derivatives. We have had several 

internal and external speakers presenting a wide variety of research seminars. Our interactions with internal and 

external agencies have added much to our research experience. 

I joined the TCS Innovation Labs- Hyderabad after nine years of teaching in the United States. My first year has 

been wonderful and welcoming. I have been a visiting professor to this lab and have been impressed by the 

intellectual environment created by Dr.Vidyasagar. My impression has only strengthened over the span of this 

year. The work atmosphere is truly conducive for performing high quality fundamental research and compares 

favourably with my academic experience. 

I hope the economic crisis will not curb dissemination of our work at national and international conferences. 

Greater access to world class journal articles and books will be good, too.” 

- Vijaysekar Chellaboina, Ph.D. - Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, TCS Innovation 

Labs - Hyderabad 


“Software tools for energy and emission management is the focus of my research in TCS Innovation Labs – 

Chennai. This project has turned out to be a good blend of R&D and field work. To arrive at performance metrics, I 

am collating and analysing a lot of field data. Having to work on a practical problem, which is the need of the 

hour, is fulfilling and I am happy to be a part of the lab. 

I had been teaching for several years. I was quite curious about industrial research. I must mention that I had been 

warned about a culture clash by peers. But working with Professor Anand Sivasubramaniam is inspiring, as he has 

a clear research focus. We hope to be working more closely with my alma mater, IIT Madras, as part of this lab. 

As an electrical engineer, my academic research projects were on power systems. This gels well with my current 

work. I continue to work on research papers and attend conferences and I am glad TCS encourages this.” 

- Geetha T, Ph.D. - Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras, TCS Innovation Labs – Chennai 

“My academic research has been mostly experimental, but in TRDDC I computationally realize and simulate 

industrial processes like carburization. This adds a balance to my research career. 

I am currently working with Dr BP Gautham in the areas of Computational material design. Minimizing energy 

consumption, product design lead times, and costs of Power train components like gears – while simultaneously 

improving performance and quality – are critically important drivers in the automotive industry. Automotive 

power train parts are usually carburized to improve the fatigue and wear resistance. However, these parts are not 

usually optimized for performance, due to inadequate understanding of materials-processing-performance 

relationship. This has motivated us to take up a 'Proof of Concept' problem, namely, Gear development using 

Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) framework. 

I have been given the opportunity to utilize my academic research skills, to listen to distinguished scientists, to 

participate in international conferences and workshops. Process R&D symposium, TRDDC seminar series and lecture 

series are some of the events that give me an opportunity to learn of others' achievement and to present mine.” 

- Ramkumar A, MS (by Research - Machine Design), IIT Madras, TCS Innovation Labs - TRDDC 


Innovation Culture 

The Innovation People Lifecycle serves as 

the CTO HR framework and each of its facets 

are built upon this foundation. Figure 15 

provides a diagrammatic representation of 

the Innovation People Lifecycle. 

The two key People mandates in TCS are 

described below: 

Attracting World Class Researchers 

�The 

niche Ph.D. hiring initiative that 

commenced in January 2007 has seen 

its impact over the last two years, 

with the number of Ph.D.s crossing 50 

in FY09. 

�Over 

20 lateral hires from Indian and 

overseas institutes/institutions were 

inducted into the R&D groups in FY09. 

�This 

year, TCS's labs benefited from five 

senior academicians from top Indian 

and overseas institutes who visited us 

for their CTO Research Sabbatical. 

�The 

Innovation labs also played host to 

33 CTO Research Interns from worldclass 

institutes, giving them an 

opportunity to participate in the 

research agenda and understand its 

functioning. 

Building Research Careers 

�From 

its introduction in early FY07, the 

research career path with its rolebased 

approach has acted as a catalyst 

for attracting new researchers and for 

existing researchers. 

Mentoring 

Grooming future 

leaders 

Member of CTB 

External 

Environment 

Attract 

�Over 

the last three years, the CTO 

organization has expanded, and multiple career streams have 

come into effect to address the needs. 


R&D Interns 

Research Collaborations 

Senior 

Leadership 

Mentor 

�Variety 

of opportunities enhancing with the creation of the 

�These 

streams, along with their well-defined and periodically 

reviewed roles, help individuals map out career paths in their core 

Incubation Group and the Corporate Tools Group under the 

areas and highlight the cross-functional opportunities. 

larger CTO umbrella. 

Academic 

Interface 

Identify 

Growth 

Initiatives 

Integration across labs 

Benchmarking of practices 

Figure15: Innovation People Lifecycle 

Head - COIN 

Head - Academic Alliance 

Head - Partner Solution/ 

VC Ecosystem 

Head - Strategic Alliances 

Solution Incubation Manager 

Partner Solution Manager 

Principal 

Scientist 

Senior 

Scientist 

CTO 

Chief 

Scientist 

Scientist 

Researcher 

PhD Hiring 

A+ Institutes 

Research Sabbaticals 

TARB 

FFS 

Talent 

Acquisition 

Communication channels 

Feedback mechanisms 

Surveys 

Internal 

Environment 

Grow 

Research 

Area Manager 

Research 

Team Lead 

Communicate 

Nurture 

Effectiveness 

Talent 

Management 

Innovation Awards 

CTO R&R framework 

Comp & Ben 

Role based Promotions 

Learning & 

Development 

Reward & 

Recognize 

Conferences / Seminars 

Technovator / Innovation 

Role wise interventions 

Talent 

Deployment 

Engage 

Role based 

deployment 

Cross Pollination 

COIN R & D Career Path Marketing & sales Business / Delivery 

Figure16: The CTO Role Based Organization 

Head - iGTM 

Head - iConnect 

Business Lead - 

Innovation Lab 

iConnect Manager (Internal) 

iConnect Manager (External) 

�The 

CTO Role Based Organization (RBO) has entrenched itself 

and evolved over its 30 months in existence. 

Head - ISU Interface 

Head - Incubation 

Head - Integration Labs 

Head - Incubation Strategy 

Entrepreneur in Residence 

Business Manager - 

New Ventures 

Manager - Integration Labs 

Lead - Integration Labs 

Technology Analyst. 


Creating a Highly Engaged Workforce 

�Constant 

communication through more than 100 road-shows 

across multiple locations by the Corporate Technology Board 

members 

�Promoting 

intellectual pursuits by nominating high potential 

researchers to attend world class conferences, publish in top 

journals, and a comprehensive incentive program for 

patenting 

�Focused 

attention on high performers, resulting in a high level 

of retention amongst researchers 

� First steps taken towards having a customized role-based 

leadership development model and engagement mechanism 

The year ahead promises to be one of opportunity, with TCS 

poised to leverage its research capabilities and innovate to 

provide continued business value to its clients. Having the right 

mix of skills and resources, coupled with a highly engaged 

innovation culture will help us derive best results from this 

opportunity. 

Balaji Ganapathy 


Special Features

TCS Top 10 - 

The Quest for the Best Coders 

Play increases with increasing complexity of the brain, say 

anthropologists. Play actually seems to contribute to health and 

longevity. As software programming moved from “art” to 

“science”, have we lost some of the “play” element in writing code? 

Do we still experience the joy, the thrill of a challenge, the creative 

surge when coding? Can we look at programming as problem 

solving - in thinking out an effective algorithm, clear data 

structures, exploring multiple possibilities towards cracking a 

problem – unconstrained by 'non technical' limitations? 

TCS CTO felt it should ensure that we still do. Hence was born the 

TCS Top 10: Quest for the best coders. Rajesh Mansharamani, VP 

and Head TCS Innovation Labs – Performance Engineering, owned 

the initiative and led from the front. As the coding contest rolled 

out across branches and geographies, and tens of thousands 

participated, the Top10 team, led by Shobana Raghavan, learnt a 

lot about game design. Setting up the contest platform involved a 

lot of thought and hard work. Choosing problems that were 

unique in some way, answers to which were not available on the 

Net was a challenge. Working on ideas from experts, scouring 

repositories of coding problems and creating set after set of tests 

modeled on real world problems, but which offered a lot of 

creative space and interest, to challenge smart people was quite a 

feat. 

The contest was tough. This facilitated the sighting of top talent 

within a 130,000 workforce, where there are galaxies of stars. 

Some of the toppers have been simply outstanding, completing 

very tough problems in 1/4th the time allocated. The “play” the 

contest served as, gave participants a sense of excitement and 

achievement (plus a lot of prizes). At the same time, it will give the 

organization some real benefits. The contest is sure to raise the 

programming standard in TCS. The repository of innovative 

solutions TCS Top 10 garners, and the tough problems from 

development projects, will feed each other to foster creative 

synergies. 

Shobana Raghavan. 

Quick Facts 

Centers covered: 

In India: 

International: 

underway 

Languages: 

Number of registrants 

(As on March 1st: 09): 

Prizes: 

Key Contributors of 

Contest Questions: 

Team: 

India Toppers: 

Seven instances held covering Chennai, 

Bangalore, Kochi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, 

Delhi, Lucknow, Kolkata, Bhubaneshwar, 

Pune, Hyderabad, Goa, Trivandrum and 

Guwahati. 

Rollout in Americas, APAC and EMEA 

Java, C, C++, and C# 

Over 11,000 

Laptops, iPods, Blue Tooth watches, 

Trophies, certificates and TCS Gems 

Jeff Ullman, Vijay Krishnamoorthy, 

Abhay Pande, Paritosh M and 

Abhijit Bhirud, 

Shobana Raghavan, Vikram Kasinathan, 

Manjeera G, Mohit Nanda, 

Jayashree Nagpal and Vinesh Prabhu. 

Nirupam Biswas (India Topper), 

Shweta Agarwal (2nd), 

Raja Subramaniam T (3rd), 

Ravi Kumar Rampalli, Deepak Surti, 

Anirban Brahmachari, Sudhir Shetiya, 

Venu Kudikala, Rajib Dutta, and 

Prasenjit Ghosh 


The Web 2.0 platforms like JustAsk and IdeaMax have 

revolutionized the way TCSers share ideas, collaborate and 

network. 

A key problem in large enterprises is the management of tacit 

knowledge. Tacit knowledge is very contextual and so far, most 

enterprise KM systems fail to recognize this. But with the arrival of 

social software, the explosion of the blogosphere, the exponential 

growth of Wikipedia and massive online collaboration becoming a 

reality on the consumer web, it has become evident that 

enterprises have to recognize the new collaboration paradigm. 

Another key inflection point is the "Web Worker" phenomenon. 

The newbies in the western workforce, born after the Internet, 

don't relate to a pre Internet era. This is the Facebook and 

MySpace generation and their ideas of how collaboration, 

knowledge management and hierarchies work, are radically 

different from traditional enterprise models. 

TCS's Web 2.0 style platforms are an acknowledgement of this. 

The CTO Blog was the first instance, creating a space where a 

trainee can converse with a Vice President. It has democratized 

technology conversations across the company. 

Solutions to technology problems and challenges as TCSers face 

them represents a key component of tacit knowledge that resides 

"in the crowd". And TCS' size makes for a humungous “crowd”. 

JustAsk, a social Q&A platform, launched during the year tries to 

reach the experts in this vast workforce and capture their tacit 

knowledge. On the face of it, the architecture is very simple. 

Anybody can ask a question and anybody can answer. The 

interesting social effects emerge from the ability to vote up or 

vote down answers. The social networking and folksonomy layer 

that has been added on top has resulted in interesting usage 

patterns. A "karma" system rewards activity on the platform and 

encourages adoption. The ability to report inappropriate use is 

critical for an organization whose average employee age is in the 

twenties. The platform has been adopted eagerly, with 10,000 + 

questions answered in a few months. JustAsk has a powerful 

search mechanism. On an average, it takes less than 10 minutes 

for a question to get an answer! 

Ideamax a social Innovation platform, launched recently, is 

broadly inspired by Digg.com and Dell's Ideastorm experiment. 

Ideamax allows anybody to submit, comment, vote, rate, 

bookmark and share ideas in a participatory ecosystem. Going 

beyond just the submission process, Ideamax comes with the 

ability to track ideas to completion. Ideamax has extensive 

semantic capabilities to unearth idea relationships and detect 

potential duplicates. An interesting extension is the "Innovation 

Stock Market" that allows users to bet their virtual currency on 

ideas. This provides a counterpoint to pure popularity based 

voting systems. Ideamax has collected over 12,000 ideas with 

several hundreds under implementation. 

Both Ideamax and JustAsk are two small pieces in the larger 

Enterprise KM 2.0 puzzle and we have already seen interesting 

emergent effects of such large scale social platforms. JustAsk has 

seen experts emerge from the edges of the enterprise and 

Ideamax has fostered the creation of "Smart Mobs", as Howard 

Rheingold puts it, as a viable alternative to traditional project 

teams. 

Krish Ashok 


Appendix

Events 

TCS Excellence in Computer Science 

(TECS) Week 2009 

The 7th TCS Excellence in Computer Science Week (TECS Week 2009) was 

held at TRDDC, Pune from 5 to 9 January 2009. It was conducted by Tata 

Research Development and Design Centre (TRDDC) jointly with United 

Nations University (UNU/IIST) and Indian Association for Research in 

Computing Science (IARCS). 

TECS Week is an annual event featuring a series of lectures on a topic 

related to computer science and engineering. It aims at providing highquality 

computer science education to students, faculty and practitioners 

from developing countries. 

The topic for this year’s TECS Week was Decentralized Cooperative 

Computing. Five experts of international repute delivered a series of 

lectures on topics that spanned from the fundamentals to the latest 

research in the field of Decentralized and Cooperative Computing. 

The invited speakers of TECS Week this year were Professor Lorenzo Alvisi 

from University of Texas at Austin, USA; Professor Peter Druschel from Max 

Planck Institute for Software Systems, Germany; Professor S. Keshav from 

University of Waterloo, Canada; Dr. Ravi Kumar from Yahoo! Research, USA; 

and Professor Guru Parulkar from Stanford University, USA. 

Professor Lorenzo Alvisi lectured on designing Byzantine Fault Tolerant 

systems. These systems continue to function correctly even when a subset 

of its components deviate arbitrarily from their correct behavior. 

Professor Peter Druschel brought out technical challenges such as selforganization, 

robustness, and incentive-compatibility in designing 

decentralized systems. He discussed the state-of-the-art in technologies 

like overlay networks, distributed hash tables, among others. He also put 

forth the concept of accountability for automated and reliable fault 

detection. 

Professor S. Keshav and Dr. Ravi Kumar discussed the applications of 

decentralized cooperative computing. Professor S. Keshav discussed 

Internet, the most successful applications since the last three decades. He 

gave valuable insights on designing and implementing Internet protocols. 

Dr. Ravi Kumar discussed the latest revolution of Social Networking. He 

explained—using data analytics—how social networks grow and evolve 

over a period of time. He also gave insights into various aspects of social 

networks like the small world phenomenon, understanding the nature of 

influence and information propagation in a social network. 

Professor Guru Parulkar addressed the issues related to how new 

inventions and uses were pushing the Internet into realms that the 

original design had not anticipated. He pointed out that future Internet 

should be re-designed in a way such that it would naturally support 

moving of computing and storage into Internet, support wireless 

communication, and mobility. He outlined the initial efforts in this 

direction made by a team at Stanford University. 

The lectures were very informative. While some lectures focused on the 

technical nuances of decentralized computing, others discussed 

decentralized application. All the lectures were well attended by a large 

enthusiastic audience and were extremely interactive. 

TECS Week 2009 received an overwhelming response with over 180 

applications for participation from Asian countries. Of these, 65 candidates 

from India and neighbouring countries were selected to participate in the 

event. These candidates were from academic institutes, government 

research labs, and industry. In addition, about 20 TCSers participated in 

the event. A random survey conducted by us showed that the participants 

were extremely satisfied with the outcome of the workshop in terms of the 

choice of the theme, the lectures and the overall organization of the 

workshop. Most of them termed it as a ‘great learning experience’. 

Invited Lectures and Presentations 

TCS Innovation Labs - Bangalore 

�Harihara 

S.G, “Novel IP core for LDPC decoders for WiMAX” Tata 

Group Innovation Forum, Bangalore, May 2008. 

�T. 

Chakravarty, “Elements of RF Design for modern wireless systems”, 

Workshop on Advances in RF Design, IIT Kharagpur, July 2008 

�T. 

Chakravarty, “On tropospheric wave propagation”, ARIES 

(Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences, 

Manora Peak, Nainital, (An observational centre under 

Department of Science & Technology, Govt. of India, 

24th-28th November 2008 

�P. 

Balamuralidhar, “ Virtual Instrumentation and emerging 

technologies”, Inaugurated one-day workshop on “Virtual 

Instrumentation” by NI and MVJ College of Engineering, 

Bangalore, 18th November 2008 

�Harihara 

S.G, “Novel Decoder architectures for Projective 

Geometry based LDPC Codes” IFIP Wireless days Dubai, 

25 November 2008. 

�Harihara 

S.G, ”Low Complexity Iterative Decoding Algorithm 

for Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes” IFIP Wireless days 

Dubai, 25 November 2008 


�Srinivasan 

Jayaraman Low Back Pain Evaluation for Cyclist 

using sEMG: A Comparative Study between Bicyclist and 

Aerobic Cyclist”, IEEE- ICBME, Singapore, December 2008 

�Srinivasan 

Jayaraman, “Cognitive Effect of Music for Joggers 

Using EEG”, IEEE-ICBME, Singapore, December 2008 

TCS Innovation Labs - Delhi 

Workshop - Virtual Reality and its application in enterprises 

TCS Innovation Labs - Delhi held a workshop on virtual reality and its 

application in enterprises with the aim of bringing together researchers 

and practitioners of common interests in emerging computer graphics 

and virtual reality technology, its application and deployment in 

enterprises and moving the state-of-art forward. 

The workshop, held from 21- 22 April, saw participation from eminent 

researchers of best universities within India and abroad. Prof. Dinesh 

Manocha (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) gave the keynote 

address on bringing realism to virtual environments. Dr. Mark Riedl 

(Georgia Institute of Technology) spoke on intelligent experience 

management for virtual worlds. Other speakers included experts in the 

domain from IIT Delhi, IIT Mumbai and IIIT Hyderabad. For an industry 

perspective, TCS organised ‘talks’ by a client interested in virtual worlds for 

enterprises and by ProtonMedia’s CEO. ProtonMedia is a company that has 

created a virtual world for enterprises. 

The audience included members from government organisations such as 

the National Technical Research Organisation, research scholars, engineers 

from Samsung, Adobe and Trimensions, and TCS associates. 

TCS Innovation Labs - Kolkata 

Workshop on Machine Vision with emphasis on Industrial 

Automation: Open Research Areas (12 September 2008) 

The Machine Vision workshop was held in TCS Kolkata on 12 September, 

2008. Mr. Debasis Bandyopadhyay (Vice President-TCS) delivered the 

opening address and Mr. Arpan Pal (Technology Group Head, TCS 

Innovation Labs - Kolkata) talked on the concept of TCS Virtual Lab. 

Speakers included Prof. P.K. Biswas (IIT-KGP), Prof. Biswajay Chatterjee (IEM 

Kolkata), Prof. Mander Mitra (ISI-Kolkata) and Prof. Bhabatosh Chanda (ISI- 

Kolkata). 

The discussion revolved around the open research areas in the field of 

Industrial Automation. Open problems in the area of Industrial 

Automation were discussed upon and few of them were short-listed for 

future course of work. 

Some of the key learning from the workshop were: 

�Different 

techniques of detecting face and tracking 

�Awareness 

on the fact that the machine vision problems not 

only lie on the image processing domain but a majority lies on 

the setup of targeted environment and the integration of 

mechanics and imaging 

�The 

concept of view based object retrieval 

�Text 

based retrieval 

�Open 

problems in surveillance 

Workshop on Media Processing Infrastructure (17 November 2008) 

The Media Processing Infrastructure workshop was 

conducted in Kolkata on 17 November, 2008. 

Mr. Debasis Bandyopadhyay (Vice President-TCS) delivered the 

introductory address wherein the workshop objectives were 

stated to the participants. 

Mr. Ganapathy Narayanan presented Media and 

Entertainment industry overview. The topic of discussion 

revolved around key application areas in this field of work, TCS 

engagements in this vertical, typical customer pain areas and 

possible opportunities. 

Mr. Arpan Pal (Technology Group Head, TCS Innovation Labs - 

Kolkata) briefed the audience regarding the current R&D 

programs in TCS in the multimedia space and infrastructure 

components related to these solutions. 

Mr. Prateep Misra (Infrastructure Group Head, TCS Innovation 

Labs - Kolkata) introduced the audience to Hadoop and 

MapReduce, and new open storage based architectures. 

�On 

8 August, 2008, an internal workshop was held on ’Wireless 

Communications- 4G and Beyond’. Prof. Ramjee Prasad of CTIF 

Aalborg was among the speakers in the workshop. 

�On 

19 December, 2008, an internal seminar was held on 

‘Wireless Sensor and Mesh Networks- Opportunities and 

Challenges.’ Dr. Mahesh Marina of University of Edinburgh was 

among the speakers in the seminar. 

TCS Innovation Labs – Mumbai 

�Workshop 

conducted on Rural BPO. C N Ram (Ex CIO of HDFC) 

of Ruralshore, V K Raman, Nitin Desai from TCS BPO were the 

invitees. (July 2008) 


�Workshop 

conducted on Speech Enabled services. We invited 

Nortel group of Telecom industry unit (Nishikanth Joshi), 

Nortel India (Atin Mahajan, Zafar-Younus Shaikh) to the 

workshop. (October 2008) 

TCS Innovation Labs - Performance 

Engineering 

Multi-core Technology Workshops – January 2009 

In this series, SUN and Intel conducted workshops on their upcoming 

multi-core technologies and programming platforms. The workshops were 

conducted across Mumbai and Bangalore through video-conferencing. 

The workshops covered the latest chip level multithreading (CMT) and 

simultaneous multithreading (SMT) technologies in hardware, which scale 

to tens of hundreds of threads/core per server, as well as the software 

thread building blocks for building parallel processing applications that 

can efficiently utilize the underlying CPU resources. 

TCS Innovation Labs - TRDDC 

�The 

fourth Dr. Dara P Antia Memorial Lecture: The Indian Institute of 

Metals, Pune Chapter and TCS Innovation Labs - TRDDC organized the 

fourth Dr Data P Antia Memorial Lecture on ’Material Science 

Approaches to Study Human Diseases’ on 23 January, 2009. A lecture 

was delivered by Professor Subra Suresh, Dean of Engineering MIT, 

USA on ’Materials Science Approaches to the Study of Human 

Diseases’. During this talk, he highlighted the importance of materials 

Visitors 

TCS Innovation Labs – Chennai 

(Infrastructure) 

�Dr.Partha 

Ranganathan, Principal Research Scientist, 

Hewlett Packard Labs, Palo Alto, 19 August 2008 

�Samir 

Menon, CEO & Co-Founder, Nature First, 28 August 2008 

�Dr. 

Norbert Henze, Karlsruhe University, Germany, 9 September 2008 

�Prof. 

Atif Memom, Professor, University of Maryland, USA, 5 December 2008 

�Prof. 

Rajkumar Buyya, Professor, University of Melbourne and 

Manjrasoft, Australia, 16 December 2008 

science in Biomedical Engineering. He discussed in detail, the changes 

in the mechanical properties of red blood cells affected by malaria. He 

concluded that combining both material science and biomedical 

engineering would unveil the great mysteries of science. 

�Workshop 

on Surface Engineering: The Indian Institute of Metals, Pune 

Chapter and TCS Innovation Labs - TRDDC organized the workshop on 

Surface Engineering on 23 January, 2009 at the TRDDC auditorium. 

�Invited 

lecture by Dr. Pradip on Challenging process design and scaleup 

issues in the manufacture of performance products - a perspective 

on the demands of modern chemical engineering, for Chemference 

08 - Annual Research Symposium, 5 – 6 July, 2008, IIT Kanpur 

�A. 

K. Singh and Satyam Sahay, Modeling of Casting and Heat 

Treatment, Workshop on Advances in Casting, Heat treatment and 

Surface Engineering, July 2008 

�Invited 

lecture by Dr. Beena Rai on Surfactants at Interfaces: A 

Molecular Modeling Approach to Engineered Molecules for Industrial 

Applications at Chem. Eng. Department, IITK, 5 September, 2008. 

�Satyam 

S.Sahay, ‘Model based optimization of industrial heat 

treatment & eco-friendly quenchants’ workshop on Quenching & 

Distortion Control, 28-30 September, 2008, NIT Surathkal 

�A 

K Singh and Ravindra Pardeshi: ‘Role of Multiphase/multiscale 

Phenomena in Solidification Processing”, 2nd International Conference 

on Multi-Scale Structures and Dynamics of Complex Systems, 

Bangalore, September 2008 


�Prof. 

Jacob Rehot, Head of Fraunhoffer Research Institute in 

Dortmud, Dr. Shriram Rajamani (Microsoft), purpose - 

collaboration with Indian Industry and academia. 

�Prof. 

Subodh Kumar, IIT Delhi, Discussion - Virtual reality, April 2008. 

�Prof. 

R Ramaswamy, JNU-Delhi, collaboration with Industry 

and academia, June 2008. 

�Prof. 

Prasun Dewan, University of North Carolina, Talk on 

‘Collaboration technologies’. 

�Prof. 

Pankaj Mehra, Distinguished Technologist -HP, Talk on ‘An 


information modeling and classification system for early 

lifecycle information’, July 2008. 

�Prof. 

Mark Mortenson, MIT, USA, Talk on ‘Globally distributed 

teams: pathways and barriers to performance’, October 2008. 

�Dr. 

Neeran Karnik, IBM, Talk on ‘Symphony: decentralized 

orchestration of composite Web services’, November 2008. 

�Prof. 

Prasun Dewan, University of North Carolina, December ’08. 

�Mr. 

Lorna Jean Edmonds, PhD, AVP Internal relations, University of 

Toronto, March ’09. Purpose - collaboration with Indian Industry. 

TCS Innovation Labs - Hyderabad 

�Dr. 

Soura Dasgupta, University of Iowa, USA from 23 May to 14 June, 2008. 

�Dr. 

Balaji Prabhakar, Stanford University, USA on 23 June. 

�Prof. 

Gautschi and Prof. Aparna Gupta, Lally School of 

Management and Technology, RPI, USA on 2 July, 2008. 

�Prof 

Vijayakumar, Vignan Jyothi Institute of Management, 

India on 29 July. 

�Dr. 

Rahul Mitra, Associate Director, MD Anderson Cancer Centre, USA 

on 22 August. 

�Dr.Madhu 

Kalimipalli, University of Waterloo, UK on 28 August. 

�Dr. 

Madan Babu, MRC Laboratory, Cambridge on 26 September. 

�Dr. 

Kanury Rao, ICGEB, New Delhi and Dr. Shekar Mande, 

CDFD, Hyderabad on 29 September. 

�Glen 

Zorpette, IEEE, USA on 10 October. 

�Dr. 

Anirban Mukherjee, IIT-Kharagpur from 7 to 26 December. 

�Dr. 

Vsevolod Makeev, Institute of Genetics, GosNIIKa, Moscow, 

Russia on December 11. 

�Dr. 

Aparna Gupta, Lally School of Management and Technology, 

RPI, USA from 12 December to 7 January 2009. 

�Prof. 

Sanjoy Mitter, MIT, USA on 17 December. 

�Dr. 

Rajan Gupta from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA 

on 28 January 2009. 


�Mr. 

Larry Tan (President TI Asia), Mr.Bobby Mitra (MD TI India) 

and Mr.Arun Jain (Head - TI India Sales), January 2009 

�Prof. 

Dipti Mukherjee (Indian Statistical Institute), January 2009 

�Mr. 

Umesh R, Head of Nihon Communication Systems, visited 

the lab on 15 May, 2008 and talked on the capabilities of 

Qualnet simulator and its applications. 

�Mr. 

Michael Jensen, Head of Network Planning, WIP Labs- 

Denmark, visited the lab on 7 August, 2008 to discuss and 

demonstrate the capabilities of WIPLAN- a network planning 

tool developed by WIP LAB. 

�Prof. 

Ramjee Prasad, Director CTIF, Aalborg University, 

Denmark, visited the lab on 8 August, 2008. He delivered a talk 

on ‘4G and Beyond’ and discussed the issues and challenges of 

next generation wireless communication systems. 

�Dr. 

Mahesh Marina, University of Edinburgh, visited the lab on 

19 December, 2008. He delivered a talk on Sensor Networks 

and Wireless Mesh Networks. 


�Mr. 

Avijit Dutt – Haier Telecom, April 2008. 

�Mr. 

Jay Asundi – University of Texas, May 2008. 

�Dr. 

Subhash Udeshi – Jayant Agro-Organics Ltd, 

Mr. C. N. Ram – Rural Shores Business Services Pvt. Ltd., July 2008. 

�Mr. 

Gulzar Singh Chahal, Mr. Arun Pandhi and 

Mr. Jamshed Bamji – Sir Ratan Tata Trust, August 2008. 

�Mr. 

Niraj Gandhi – Rhythm Services Network LLC, September 2008. 

�Mr. 

Ravishankar Mantha – Agriwatch, October 2008. 

�Mr. 

S. K. Chaturvedi – Rallis India Ltd., November 2008. 

�Prof. 

Annirudha Joshi, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mumbai; 

Mr. Nirmalendu Jajodia and Mr. Sudarshan Singh – NCDEX Ltd., 

Mr. Ram Warriar – Hydrovision, Mr. Sandeep Gupta – Arizona State 

University, Ashish Gandhi (Verizon Wireless), December 2008. 

�Mr. 

Sunil Bandhu – TTSL (V.P.), Mr. Rohit Gupta – BCG, January 2009. 


�Prof. 

P. Somasundaran, Columbia University, New York, USA, 

19 April 2008. 

�Prof. 

Pradip Dutta, Department of Mechanical Engineering, 

Indian Institute of Science, 11 November 2008. 


�Prof. 

P Somasundaran, Columbia University, New York, USA, 

15 December 2008. 

�Hosted 

Bob Zeidman, President, Zeidman Consulting and 

Software Analysis and Forsenic Engineering, for talk and demo 

of ‘CodeSuite’ their flag-ship product for detecting Software Plagiarism 

�Atif 

M. Memon, Associate Professor at the Department of Computer 

Science, University of Maryland, USA, November 2008. 

�David 

Whyte, VP, Lending, Insurance and Amicus Technology, 

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), Toronto, Canada, 

17 -19 January 2009. 

�Anuj 

Dhall, VP, Channels and Distribution, Canadian Imperial 

Bank of Commerce (CIBC), Toronto, Canada, 17 -19 January 2009. 

�Tina 

Robinet, Senior Director, ADM, Canadian Imperial Bank of 

Commerce (CIBC), Toronto, Canada, 17 -19 January 2009. 

�Esther 

Wong, Senior Director, Quality Assurance, Canadian Imperial 

Bank of Commerce (CIBC), Toronto, Canada, 17 -19 January 2009. 

�Kevin 

Paget, Senior Manager, Canadian Imperial Bank of 

Commerce (CIBC), Toronto, Canada, 17 -19 January 2009. 

�Prof. 

Narsingh Deo, Millican Chair Person, University of Central 

Florida, Orlando, 20-26 December 2008, Talk Series. 

Publications 

Book Sections 

TCS Innovation Labs- Bangalore 

Lecture Notes In Computer Science: An Efficient Certificate 

Authority for Ad Hoc Networks, Jaydip Sen and Harihara 

Subramanyam 



�Y. 

Kim, J. Choi, S. Gurumurthi, A. Sivasubramaniam. Managing 

Thermal Emergencies in Disk-Based Storage Systems. To 

�Prof. 

Sushil Kumar, CSE, Georgia State University, 

11 December 2008, Talk. 

�Mukund 

Sundarajan, CSE., Stanford University, 11 December 2008. 

�Dr. 

Pushpak Bhattacharya and team, IITB, 4th October 2008, Seminar. 

�Prof. 

Don Batory, University of Texas, Austin, 2nd March 2009. 

�Marcel 

Fuerst, Deutsche Bank, 28-29 August 2008. 

�Dr. 

Shirish Karande, University of California, Santa Cruz, 

19th February 2009. 

�Dr. 

Pallavi Manohar, IIT Powai, 19th February 2009 

�Major 

Sudip Chatterjee, PMO BSS, Dte Gen of Info Systems, 

New Delhi, 26th August 2008. 

�Alysia 

M. Sagi-Dolev, Ph.D, Qylur Security Systems Inc, 

17th March 2009. 

�Ritesh 

Kumar, PhD, University of North California, 2nd May 2008. 

�Sandeep 

Garg, PhD, IT, BHU, 29th April 2008. 

�Rahul 

Nagpal, PhD, IISC, 21st April 2008. 

�Dr. 

Satya Sai Prakash, PhD, IIT Madras - Freelance Research 

Consultant, 8th April 2008. 

appear in ASME Journal of Electronic Packaging. 

�C. 

Liu, A. Sivasubramaniam, M. Kandemir. Optimizing Bus 

Energy Consumption of On-Chip Multiprocessors Using 

Frequent Values. To appear in Journal of Systems Architecture: 

Special Issue on Best Papers of Euromicro Conference on 

Parallel and Distributed Processing 2004. 

�M. 

Squillante, Y. Zhang, A. Sivasubramaniam, N. Gautam. 

Generalized Parallel-Server Fork-Join Queues with Dynamic 

Task Scheduling. Annals of Operations Research, 160(1):227- 

255, April 2008. 

�J. 

Choi, Y. Kim, A. Sivasubramaniam, J. Srebric, Q. Wang, J. Lee. 

A CFD-based Tool for Studying Temperature in 

Rack-mounted Servers. IEEE Transactions on Computers, 

57(8):1129:1142, August 2008. 


�J. 

Choi, S. Govindan, B. Urgaonkar, A. Sivasubramaniam. 

Profiling, prediction and capping of power in Consolidated 

Environments. In Proceedings of International Conference on 

Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer Systems 

(MASCOTS), September 2008. (Best Student Paper Award). 

�N. 

Soundararajan, N. Vijaykrishnan, A. Sivasubramaniam. 

Impact of DVFS on the architectural vulnerability of GALS 

architectures. In Proceedings of the International Symposium 

on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED), August 2008. 

�P. 

Nath, B. Urgaonkar, A. Sivasubramaniam. Evaluating the 

Usefulness of Content Addressable Storage for High- 

Performance Data Intensive Applications. In Proceedings on 

the IEEE International Conference on High Performance 

Distributed Computing (HPDC), pages 35-44, June 2008. 

�S. 

Chaitanya, B. Urgaonkar, A. Sivasubramaniam. QDSL: QoSaware 

Systems with Differential Service Levels. In Proceedings 

of the ACM SIGMETRICS International Conference on 

Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, pages 289- 

300, June 2008. [36 accepted out of 201 submissions] 

�N. 

Soundararajan, A. Yanamandra, C. Nicopolous, V.Narayanan, 

A. Sivasubramaniam, and M. J. Irwin. Analysis and Solutions to 

Issue Queue Process Variation. To appear in Proceedings of the 

International Conference on Dependable Systems and 

Networks, June 2008. [23% acceptance rate] 

�V.Jayashankar, 

S.Anand, T.Geetha, ‘A twin unidirectional 

impulse turbine topology for OWC based wave energy plants’, 

to appear in Science Direct journal of Renewable Energy. 

�T.Geetha 

, V.Jayashankar, ‘Variable Frequency Transformers for 

increased wind penetration’, presented in Joint International 

Conference on Power System Technology and IEEE Power 

India Conference (POWERCON), 12-15 October 2008, New Delhi. 

�T.Geetha 

, V.Jayashankar, ‘Stability assessment of Power System 

Models for higher wind penetration’, presented in Joint International 

Conference on Power System Technology and IEEE Power India 

Conference (POWERCON), 12-15 October 2008, New Delhi. 

�T.Geetha, 

V.Jayashankar, ‘Generation dispatch with storage 

and Renewables under Availability Based Tariff’, presented in 

IEEE TENCON, 18-21 November 2008, Hyderabad. (Best paper award) 

�T.Geetha, 

V.Jayashankar, ‘Sea water based pumped storage 

and desalination system’ accepted for presentation in 

International conference in Ocean Engineering (ICOE), 

February 2-5 2009, IITM. 

�K.Mala, 

V.Jayashankar, Koshy Varghese, T.Geetha, ‘Offshore 

renewables for Indian Railways’, accepted for presentation in First 

International Seminar on Alternative fuels for Rail Traction, 

February 2-9 2009, New Delhi. 

�K.Mala, 

V.Jayashankar, T.Geetha, ‘Pumped Storage schemes for 

Indian Railways’, accepted for presentation in First 

International Seminar on Alternative fuels for Rail Traction, 

February 2-9 2009, New Delhi. 

TCS Innovation Labs – Kolkata 

�Arijit 

Ukil, ‘Cross-Layer Optimized Resource Allocation 

Mechanisms for Next-Generation Wireless Communication 

Systems.’ Book Chapter under preparation for the book: 

‘Fourth-Generation (4G) Wireless Networks: Applications and 

Innovations’. Publisher: IGI Global. Editors: Sasan Adibi, 

University of Waterloo, Canada, Amin Mobasher, Research in 

Motion (RIM), Canada, and Tom Tofigh, AT&T, WiMAX Forum 

Application Group Chair. 

�Jaydip 

Sen, ‘Security Issues in Pervasive Computing 

Environment.’ Book chapter under preparation for the book: 

‘Security in Computing and Networking Systems: The State-of- 

Art.’ Publisher: CRC Press. Editors: William McQuay, The 

Computer and Information Society, Inc. USA and Waleed W. 

Smari, University of Dayton, USA. 

�Jaydip 

Sen: Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh 

Networks (Handbook of Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks’ 

to be published by Springer- London, volume editor: 

Dr. Sudip Misra, Ryerson University, Canada.) 

TCS Innovation Labs – TRDDC 

�Somasundaran, 

P., and V. Runkana, ‘Aggregation of Colloids: 

Recent Developments in Population Balance Modeling,’ In: D. 

Platikanov and D. Exerowa (Eds.), Highlights in Colloid Science, 

WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim (2008) 

�M. 

Gharote, S. Lodha, A. Deshpande, N. Kantharia, Y. Wadademar, A. 

Rao, Automated Telescope Scheduling, In Proceedings of Low 

Frequency Radio Universe Conference (LFRU), Pune, December 2008. 

�M. 

Gharote, S. Sahay, B. Ingole, N. Sonawane , V. Vijay, 

Comparison and Evaluation of the Product Supply-Chain of 

Global Steel Enterprises, In Proceedings of 12th Annual 

Conference of the Society of Operations Management, IIT Kanpur, 

December 2008. 


�M. 

Panduranga Rao, A. Ahuja, S. Iyengar, K. Iyer, R. Khade, S. 

Lodha, D. Mehta, B. Nagy, A Minimum Variance Method for 

Problems in Radio Antenna Placement, In Proceedings of Low 

Frequency Radio Universe Conference (LFRU), December 2008. 

�M. 

Gharote, A. Deshpande, Optimization of Integrated 

Forward and Reverse Supply Chain, In Proceedings of 18th 

Triennial Conference of the International Federation of 

Operational Research Societies (IFORS),Johannesburg, 

South Africa, July 2008. 

�S. 

Agarwal, V. Saradhi, H. Karnick, Kernel-based On-line 

Machine Learning and Support Vector Reduction, 

Neurocomputing, 71 (7), May 2008, pages 1230-1237. 

�G. 

Palshikar, M. Apte, Collusion Detection using Graph 

Clustering, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (Springer), 

16 (2), April 2008, pages 135-164. 

�M. 

Natu, G. Palshikar, Discovering Interesting Subsets using 

Statistical Analysis, In Proceedings of International Conference 

on Management of Data (COMAD2008), 2008. 

�V. 

Vijaya Saradhi, H. Karnick, P. Mitra, Topic Distillation using 

Support Vector Data Description", In Proceedings of COMAD, 2008. 

�V. 

Vijaya Saradhi, H. Karnick, On the Stability and Bias-Variance 

Analysis of Sparse SVMs, 2008. 

�M. 

Meshram, A. Kulkarni, S. Lele, V. Jayaraman, B. Kulkarni, 

Optimal Xylanase production using Penicilium Janthinellum 

NCIM 1169: A model based approach, Biochemical 

Engineering Journal, 40 (2), 2008, pages 348-356. 

�K. 

Patil, A. Kulkarni, Kernel Enabled Methods for Subspace 

Regression and Efficient Control, "International Journal of 

Modeling, Identification and Control", 4 (3), 2008. 

�S. 

Angadi, A. Kulkarni, Nonlinear signal analysis to understand 

the dynamics of the protein sequences, European Physical 

Journal Special Topics, 164 (0), 2008, pages 141-155. 

�Document 

Summarization using Central Sentences and 

Keywords, Unpublished Technical Report, 0 (0), 2008. 

�J. 

Augustine, S. Irani, C. Swamy, Optimal aOptimal Power- 

Down Strategies, SIAM Journal on Computing, 37 (5), 2008, 

pages 1499-1516. 

�P. 

Bose, S. Langerman , S. Roy, Smallest Enclosing Circle 

Centered on a Query Line Segment, In Proceedings of 

Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry (CCCG), 

2008, pages 167-170. 

�G. 

Das, S. Roy, S. Das, S. Nandy, Variations of Base Station 

Placement Problem on the Boundary of a Convex Region, 

International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science, 19 

(0), 2008, pages 405-427. 

�A. 

Karmakar, S. Roy , S. Das, Fast Computation of Smallest 

Enclosing Circle with Center on a Query Line Segment, 

Information Processing Letters, 108 (0), 2008, pages 339-422. 

�A. 

Karmakar, S. Roy , S. Das, Guarding Exterior Region of a 

Simple Polygon, In Proceedings of Workshop on Algorithms 

and Computation (WALCOM), 2008, pages 100-110. 

�M. 

Panduranga Rao, Interference Automata, 2008, pages 89-103. 

�S. 

Roy, D. Bardhan , S. Das, Base Station Placement on 

Boundary of a Convex Polygon, "Journal of Parallel and 

Distributed Computing,", 68 (0), 2008, pages 263-275. 

�M. 

Natu and A. S. Sethi, Application of Adaptive Probing for 

Fault Diagnosis in Computer Networks. IEEE/ IFIP Network 

Operations and Management Symposium, Salvador, Brazil, 

April 2008. Best Ph.D. Research Award. 

�M. 

Natu and A. S. Sethi, Probe station placement for robust 

monitoring of networks. Journal of Network and Systems 

Management, 16(4), 2008, pages 351-374. 

�S. 

Ganesh, M. Natu, A.S. Sethi, R. Gopaul, and R. Hardy, Design 

Approaches for Stealthy Probing Mechanisms in Battlefield 

Networks. In Proceedings of Milcom-2008, IEEE Military 

Communications Conference, San Diego, CA, November 2008. 

�V. 

Mahajan, M. Natu, and A.S. Sethi, Analysis of Wormhole Intrusion 

Attacks in MANETs. In Proceedings of Milcom-2008, IEEE Military 

Communications Conference, San Diego, CA, November 2008. 

�M. 

Natu and A.S. Sethi, Using Temporal Correlation for Fault 

Localization in Dynamically Changing Networks. International 

Journal of Network Management, Vol. 18 No. 4 (July-August 2008), 

pages 303-316. 

�C.-S. 

Chao, M. Natu, and A.S. Sethi, Call Forwarding-Based 

Active Probing for POTS Fault Isolation. Journal of Network 

and Systems Management, Vol. 16 No. 2 (June 2008), pages 145-162. 

�M. 

Natu, A.S. Sethi, and E.L. Lloyd, Efficient Probe Selection 

Algorithms for Fault Diagnosis. Telecommunications Systems 

Journal, Vol. 37 (2008), pages 109-125. Invited Paper. 

�M. 

Natu and G. K. Palshikar, Discovering Interesting Subsets 

Using Statistical Analysis. 14th International Conference on 

Management of Data, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, 

India, December 2008. 


�V. 

Sadaphal, B. Jain, Tracking Target using Sensor Networks: Target 

Detection and Route Activation under Energy Constraints, In 

Proceedings of COMSWARE 2008, Bangalore, India, 2008. 

�V. 

Sadaphal, B. Jain, Random and Periodic Sleep Schedules for 

Target Detection in Sensor Network, Springer Journal of 

Computer Science and Technology, 23(3), May 2008. 

Conference Proceedings 


�‘Concepts 

of Graph Theory Relevant to Adhoc Networks’, M.A. 

Rajan, M. Girish Chandra, Lokanatha C. Reddy and Prakash S. 

Hiremath, International Conference on Computers, 

Communications & Control (ICCCC 2008), Romania, May 2008. 

�‘Characteristic 

Impedance of Microstrip-like Interconnections 

Guarded by Ground Tracks’, Rohit Sharma, T. Chakravarty, and 

A. B. Bhattacharyya, Proceedings of the 29th URSI General 

Symposium, Chicago, August 2008. 

�‘On 

resonant frequency of PIN shorted gap coupled circular 

patch antenna’, P. Kumar, G. Singh, T. Chakravarty and S. 

Bhooshan, International Conference PIERS 2008, Hangzhou, 

China, 24 – 28 March, 2008. 

�‘Resonant 

frequency of annular ring antenna using shorting 

pins’, M.Mahajan, T Chakravarty, S.K.Khah, IEEE-EMC-Zurich 

Symposium, Singapore, May 2008, pp. 862-865 

�‘Study 

of Bandwidth and Radiation Properties of Loaded 

Annular Ring Antenna.’ M.Mahajan, T Chakravarty, S.K.Khah, 

International Conference on Recent Advances on in 

Microwave Theory and Applications, MICROWAVE – 2008, 

Jaipur (Accepted) 

�‘Study 

of Return loss and Radiation Patterns of Ring Antenna 

Using Extended Cavity Model.’ M.Mahajan, T Chakravarty, 

S.K.Khah, International Conference on Recent Advances on in 

Microwave Theory and Applications, MICROWAVE – 2008, 

Jaipur, (Accepted) 

�‘Low 

Back Pain Evaluation for Cyclist using sEMG: A Comparative Study 

between Bicyclist and Aerobic Cyclist’, Srinivasan Jayaraman, 

Venkatesh Balasubramanian IEEE- ICBME, Singapore, 2008 

�‘Cognitive 

Effect of Music for Joggers Using EEG’, Srinivasan 

Jayaraman, Ashwin and Venkatesh Balasubramanian IEEE- 

ICBME, Singapore, 2008 

�Harihara 

S.G, M. Girish Chandra, Tarakapraveen Uppalapati, 

B.S. Adiga, ‘Decoding Architectures for Projective Geometry 

Based LDPC codes’, IFIP Wireless Days, Dubai, November 2008. 


�Geetika 

Sharma, Santanu Chaudhury, J B Srivastava, 'On 

Exploiting Affine Repetitions for View Synthesis from a Single 

Image', ICVGIP, Bhubaneswar, December ’08. 

�Shefali 

Bhatt, C Anantaram, Hemant Jain 'An architecture for 

intelligent email based workflow interface to Business 

applications', ICAI, Las Vegas, July ’08. 

�Shefali 

Bhatt, C Anantaram, Hemant Jain, ‘Enabling email 

based conversational interface for business applications’, 

CITSA, Florida, June ’08. 

�Amol 

R Madane, M M Shah, ‘Watermark Image Recognition using 

Principle Component Analysis’, ICETET Nagpur,16th-18th July ’08. 

�Amol 

R Madane, K. T. Talele, M. M. Shah, ‘Addition algorithm of 

watermarking’, SPIT IEEE Conference’ 08, Mumbai. 

�Amol 

R Madane, Zalak Shah, Raina Shah, Sanket Thakur 

‘Speech Compression Using Linear Predictive Coding’, MIR Day 

January ’09. 

�Amol 

R Madane, Rashmi Khare, ‘Time Domain Steganography’, 

MIR Day 2009, January ’09. 

�Sujal 

S Wattamwar, Surjeet Mishra, Hiranmay Ghosh, 

‘Multimedia Explorer: Content Based Multimedia Exploration’, 

IEEE Tencon, Hyderabad (India), November ‘08. 

�Sujal 

Wattamwar, Hiranmay Ghosh, ‘Spatio-Temporal Query for 

Multimedia Database’, Workshop on Multimedia Semantics, 

ACM Multimedia Conference 2008, Vancouver (Canada), 

October 2008. 

�Ashish 

Khare, Hiranmay Ghosh, Jaideep Jagannathan, 

‘Shopping by Example: A new Shopping Paradigm in next 

generation retail stores’, International Conference on 

Computer Vision and Applications (VISAPP), Lisbon (Portugal), 

February 2009. 

�Ashish 

Khare, Hiranmay Ghosh, Sujal Wattamwar, Aniruddha 

Sinha, Brojeshwar Bhowmick, K.S. Kschidanand Kumar, 

Sunilkumar Kopparapu, ‘Multimodal interactions in modern 

automobiles’, Workshop on Multimodal Interfaces for 

Automotive Applications, International Conference on User 

Interfaces, Florida (USA), February 2009 


�Lipika 

Dey, SK Mirajul Haque, ‘Opinion Mining from Noisy Text 

Data’, Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Analytics for Noisy 

Unstructured Text Data held in conjunction with ACM SIGIR- 

2008, AND, Singapore, July 2008 

�Lipika 

Dey, ‘Fuzzy Ontology for Handling Uncertainties & 

Inconsistencies in Domain Knowledge Description’, IEEE World 

Congress on Computational Intelligence, June 2008 

�Lipika 

Dey, Anuj Mahajan, SK Mirajul Haque, ‘Mining Financial 

News for Major Events and their Impact on the Markets’, 

Proceedings of International Conference on Web Intelligence, 

WI, Sydney, December 2008 

�Lipika 

Dey, Anuj Mahajan, SK Mirajul Haque, ‘Document 

Clustering for Event Identification and Trend Analysis in 

Market News’, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference 

on Advances in Pattern Recognition, ICAPR, Kolkata, February 2009 


�M. 

Vidyasagar. 'Systems Approach to Drug Development: Bio- 

Simulation and Bio-Mathematics'. Bio-IT World Conference & 

Expo, Boston, USA, April 2008. 

�N.Vijayarangan. 

‘Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) for mobile 

applications’. PSG college, Coimbatore, June 2008. 

�N.Vijayarangan. 

‘Implementation of SETS and ECC for mobile 

applications’. TCE college, Madurai, July 2008. 

�B. 

Gopalakrishnan. ‘Hunting for New Antiparasitic Drug 

Targets’. SERC Summer School in Modelling and Informatics in 

Drug Design, NIPER, Mohali, Punjab, July 2008. 

�B. 

Gopalakrishnan. ‘Molecular Modelling and Drug Design: I. 

towards Designing Selective PPAR Modulators and NOS 

Inhibitors’. SERC Summer School in Modelling and Informatics 

in Drug Design, NIPER, Mohali, Punjab, July 2008. 

�B. 

Gopalakrishnan. ‘Molecular Modelling and Drug Design: II. 

Virtual Screening Applied to TMPK Inhibitors as Antitubercular 

Agents’. SERC Summer School in Modelling and Informatics in 

Drug Design, NIPER, Mohali, Punjab, July 2008. 

�S. 

Rao. 'Introduction to Biometric De-duplication'. Biometric 

Conference for AP State Government, Hyderabad, August 2008. 

�B. 

Gopalakrishnan. 'Evolution of Disease and Therapy'. III-T, 

Hyderabad, November 1, 2008. 

�Sharmila 

Mande. 'Application of genome informatics to understand 

bacterial pathogenicity'. Indian Academy of Sciences Sponsored Lecture 

series in Computational Biology. Hyderabad, November 22, 2008. 

�M.Vidyasagar. 

'A brief introduction to some aspects of systems 

biology'. IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Cancun, 

Mexico, December 9, 2008 

�N. 

Vijayaragan. 'Design and Analysis of Message preprocessing 

functions for reducing hash collisions', ISSSIS 2009 

International conference, 8-10 January 2009. 

�Sharmila 

Mande. 'Facilitating Drug Discovery Research using 

Software Tools'. Conference on Drug Discovery and 

Development, New Delhi, January 23, 2009. 

�Sharmila 

Mande 'Application of Genome Informatics to identify and 

characterize gene components of Type VI Secretion System in 

Bacterial Genomes'. Perspectives and Current Trends in Bioinformatics 

(BTP2009), CCMB, Hyderabad February 12, 2009. 

�Sharmila 

Mande 'Role of Software tools in Drug Discovery'. 

Perspectives and Current Trends in Bioinformatics (BTP2009), 

CCMB, Hyderabad February 12, 2009. 

�Sharmila 

Mande 'Genomes to Drugs: Role of Bioinformatics'. 

'Science Meet 2009', Bharat Degree and U.G. College for 

Women, Hyderabad, February 15, 2009. 

�Sharmila 

Mande 'Application of Bioinformatics in Drug 

Discovery.' National Conference on Challenges and 

Opportunities in Information Technology and Bioinformatics 

(NCCOITBT-09), Vivekananda Mahavidyalaya, Udgir, 

February 28, 2009. 


�T. 

Chattopadhyay, Ayan Chaki, B. Bhowmick, and Arpan Pal: An 

Application for Retrieval of Frames from a Laparoscopic Surgical Video 

Based on Image of Query Instrument (TENCON 2008, Hyderabad) 

�T. 

Chattopadhyay, and Arpan Pal: A H.264 based Video 

Conferencing System with Watermarking (International 

Conference on Consumer Electronics, 2008 (ICCE 2008)) 

�T. 

Chattopadhyay, and Arpan Pal: A fast video encryption algorithm 

applicable to H.264 AVC for Place-shifting Solution (International 

Conference on Consumer Electronics, 2008 (ICCE 2008)) 

�K.S.Chidanand 

Kumar and Brojeshwar Bhowmick: A Survey of 

Driver Drowsiness Detection Techniques (Second National 

Workshop on Intelligent Data Analytics and Image Processing) 

�Tanushyam 

Chattopadhyay, Provat Biswas, Biswanath Saha 


and Arpan Pal: Gesture Based English Character Recognition 

for Human Machine Interaction in Interactive Set top box 

Using Multi factor analysis (Sixth Indian Conference on 

Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing, ICVGIP, 

2008, Bhubaneswar, India) 

�Brojeshwar 

Bhowmick and Kaustav Goswami: SVM Based Shot 

Boundary Detection Using Block Motion Feature Based on 

Statistical Moments (7th International Conference on 

Advances in Pattern Recognition (ICAPR 2009)) 

�Ayan 

Chaki, T Chattopadhyay: An Automatic decision support 

system for medical instrument suppliers using fuzzy 

multifactor based approach (IEEE International Symposium on 

Broadband Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting, Bilbao, Spain) 

�T 

Chattopadhyay, Arpan Pal: A Multifactorial based approach 

for evaluation of Robustness of a Video Watermarking 

Technique (IEEE International Symposium on Broadband 

Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting, Bilbao, Spain) 

�T 

Chattopadhyay, Arpan Pal: A H.264 based Video 

Watermarking solution (IEEE International Symposium on 

Broadband Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting, Bilbao, Spain) 

�T 

Chattopadhyay, Ayan Chaki, Aniruddha Sinha: Identification 

of Trademarks Painted on Ground and Billboards using H.264 

Compressed Domain Features from Sports Videos (IEEE 

International Symposium on Broadband Multimedia Systems 

and Broadcasting, Bilbao, Spain) 

�Dhiman 

Chattopadhyay, Aniruddha Sinha, T. Chattopadhyay, 

Arpan Pal: Adaptive Rate Control for H.264 Based Video 

Conferencing Over a Low Bandwidth Wired and Wireless 

Channel (IEEE International Symposium on Broadband 

Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting, Bilbao, Spain) 

�Arijit 

Ukil: Long-term proportional fair QoS profile follower 

sub-carrier allocation algorithm in dynamic OFDMA systems 

(13th International OFDM Workshop, Hamburg, Germany) 

�Jaydip 

Sen: A robust and fault-tolerant intrusion detection 

system (International Conference on Information Processing, 

Bangalore, August 2008) 

�Soma 

Bandyopadhyay: Modular Architecture of Mobile 

WiMAX MAC and Beyond With Case Studies (IEEE- 

GLOBECOMM-08) 

�Debasish 

Bera: On Prologue Decoding for SOVA-based DVB- 

RCS Turbo Codec (IEEE INDICON, December 2008) 

�Suvra 

Das: On Prologue Decoding for SOVA-based DVB-RCS 

Turbo Codec (IEEE VTC Fall 2008) 

�Suvra 

Das: Allocation fairness for MIMO precoded UTRA-LTE 

TDD (IEEE VTC Fall 2009) 

�Jaydip 

Sen, Arijit Ukil and Debasish Bera: A distributed intrusion 

detection system for wireless ad hoc networks (IEEE ICON, New Delhi) 

�Jaydip 

Sen: A Robust and Fault-Tolerant Intrusion Detection 

System (2nd International Conference on Information Processing 

(ICIP 08), Bangalore, India) 

�Arijit 

Ukil: Long-Term Proportional Fair QoS Profile Follower 

Sub-Carrier Allocation Algorithm in Dynamic OFDMA Systems 

(13th International OFDM Workshop, Hamburg, Germany) 

�Ranjan 

Dasgupta: Anatomy of RTOS and Analyze the Best 

Fitted for Small Medium and Large Footprint Embedded 

Devices in Wireless Sensor Network (SENSORCOMM, Second 

International Conference on Sensor Technologies and 

Applications, Cap Esterel, France) 

�Ranjan 

Dasgupta: Essential RTOS Services for Small Footprint 

Embedded Devices in Wireless Sensor Network (CSI-RDHS 

2008, National Conference on Research & Development in 

Hardware & Systems) 

�Jaydip 

Sen, Arijit Ukil and Debasish Bera: A Distributed Intrusion 

Detection System for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks (13th IEEE 

International Conference on networks (ICON), New Delhi) 

�Jaydip 

Sen, Arijit Ukil and Debasish Bera: A New Optimization 

Scheme for Resource Allocation in OFDMA based WiMAX 

Systems (International Conference on Computer Engineering 

and Technology (ICCET’09), Singapore) 

�Jaydip 

Sen and Arijit Ukil: An Efficient Algorithm for Context- 

Aware End-to-End Connectivity Management (IEEE International 

Symposium on Wireless and Pervasive Computing, Melbourne) 

�Jaydip 

Sen, Arijit Ukil and Debasish Bera: Dynamic OFDMA 

Resource Allocation for QoS Guarantee and System 

Optimization of Best Effort and Non Real-Time Traffic (15th 

National Conference on Communications, Guwahati) 

�Jaydip 

Sen: A Framework for Detection of Distributed Denial 

of Service Attacks (National Conference on Emerging Trends in 

Computing and Communications, NIT Hamirpur) 

�Debasish 

Bera: On Prologue Decoding for SOVA Based DVB- 

RCS Turbo Codec (National Conference on Emerging Trends in 

Computing and Communications, NIT Hamirpur) 

�Arijit 

Ukil and Jaydip Sen: Cross-Layer Optimization Framework for 

QoS-Aware WiMAX Systems (National Conference on Emerging Trends 

in Computing and Communications, NIT Hamirpur) 



�Bhushan 

G. Jagyasi, Deepthi Chander, S. N. Merchant, U. B. 

Desai, Bikash K. Dey, ‘MAAS: Multibit Adaptive Aggregation 

Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks’, in Proc. 15th 

International Conference on Telecommunication, 2008, ICT 

2008, 16-18 June 2008, St. Petersburg, Russia. 

�Deepthi 

Chander, Bhushan G. Jagyasi, U. B. Desai, S. N. 

Merchant, ‘Layed Data Aggregation in Cell-Phone based 

Wireless Sensor Networks’, in Proc. 15th International 

Conference on Telecommunication, 2008, ICT 2008, 16-18 

June 2008, St. Petersburg, Russia. 

�D. 

Chander, B. Jagyasi, U. B. Desai, S. N. Merchant,’ DVD based 

Moving Event Localization in Multihop Cellular Sensor 

Networks’, accepted for publication at IEEE International 

Conference on Communication, ICC 2009, June 14-18, 

Dresden, Germany 

�Bhushan 

G. Jagyasi, Deepthi Chander, U. B. Desai, S. N. 

Merchant, Bikash K. Dey, ‘Blind Adaptive Distributed Detection 

in Multi-Hop Wireless Sensor Networks’, 11th International 

Symposium on Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications, 2008, 

WPMC 2008, 8-11 September 2008, Lapland, Finland. 

�Sunil 

Kopparapu, Nirmal Janardan, ‘A novel mobile interface to 

Register Citizen Complaint’, iHCI IADIS International 

Conference Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction 2008, 

Amsterdam, Netherlands (25-27 July, 2008). 

�Laxmi 

Narayana, Sunil Kumar Kopparapu, ‘Semi-Automatic 

Generation of Pronunciation Dictionary for Proper Names: An 

Optimization Approach, International Conference on Natural 

Language Processing, ICON 2008, CDAC, Pune, India 

�Arijit 

De, ‘Result Merging of Information Retrieval System 

Rankings under Linguistic Preferences under Fuzzy Linguistic 

Quantifiers’, International Conference on Natural Language 

Processing, ICON 2008, CDAC, Pune, India 

�Ramakrishnan 

AG, Laxmi Narayana, ‘Studies on Natural 

Variability in Human Speech and Perception for Enhancing the 

Quality of Synthetic Speech’, International Conference on 

Natural Language Processing, ICON 2008, CDAC, Pune, India 

�Sunil 

Kumar Kopparapu, ‘Natural Language Mobile Interface to 

Register Citizen Complaints’ TENCON 2008, Hyderabad, India, 

18-21 November, 2008. 

�Sunil 

Kopparapu, ‘Voice Based Self Help systems: User 

Experience Vs Accuracy’, International Joint Conferences on 

Computer, Information and System Sciences and Engineering, 

CISSE 2008, e-conference, 5-13 December 2008. 

�Lajish.V.L, 

Sita.G and Sunil Kumar Kopparapu, ‘Handwritten 

Character Recognition Using PCA of State Space Point 

Distribution’, Fifteenth National Conference on 

Communications 2009 (NCC 2009) at IIT Guwahati. 

�Aniruddha 

Sinha , Ashish Khare, Brojeshwar Bhowmick , 

Hiranmay Ghosh K, S Chidanand Kumar , Sujal Subhash 

Wattamwar, Sunil Kumar Kopparapu, ‘Multimodal Interaction 

in Modern Automobiles’, Multimodal Interfaces for 

Automotive Applications, IUI 2009, Sanibel Island, Florida. 

TCS Innovation Labs - Performance 

Engineering 

�DCPE 

Rollout, Scaling Performance Engineering Training and 

Certification across a very Large Enterprise - Rajesh 

Mansharamani, Arunava Bag, Kishor Gujarathi, Kunal Gupta, 

Amol Khanapurkar, Manoj Nambiar, and Mehul Raval. 22nd 

IEEE CS Conference on Software Education and Training, 

February 2009, India. 

�A 

Simple, Efficient ICMP Based Method of Network 

Characterization - Hemanta Kumar Kalita and Manoj Nambiar. 

CMG December 2008 International Conference, USA. 

�Analysis 

and Application of Conditional Software Rejuvenation 

– A New Approach. Hitesh Shetty, Manoj Nambiar, and Hemanta 

Kumar Kalita. WoSAR 2008, (First International Workshop on Software 

Aging & Rejuvenation) November 2008, USA. 

�Performance 

Monitoring and Analysis of a Large Online 

Transaction Processing System - Manoj Nambiar, and Hemanta 

Kumar Kalita, SIPEW 2008 (June), Darmstadt, Germany. 


�Test-suite 

Augmentation for Evolving Software. Raul Andres 

Santelices, Pavan Kumar Chittimalli, Taweesup Apiwattanapong, 

Alessandro Orso, Mary Jean Harrold. IEEE/ACM International 

Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2008), L'Aquila, 

Italy, September 2008, pp. 218-227. 

�Majumder, 

S., P. V. Natekar, and V. Runkana, ‘Virtual Indurator: A 

Simulator for Induration of Iron Ore Pellets on a Moving Grate,’ 

Proceedings of International Seminar on Mineral Processing 

Technology (MPT-2008), Trivandrum, 22-24 April 2008 


�Beena 

Rai, Shailaja Krishamurti, Sathish P and Pradip, 2008, 

‘Salicylaldoxime derivatives as flotation collectors: quantum 

mechanics calculations (Density Functional Theory) for the 

design of selective reagents’, Mineral Processing Technology - 

2008, Trivandrum, India, April 22-24, 2008 

�Aashish 

Jain, B. Venkoba Rao and Amlan Datta, 2008, ‘Effect of 

slurry rheology on the grinding kinetics in stirred media mill’, 

International seminar on Mineral Processing Technology 

(MPT), Trivandrum. April 22-24, 2008 

�V. 

Ganvir, A. Lele, R. Thaokar, B.P. Gautham, H. Pol, 2008, 

‘Numerical and experimental studies on die swell in polymer 

melt extrusion’, PPS 24: June 14-19, 2008 

�H. 

Pol, A. Lele, R. Thaokar, V. Ganvir, B.P. Gautham, 2008, ‘ 

Analysis of free surface flow in extrusion film casting using 

experiments and simulations’, PPS 24: June 14-19, 2008 

�Surya 

Kumar Singh, B.P. Gautham, Sharad Goyal, Amol Joshi, 

and Dinesh Gudadhe, Optimization of multi-pass steel 

wiredrawing operation, Wire Expo 2008, June 2008 

�A.K. 

Singh and S.S. Sahay, ‘Model based optimization of 

casting and heat treatment operations Casting, Heat 

Treatment and Surface Engineering’ IIM Workshop on Casting, 

Heat treating and surface engineering, July 15, 2008 

�Satyam 

S.Sahay, Invited Lecture on ‘Model based optimization 

of industrial heat treatment & ecofriendly quenchants’ 

Workshop on Quenching & Distortion Control, September 28- 

30, 2008, NIT Surathkal 

�Runkana, 

V., and G. Muralidharan, ‘Polymer Gels for Coatings, 

Drug Delivery and Consumer Products,’ Poster presented at 

2nd International Conference on Multi-scale Structures and 

Dynamics of Complex Systems: Processes and Forces for 

Creation of Designer Materials with Multi-Scale Structures, 

Bangalore, 4-5 September 2008 

�B. 

Rai, P. Sathish and Pradip, Molecular Modeling based Design 

of Selective Depressants for Beneficiation of Dolomitic Phosphate 

Ores, September. 23-28, 2008, XXIV IMPC, Beijing, China 

�A 

K Singh and Ravindra Pardeshi: Invited talk: Role of 

Multiphase/multiscale Phenomena in Solidification Processing 

at 2nd International Conference on Multi-Scale Structures and 

Dynamics of Complex Systems, Bangalore, September 2008 

�Mitra, 

K., S. Majumder, and V. Runkana, ‘Multi-objective Pareto 

Optimization of an Industrial Straight Grate Iron Ore 

Induration Process Using an Evolutionary Algorithm,’ WSC 

2008 Online World Conference on Soft Computing in 

Industrial Applications: 10-21 November 2008 

�R. 

Pardeshi, A. K. Singh, and P. Dutta, ‘Modeling of 

macrosegregation during solidification of multicomponent 

alloy,’ presented at National Metallurgist’s Day-Annual 

Technical Meet 2008, 15-16 November 2008 

�K. 

P. Nishad, R. Pardeshi, and A. K. Singh, ‘Mathematical Model 

of Caster Tundish for Control of Inclusion,’ presented at 

National Metallurgist’s Day-Annual Technical Meet 2008, 15-16 

November 2008 

�G. 

Mohapatra, S. S. Sahay and Ravi Kumar; Model based 

optimization of industrial heat treatment operations; 

Workshop on Casting, Heat treating and surface engineering, 

MIT Aurangabad (28th November 2008) 

�J. 

Jaidi, A. Gera and U. K. Singh, ‘ The Heat Effects On Residual 

Stresses, Microstructures And Mechanical Properties In Haz Of 

Low-Alloy Steel Weldments’, International Welding Symposium 

(SOJOM 2008), 11-13 December 2008 at BHEL, Tiruchirappalli, 

INIDA, pp: 99-108 

�Buddhiraju, 

V. S., and V. Runkana, ‘Simulation of Nanoparticle 

Synthesis in a Flame Aerosol Reactor using a Coupled 

Population Balance-Flame Dynamics Model,’ Presented at 

CHEMCON2008, Chandigarh, India (2008): 27-30 December 2008. 

�Muralidharan, 

G., and V. Runkana, ‘Prediction of Viscosity of 

Polymer Gel Dispersions,’ Presented at CHEMCON2008, 

Chandigarh, India (2008): 27-30 December 2008. 

�Harshawardhan 

Pol, Ashish Lele, B P Gautham, and Vivek 

Ganvir, Analysis of Free Surface Flow in Extrusion Film Casting 

Using Experiments and Simulations, PPS 25, February 2009 

�Vivek 

Ganvir, B P Gautham, Rochish Thaokar, Ashish Lele and 

Harshawardhan Pol, Numerical and Experimental Studies on 

Extrudate Swell of Linear and Branched Polyethylenes, PPS25, 

February 2009 

Journal Articles 

�‘Topological 

and Energy Analysis of K-Connected MANETS: A 

Semi-Analytical Approach’, M.A. Rajan, M. Girish Chandra, 

Lokanatha C. Reddy and Prakash S. Hiremath, International Journal of 

Computer Science and Network Security, Vol.8, No.2, February, 2008 

�‘A 

Study of A Study on Network Partition Detection Relevant 


to Ad-hoc Networks: Connectivity Index Approach’, M.A. Rajan, 

M. Girish Chandra, Lokanatha C. Reddy and Prakash S. 

Hiremath, International Journal of Computer Science and 

Network Security, Vol.8, No.6, June, 2008. 

�‘A 

context driven architecture for cognitive radio nodes’, 

Balamuralidhar P. and Ramjee Prasad, International Journal of 

Wireless Personal Communications (Springer), Vol. 45 (3), May 

2008, pp 423-434 

�‘A 

Novel wideband subarray technique for shaped patterm 

generation and adaptively interference rejection’, Q.M.Alfred, 

T.Chakravarty, G.Singh, S.k.Sanyal, International Journal of 

Infrared and Millimeter Wave (Springer), vol.29 (3), March 

2008, pp 249-260 

�‘A 

DSP based study of pattern nulling and pattern shaping 

using transform domain windows techniques’, Q. M, Alfred, K. 

Bishayee, T. Chakravarty and S. K. Sanyal, Progress in 

Electromagnetic Research (C), Vol. 2, 2008, pp 31-45 

�‘A 

schematic for broadband beam formation using time-delay 

technique’, Q. M. Alfred, K. Bishayee, T. Chakravarty and S. K. 

Sanyal, Progress in Electromagnetics Research (M), Vol. 3, 2008, 

pp 131-139 

�‘Extended 

cavity model for input impedance of annular 

Microstrip antenna loaded with multiple shorting posts’, 

M.Mahajan, T Chakravarty, S.K.Khah, Journal of 

Electromagnetic Waves and Applications, Vol 22, 2008 

(forthcoming), pp 1333-1340 

�‘Resonant 

Frequency of asymmetrically loaded Microstrip 

annular ring antenna’, M.Mahajan, S.K.Khah, T Chakravarty and 

A. De, Microwave and Optical Technology Letters (Wiley), 

Vol. 50, No.9. 2008, pp 2351-2353 

�‘Closed-form 

expressions for computation of mutual 

admittance of a class of gap-coupled circular microstrip 

antennas’, T Chakravarty, S.K.Khah and A De, Microwave and 

Optical Technology Letters (Wiley), Vol. 50, No.4. 2008, pp 924-927 

�Transient 

analysis of microstrip-like interconnections guarded 

by ground tracks’, Rohit Sharma, T. Chakravarty and A. B. 

Bhattacharya, Progress in Electromagnetic Research, 

Vol. 82, 2008, pp 189-202 

�‘Signal 

integrity issues in high-speed interconnects over a 

ground plane aperture’, Rohit Sharma, T. Chakravarty and 

A. B. Bhattacharya, Journal of Electromagnetic Waves and 

Applications, vol. 22, pp 2231-2240,2008 


�M. 

Vidyasagar, S. S. Mande, C. V. S. K. Reddy and V. Raja Rao, 

‘The 4M (mixed memory Markov model) algorithm for finding 

genes in prokaryotic genomes,’ IEEE Trans. Circuits and Systems, 

55(1), 26-37, January. 2008. (Special Issue on Systems Biology). 

�S. 

Shrivastava and S. S. Mande, ‘Identification and functional 

characterization of gene components of Type VI Secretion 

System in Bacterial Genomes,’ PLoS ONE 3(8): e2955, 2008. 

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002955. 

�A. 

B. Ganesh, H. Rajasingh and S. S. Mande, ‘Mathematical 

modeling of regulation of Type III secretion system in 

Salmonella enterica serovar typhimurium by SirA,’ In Silico Biol. 

8, 0045, 2008. 

�B. 

Jayashree, S. Rajgopal, D. Hoisington, V. P. Prasanth and S. 

Chandra, ‘WebStruct and VisualStruct: web interfaces and 

visualization for Structure software implemented in a cluster 

environment’, Journal of Integrative Bioinformatics, 5(1), 2008. 

�A. 

Rao, S. J. Yeleswarapu, R. Srinivasan and G. Bulusu, ‘An 

integrated rule-set for protein localization in Plasmodium 

falciparum’, Current Bioinformatics, 3, 66-73, 2008. 

�A. 

Rao, S. J. Yeleswarapu, R. Srinivasan and G. Bulusu, 

‘Localization of Heme Pathway enzymes in Plasmodium 

falciparum’, Indian J. Biochem. Biophys., 45, 365-373, 2008. 

�V. 

A. Nagaraj, R. Arumugam, B. Gopalakrishnan, Y. S. Jyothsna, 

P. N. Rangarajan, G. Padmanaban, ‘Unique properties of Plasm 

odium falciparum porphobilinogen deaminase,’ J Biol Chem., 

283, 437-444, 2008. 

�S. 

B. Gunturi, K. Archana, A. Khandelwal and R. Narayanan, 

‘Prediction of hERG Potassium Channel Blockade Using kNN- 

QSAR and Local Lazy Regression Methods,’ QSAR & 

Combinatorial Science, 27(11-12), 1305-1317, 2008. 

�K. 

Uma Devi, J. Padmavathi, C. Uma Maheswara Rao, P Akbar 

Ali and C Murali Mohan, ‘A study of host specificity in the 

entomopathogenic fungus Beauveria bassiana (Hypocreales, 

Clavicipitaceae),’ Biocontrol Science and Technology, 

18(10):975-989, 2008. 

�M. 

Sharma, S. Khanna, G. Bulusu and A. Mitra, ‘Comparative 

Modeling of Thioredoxin Glutathione Reductase from 

Schistosoma mansoni: A Multifunctional Target for 

Antischistosomial Drug Discovery,’. J Mol Graph Model., 

27(6):665-675, 2009. 


�N. 

Nageswara Rao Reddy, R. Annette, C Uma Maheswara Rao 

and K. Uma Devi, 'Beta-tubulin sequence based phylogeny of 

asexual entomopathogenic fungi with special reference to 

Beauveria bassiana and Nomuraea rileyi'. Systematics and 

Biodiversity. (In press) 2008. 

�L. 

S. Chandran, M. C. Francis and N. Sivadasan, ‘Boxicity and 

maximum degree,’ Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, 

98(2):443-445, 2008. 

�L. 

S. Chandran, M. C. Francis and N. Sivadasan, ‘Geometric 

representation of graphs in low dimension using axis parallel 

boxes,’ to appear in Algorithmica (DOI: 10.1007/s00453-008- 

9163-5). 

�L. 

S. Chandran, M. C. Francis and N. Sivadasan, ‘On the cubicity 

of interval graphs,’ Graphs and Combinatorics (GCOM-D-08-00036). 

�L. 

S. Chandran and N. Sivadasan, ‘The cubicity of hypercube 

graphs,’ to appear in Discrete Mathematics. 


�T. 

Chattopadhyay, and Arpan Pal: Enhancements of H.264 

Encoder performance for real-time video based applications in 

Low cost DSP platforms (IEEE Transaction on Consumer Electronics) 

�Arijit 

Ukil: A Survey on Dynamic Radio Resource Allocation in 

Multi-user OFDMA in Broadband Wireless System 

(International Journal on Computer Science and Information 

Technology, Vol 1 No. 1) 

�Jaydip 

Sen: A Survey on Cross-Layer Design Frameworks for 

Multimedia Applications over Wireless Networks (International 

Journal on Computer Science and Information Technology, Vol 1 No. 2) 


�B. 

G. Jagyasi, B. K. Dey, S. N. Merchant, and U. B. Desai, ‘An 

Efficient Multibit Aggregation Scheme for Multi-hop Wireless 

Sensor Network’ accepted for publication at EURASIP Journal 

on Wireless Communications and Networking 

�Re-computing 

Coverage Information to Assist Regression 

Testing. Pavan Kumar Chittimalli, Mary Jean Harrold, IEEE 

Transactions on Software Engineering, March 2009. (The 

journal to be printed in this month) 

TCS Innovation Labs – TRDDC 

�G. 

Mohapatra and Satyam S. Sahay, A probabilistic approach 

to analyze austenite to ferrite transformation in Fe-Ni system, 

Defect and Diffusion Forum, 2008. 

�Majumder, 

S., P. V. Natekar, and V. Runkana, Virtual Indurator: A 

Tool for Simulation of Induration of Wet Iron Ore Pellets on a 

Moving Grate, Computers and Chemical Engineering, 2008. 

�Maneesh 

Singh, P. C. Kapur, Pradip, Preparation of alinite 

based cement from incinerator ash, Waste Management, 2008, 

Vol.28: pp. 1310. 

�Maneesh 

Singh, P.C. Kapur, Pradip, Preparation of calcium 

sulphoaluminate cement using fertiliser plant wastes, Journal 

of hazardous materials, 2008, Vol.157: pp.106. 

�Rai, 

Beena and Pradip (2008), 'Design of highly selective 

industrial performance chemicals: a molecular modelling 

approach', Molecular Simulation, 34:10, pp. 1209-1214 

�Rajesh 

Mehta, Satyam Sahay, Heat Transfer Mechanisms and 

Furnace Productivity During Coil Annealing: Aluminum vs. Steel, 

Journal of materials engineering and performance, 2008, Vol.67. 

�R. 

Pardeshi, A. K. Singh and P. Dutta, Modelling of solidification 

process in Rotary Electromagnetic Stirrer, Numerical Heat 

Transfer A, 2008. 

�Satyam 

S Sahay, Starch-Based Quenchants as an Eco-Friendly 

Alternative to Quenching Oil, Journal of ASTM International, 

2008, Vol. 5(10) 

�S. 

Raghavan, Satyam S Sahay, Modeling the topological 

features during grain growth by cellular automaton, 

Computational Materials Science, 2009 

�S. 

Majumdar, K. Kargupta, S. Ganguly, Mathematical Modeling 

for the Ionic Inclusion Process inside CP Based Thin-Films, 

Polymer Engineering & Science, 2008, Vol. 48:11, pp. 2229-2237 

�S. 

Manigandan, S. Majumdar, S. Ganguly, K. Kargupta, 

Formation of Nano-rod and Nano-particles of Polyaniline 

Using LB Technique, Materials Letters, 2008, Vol.62, pp. 2758-2761 

�S. 

Manigandan, A. Jain, S. Majumdar, S. Ganguly, K. Kargupta, 

Formation of Nano-rods and Nano-particles of Polyaniline 

Using Langmuir Blodgett Technique: Performance study for 

ammonia sensor, Sensors and Actuators B, 2008, Vol. 133:1, pp. 

187-194 

�Mitra, 

K., S. Majumder, and V. Runkana, ‘Multi-objective Pareto 

Optimization of an Industrial Straight Grate Iron Ore 

Induration Process Using Evolutionary Algorithms,’ Materials 

and Manufacturing Processes, 2009, Vol. 24, pp.331-342 


� Vivek Ganvir, Ashish Lele, Rochish Thaokar and B P Gautham, 

Prediction of extrudate swell in polymer melt extrusion using 

an Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) based finite element 

method, Journal of Non-Newtonial Fluid Mechanics, 2009, 

Vol. 156, pp. 21-28 

Technical Reports 


�Sukriti 

Jalali, T. Chakravarty and Jaydip Sen, ‘Trends in 

Embedded Systems’, (Hi-tech ISU) 

�H. 

Reddy, Vishnu, Deepika, T.Chakravarty and P. Balamurali, 

‘Concept paper on the design of wireless sensor network’, 

January, 2008 

�T. 

Chakravarty , ‘ Implantable RFID tag’, December. 2008 

�T. 

Chakravarty, ‘Near-field device’, December. 2008 

�T. 

Chakravarty, ‘Basics of wireless sensor networks’, January 2008 

�Srinivasan 

Jayaraman, ‘Wireless Portable cardiac device’, 

�Srinivasan 

Jayaraman, ‘Wearable locket for remote monitoring’, 

�Srinivasan 

Jayaraman , Design document for wearable locket 


�A 

report on ‘enhanced speaker identification system’ by 

Mr. Amarendra Kumar Gorai. 

�A 

report on ’Document Image Segmentation’ by Ashish Khare. 

�A 

report on ‘Hand gesture application for controlling 

entertainment devises’ by Mr. Ashish Khare and Mr. Sujal S Wattamwar. 

� Andreij Milenin, B P Gautham, Sharad Goyal, Jan Pilarczyk and 

Zbigniew Muskalski, FEM Simulation of wire fracture 

phenomena during multi-pass drawing, Wire Journal 

International, 2008, Vol. 41, pp. 93-99. 


�Jaydip 

Sen, Arijit Ukil and Debasish Bera, ‘Wireless 

Communications- Reaching towards 4G. Technical Report. 

�Sukriti 

Jalali, Tapas Chakravarty and Jaydip Sen,’Trends and 

Implications in Embedded Systems Development.’ White 

Paper. 

�Jaydip 

Sen, ‘Cross-Layer Optimization for Multimedia 

Communications in Wireless Networks’. Technical Report. 

�Jaydip 

Sen, ‘Security and Privacy in Wireless Networks’. 

Technical Report 

�Arijit 

Ukil, ‘A Tutorial on OFDMA.’ Technical Report. 


�Ravindra 

Naik and Hemanth Makkapati. Identifying Functional 

Services: a step towards establishing traceability between 

code and features. Available in KnowMax 

�Ravindra 

Naik and Amit Saxena. Automated Extraction of 

Architectural and Design Abstractions for Interactive, Legacy 

Business Systems. Available on KnowMax 


Contribution to Industry Standards and 

Proposals 


Jaydip Sen presented an efficient key management protocol for secure 

group communication in the 57th session of IEEE 802.16 working group’s 

meeting. The protocol has very low overhead of computation and 

communication. The proposal was discussed in the 58th session (Plenary 

session) of IEEE 802.16 working group and was recommended for 

inclusion in the SDD text of the 802 .16m standard. 


3GPP standards for SMS (Indian Language) 

Certain changes made by 3GPP to its SMS standards for including 

enhanced encoding schemes for languages not supported by the GSM 

default 7-bit alphabet. These changes have significant implications for 

India as well. TCS Innovation Labs – Mumbai is one of the key contributors 

to this standard. 

Patents 

Patents Granted During the Year 


Abstract Syntax Tree Models (ASTM): OMG plans to develop standards that 

would enable transformation of legacy applications to modern 

architectures using model-based development. In the ADM (Architecture 

Driven Modernization) task force, TCS is a lead submitter for ASTM 

(Abstract Syntax Tree Model specification). This specification presents a 

standard way of representing various programming language constructs. 

TCS's proposal for ASTM is based on its CIR (Common Internal 

representation) model that it has used to represent various programming 

languages like C, COBOL, Java, PL/I, Synergy, Pascal, and very recently 

Natural. TCS's CIR is the base on which a joint submission is in progress. 

Since September 2008, TCS is the Chair of the Finalization Task Force for 

ASTM. Using QVT and ModelMorf, we are building a two-way bridge 

between the TCS's internal representation (CIR) and OMG's ASTM standard. 

No. Title/Description Country 

1 Method and Apparatus for Pattern based Generation of Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) USA 

2 Method and Apparatus for Batch Programs Implementation USA 

3 Methods for Aligning Measured Data taken from Specific Rail Track Sections of a Railroad with the 

Correct Geographic Locations of the Sections India 

4 Selective separation of phosphate minerals from other minerals, using aminotris (methylenephosphonic acid), 

and diethylenetriaminepentakis (methylenephosphonic acid) as depressants. India 

5 A Device for Handling Message Queues India 

This brings the total number of granted patents to 42. In addition, TCS has over 150 patents pending in multiple jurisdictions, including 58 filed in 2008-09." 


Honours and Awards 

� TESCO Innovation Award 

� Innovation Award from Ferrari 

� mKrishi Wins Wall Street Journal Global Innovation Technology 

Award in Wireless Category 

� mKrishi wins Golden Peacock Innovation Award – 2008 

� Global Certainty IdeaStorm bags InfoWorld 100 Award 

� Industry Excellence Award 2008 from Institution of Engineers, India 

TCS Innovation Labs – Bangalore 

Harihara S. G – South Region Finalist TATA Group Innovation Forum May 2008 



�Best 

Paper Award at IEEE’s MASCOTS Symposium 

Prof. Anand Sivasubramaniam, Head of TCS Innovation Labs –Chennai, 

co-authored and guided his students’ paper on ’Profiling, Prediction, and 

Capping of Power Consumption in Consolidated Environments’. 

Presented at IEEE International Symposium on ‘Modeling, Analysis and 

Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS)’, 

the paper won the Best Student Paper Award. 

The paper explores a subject that Prof. Anand has been researching into: 

server consolidation and power consumption of co-located applications. 

�Best 

Paper Award at TENCON 2008, Hyderabad, India 

Ms.Geetha T, Scientist at the TCS Innovation Labs – Chennai, has won 

the best paper award at TENCON, a premier technical conference of 

IEEE covering subjects of electrical & electronic engineering, 

computer science and related areas. 

Her paper talks about innovative algorithms and designs for power 

optimization in Indian electrical networks with increasing renewable 

penetration. This paper quantifies the scheduling of pumped storage in 

response to price signal as well as prediction error signal. Several 

hardware improvements like variable speed drives, four machine storage 

topology and combined storage-desalination plant are analyzed. 


�K 

S Chidanand & Brojeshwar Bhowmick, Young IT Professional 2008, 

Computer Society of India, Eastern Region 

�The 

paper entitled ‘A Robust and Fault-Tolerant Intrusion Detection 

System’ by Jaydip Sen was selected for the best paper award for being 

among the best three papers selected in the 2nd International 

Conference on Information Processing (ICIP) held in Bangalore during 

August 8-10, 2008. 

�Jaydip 

Sen was invited to deliver a talk on ‘Secure Multicast and 

Broadcast Communication in the Next-generation Wireless Networks’ 

in the prestigious ETSI Security Workshop held in Sofia Antipolis, France, 

during January 13-14. 


�Bhushan 

Jagysi, TPC member for an International Symposium on 

Wireless and Pervasive Computing, ISWPC 2009, Melbourne, Australia. 

�Finalist 

of NASSCOM Innovation Award 

�Dr. 

Arun Pande was selected on the Industrial Advisory Board for Wireless 

Communication Engineering & Technology (WCET) certification Program. 

�Western 

Region Tata Innovation Award (PIM2R) 


�Hitesh 

Sajnani and Adnan Contrator: Among Top Hundred 

Coders in the Western Region 

�Pavan 

Kumar Chittimalli’s paper on Test-suite Augmentation for 

Evolving Software (ASE 2008) has been given ASE Best Paper award 

and an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper award. 

�Pavan 

Kumar Chittimalli is serving on Programming Committee of 

Testing: Academic and Industrial Conference – Practice and Research 

Techniques (TAIC PART 2009). (http://www2009.taicpart.org) 

�Saptarshi 

Majumdar. Awarded Doctorate in Chemical Engineering 

from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharaghpur. 

�Dr. 

Beena Rai & Dr. Pradip: Khare Award for best paper entitled 

‘ Salicylaldoxime Derivatives As Flotation Collectors: Quantum 

Mechanics Calculations (Density Functional Theory) For The Design Of 

Selective Reagents’ presented during International Mineral Processing 

Technology Seminar (MPT-2008) at Trivandrum 

�Dr. 

Satyam Sahay: Promising Innovation Award - Western Region, 

Tata Group, awarded by Tata Quality, Western Region Innovation Forum 

for ‘Novel and efficient non-isothermal cyclic processing’ 

�V. 

Sista, P. Nash, Satyam Sahay: Runners-up - ASM-Bodycote Heat 

Treating Best Paper Award, awarded by ASM International - Bodycote I 

nc. for Our paper on cyclic austempering, which came out of Vivek's 

PhD at IIT-Chicago. 

�Satyam 

Sahay nominated to the editorial board of member of the 

editorial board for the ‘Journal of ASTM International’ (JAI), for the period 

of 2008-2011. 

�Dr. 

Satyam Sahay won ‘Metallurgist of the year 2008’ from 

Ministry of Steel, Government of India 


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