Samsung R&D Institute, Bangalore Wins a Double for Engineering Excellence & Innovation at the Nasscom Spotlight Awards 2023

Also Wins Circular Economy and Carbon Reduction Innovation Awards

Samsung R&D Institute Bangalore (SRI-B) won the Nasscom spotlight awards 2023 for the worlds’ first innovation for Galaxy Upcyling and industry’s first innovation for Smart Building solution (b.IoT). The awards were presented under the categories – Ideation to Engineering Leadership and Concept to Engineering Leadership.

The nasscom Spotlight Awards serve as a platform to honor and showcase the outstanding contributions of ER&D organizations, who are at the forefront of spearheading innovation in diverse domains.
SRI-B, which is Samsung’s largest R&D facility outside Korea, won these awards for its “research to commercialization” approach across multiple product lines such as smartphones, networks, and connected home appliances.

The circular economy award recognized the recently developed Samsung Galaxy Upcycling Program. Under this program, Samsung re-purposes older smartphones into medical diagnosis cameras, helping underserved populations in Vietnam, India, Morocco, and Papua New Guinea.

As part of the Galaxy Upcycling program, Samsung is giving new life to older Galaxy devices to reduce electronic waste and enable greater access to ophthalmic health care in underserved communities.

SRI-B has developed this solution to utilize power of AI, Camera Tech & Image Processing to deliver affordable eye health care to underprivileged population through old smartphones.
By using power of the old smartphones, a circular economy is created thereby, reducing carbon footprint in atmosphere. Product launched in seven countries [Vietnam, India, Morocco, Bangladesh, New Papua Guinea, S. Korea, and Singapore] with around 80000 patients benefitted until now.

The carbon reduction innovation award was given for the industry first innovation which reduces carbon emissions from a smart building, making the building more valuable and sustainable.
The innovation in Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered algorithm-suite to detect energy operation anomalies and manage energy efficiently in an IoT-enabled smart building. Through reduction in energy usage, it brings down the building’s carbon footprint and reduces total operating cost.

The Smart Building solution has been deployed in a variety of commercial establishments and universities in countries such as India, South Korea, Poland and Vietnam, among others. “These awards are a testament to the incredible research and development capabilities that we have developed at Samsung Research Institute, Bangalore. It’s encouraging for our team members to see their work being recognized. Be it our products incorporating AI, IoT and smart assistants or our commitment to creating positive social impact via technology – Samsung is continuously working on innovating within different verticals. We look forward to engaging and developing transformational technology in India to continue to deliver world class products and services,” said Mohan Rao Goli, CTO & CVP, Samsung Research Institute, Bangalore.

Set up in 1996, SRI-B has grown into an advanced R&D center for Samsung globally, with excellence in wireless communications, multimedia and image processing, artificial intelligence in vision, voice and text technologies, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

SRI-B, which has created a strong culture of filing patents among its engineers over the last decade, will also expand Open Innovation with startups, students, and universities to help strengthen the innovation and startup ecosystem in the country.

It will drive this effort by scaling up its industry-academia program PRISM under which it has been working with engineering students and faculty on real-world research and development projects in cutting-edge technology areas. So far it has worked with close to 500 students in the country and some of these students have gone on to file patents along with Samsung engineers.