Leading Hybrid Cloud data services company NetApp has recently announced three research grants for the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Kharagpur, Jodhpur). Apparently, these grants have been provided for the advancement of data management space research.
NetApp has awarded fellowships to professors from IISc and IITs for further research in data management and security areas. Managing Director and Senior Vice President of NetApp, Deepak Visweswaraiah, was assured that the grants are provided with no strings attached and the company will not claim any Intellectual Property (IP) from the research, to allow for an open technology propagation.
Citing reliable sources, IISc Bengaluru’s Professor Vijay Kumar was awarded the NetApp Faculty Fellowship (NFF) in 2018 for supporting research in private information retrieval and coded computation for enhancing security in the Cloud Computing age.
Kumar mentioned that the best research is done when one’s working on something which, apart from theoretical interest, has some practical relevance as well. NetApp has enabled the researchers to bridge this gap with this partnership, as one could get a sense of what is prevailing in the data industry by talking to the companies, he commented.
Furthermore, Professor Bivas Mitra of IIT Kharagpur received another fellowship to research on model development for storage workload characterization and system troubleshooting based on Machine Learning (ML).
The NetApp Student Fellowship (NSF) has been granted to Professor Subhajit Sidhanta of IIT Jodhpur for investigating the trade-off in consistency and performance for widely distributed systems used in Fog computing and IoT.
Visweswaraiah said that NetApp encourages leading-edge research in data and storage management, through the fellowships. It plans to foster relationships between its technical community and academic researchers.
The company said in a statement that 31 research partnerships have been granted by the fellowship program till date, with IP free grants up to $20,000 during the past 10 years in India. Purportedly, the program also provides recipients opportunities for conducting research in areas such as cybersecurity, data analytics, data lakes, Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence (AI), IoT and ML.