Samsung R&D Institute Inaugurates Khronos Bangalore Chapter To Advance Technology Development & Evangelization in India

Samsung RnD Institute, Bangalore (SRIB) recently hosted the inaugural meeting of Khronos Bangalore chapter to bring visibility to India’s efforts and involvement in the standard APIs. The event was organised in collaboration with Khronos Group, a non-profit open global consortium of leading graphics hardware and software industries responsible for creating open standards.

Khronos Group, headquartered in California (USA), delivers royalty free APIs, to facilitate authoring and acceleration of applications in parallel computing, graphics, dynamic media, computer vision and sensor processing on many platforms. The specifications help companies accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge 3D platforms and applications including conformance tests.

The Khronos Bangalore chapter meeting focused on promoting regular technical deliberation and interactions amongst industries as well as academia working in graphics and computer vision domains. Given the presence of many leading MNCs and Indian companies in graphics, vision and gaming area, the Bangalore chapter is expected to play a crucial role in advanced technology development. The event was attended by 80 delegates from approximately 15 companies (Samsung, AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, TI, etc.) and academia (Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore; International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Bangalore and Hyderabad).

On the inauguration, Dr. Aloknath De, Corporate VP and CTO, Samsung RnD Institute India emphasized, “Samsung is a strong supporter of global standards to enable interoperability and wider eco-system of standards-based products and services, in upcoming revolutionary areas such as Advanced Graphics, Augmented Reality-Virtual Reality (AR-VR), Computer Vision & Machine Learning”. Also, he added, “Chapters such as these would strengthen the technical community through regular meet-ups and further helps Indian researchers to contribute actively in standards related to graphics applications / solutions”.

Key Note Speaker, Dr. P J Narayanan, Director of IIIT-Hyderabad who is a renowned expert in Graphics, Computer Vision and Parallel Computing, highlighted “Formation of such a chapter representing the Khronos global consortium, would surely go a long way in boosting the technical discussions and collaboration amongst the Indian industries and academia. Additionally, Khronos

Bangalore chapter has huge potential to contribute towards many initiatives from the Indian government such as Digital India, Smart Cities and Make-In-India.”

Technical talks on Khronos eco-system and upcoming next generation graphics APIs such as Vulkan delivered jointly by experts from SAMSUNG, AMD, NVIDIA, QUALCOMM; was very well received by the audience.

The kick-off event concluded with a panel discussion on “Way forward for Khronos Bangalore Chapter”, consisting of eminent panellists including Dr. Aloknath De (Samsung), Dr. P.J. Narayanan (IIIT, Hyderabad), Dr. Vijay Natarajan (IISc, Bangalore), Veera Manikandan (TI), and moderated by Prabindh Sundareson (NVIDIA).

The audience expressed keen interest to consider focus on Computer Vision (OpenVX) and facilitate larger involvement from local engineering institutes in the follow-up event which is expected to be organized within next three months. Balaji Holur (Senior VP, Samsung), presented vote of thanks and concluded the event.

Samsung RnD Institute Bangalore in collaboration with local industry and academia shall continue to work towards strengthening the India ecosystem in the domains of 3D Graphics, Computer Vision and Heterogeneous Computing; while bringing a key focus on Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality technologies, benefiting from these Khronos Standards.