Indian Outsourcing Firm Infosys Funds Research Center at USC

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 06/12/08

The University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering and Infosys Technologies, a Bangalore-based IT services and consulting company, jointly announced an agreement to set up a research center at USC.

"This agreement will explore a model of interaction in research, education and training in areas of interest to both Infosys and USC." said Yannis C. Yortsos, dean of the USC Viterbi School. "The collaboration will include joint research, bilateral visits by researchers, student internships and distance education, among other activities."

The agreement provides that the Center for Research & Education in Advanced Software Technologies (CAST) will open on the USC campus. Created with funding from Infosys, CAST will facilitate joint research and education in such areas as software architecture, service oriented architecture and information integration, intelligent systems and agents, mobile and wireless systems, sensor networks, and CAD frameworks and tools for hardware and software.

"The United States is the hub for innovation in science and technology," said Subu Goparaju, vice president and head of Infosys' SETLabs, which performs applied research and development. "Through this collaboration we hope to work with the best and the brightest engineering talent in the world on innovative technology solutions. USC has among the largest number of international students of any U.S. university and the USC graduate program in engineering is widely acknowledged to be among the top 10 in the United States."

This agreement is part of a larger Infosys program to engage with leading Indian and international universities to facilitate research in a variety of areas including software engineering, information management, knowledge engineering, game theory, and IP lifecycle management.

Infosys has previously collaborated with academic institutions through a global internship program, InStep, and its industry academia program, Campus Connect. Infosys has also been hiring university graduates from outside India, training them in India and sending them back to their home markets. Yortsos noted that the Viterbi School has more graduate students enrolled from India than any other country except the United States.