ACADEMIA

Bell Labs Prize program encourages global inventors to 'invent the future' in partnership with one of the world's leading industrial research labs

Bell Labs, the research arm of Alcatel-Lucent, has announced expansion of its university collaboration program with a new award for the institution that gives rise to the winning application for the new Bell Labs Prize.

Bell Labs will offer a U.S. $100,000 donation to the accredited university or institution of higher learning in which the overall winner of the Bell Labs Prize is enrolled at the time of their application.  The donation will be directed to a selected professor of the university or institution whose areas of research and study are foundational to the subject matter of the winning application.

In May, Bell Labs introduced the Bell Labs Prize, a competition that will give any researcher, in participating countries around the globe, to collaborate with world-renowned Bell Labs researchers. The Bell Labs Prize winners will take home cash awards worth as much as $100,000, and the chance to further develop their ideas at Bell Labs.  The call for entries closes on July 15, 2014.  The program will be judged by a global panel of industry luminaries, university professors and major corporations.

Bell Labs Expanding Footprint
In addition to unveiling the Bell Labs Prize, in recent months Bell Labs also unveiled its plans to open at least three new 'antenna' locations. These are designed to be smaller and more nimble research spaces, that are actively engaged in the global Bell Labs network.

In May, Bell Labs announced the first location, an office led by Danny Raz a prominent Israeli computer scientist near Tel-Aviv, Israel with a specific focus on cloud networking research.  This team is working closely with Alcatel-Lucent's CloudBand team to undertake cutting edge research into how to provide highly distributed, heterogeneous cloud services with guaranteed security, reliability and performance.

Later this month Bell Labs will announce a new location in Europe to expand its collaboration with leading universities and technology innovators in another technology domain.

Marcus Weldon, President of Bell Labs & CTO of Alcatel-Lucent commented, "We are excited by tremendous interest shown so far in the Bell Labs Prize and the quality of the applications that we are seeing.  So we have decided to further enhance the impact on the next generation of innovators and recognize the larger research community with an additional award for the originating university that sponsored the work of the winning applicant.  This, together with our expansion of Bell Labs with new antenna sites in research 'hotbeds' is all part of our continuing reconnection of Bell Labs to the next great generation of innovators."