Chennai : A young Chennai innovator, Venkatesan Oosur Vinayagam, has been chosen to the MIT Technology Review’s India TR35 list of young Technology Innovators under 35 for 2012 for developing Mobile antakshari.

Voice based mobile technology solutions hold key to the future of health care, governance and entertainment information services in India. Venkatesan Oosur Vinayagam, founder of Chennai-based Hexolabs Interactive Technologies demonstrated this in the entertainment space by creating Mobile Antakshari, a game usually played by small to large groups of people.

Mobile Antakshari is a multilingual speech recognition technology enabled mobile music service that is based on the classic Indian musical game of antakshari, where the player or team sing songs that start with last consonant letter of the song sung by the previous player or team. When a team sings a correct song they earn points. The innovation in Mobile Antakshari is in adding right usability and technology elements.

Mobile Antakshari uses complex algorithms to match users input with over 10,000 songs and evaluates whether it is the right song. The complexity increases manifold when one has to create a database of songs in four major Indian languages — Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam. Each of the four languages has in excess of 1,500 songs and required a grammar code that needed to be written to give the system points of comparison with what players were singing. Though Mobile Antakshari employs complex algorithm in the back end, it has created a simple and accessible voice interface.

Mobile Antakshari can be played either against the artificial intelligence or against friends. In the former, a player is presented with four modes of play. All four modes expect players to recognize a song and sing it back, although the clues in each differ.

Vinayagam is now working on a mobile semantic search product to help non-data consumers discover Web contents over simple voice call. This allows user to search by using a voice input and results would be delivered over the voice output or SMS.

Venkatesan will present his innovation to an audience of 500 innovators including six outstanding scientists and researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at the fourth emerging technologies conference of MIT Technology Review’s, EmTech India, starting March 27 at Bangalore.

Bangalore has emerged as India’s hottest technology innovation city with five innovators from the Silicon Valley of India (Bangalore) making it to the ‘India TR35 2012 list of young technology innovators’.

The India TR35 members from Bangalore include Shirish Goyal, 27, of LinkSmart Technologies for creating fool-proof security to prevent data theft; Sumeet Yamdagni, 29, of Instrumentation Scientific Technologies for inventing Optical instruments for Fiber Bragg Grating sensors and Vikas Malpani, 28, of MaxHeap Technologies for bringing communities on a common floor.

Bangalore’s Anirudh Sharma, 24, of Ducere Technologies was named the Innovator of the Year for creating Haptic shoe for the visually impaired. Animesh Nandi, 33, of Bell Labs India, Alcatel-Lucent for devising personalized privacy frameworks. Nandi was the only India TR35 member from a Bangalore based multi-national while the rest were from local enterprises.

The Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, has emerged as India’s hottest technology innovation center with three of its researchers VSK Murthy Balijepalli, 26; Nitin Joshi, 28; and Vanteru Mahendra Reddy, 30, making it to the ‘India TR35 2012 list of young technology innovators’.

The India TR 35 program started in 2010 and in the last three years, Technology Review India has identified 57 young innovators. India lists have so far been dominated by innovators from small and medium size private research institutions.

Selection of six innovators from IITs and CSIR funded labs proved that the Indian technology innovation scene is also expanding its footprint into more sectors. For most part of their existence, IITs were known mainly for their excellent faculty who trained the innovators for the global industry.

A remarkable feature of this year’s India TR 35 list is the dominance of innovators from two hot segments, computing and web applications. India’s software services sector had so far been looked down upon on the innovation quotient. Nine of the 20 winners this year are from these two segments, indicating that product innovation is permeating the corridors of the nation’s software service companies.

This year Technology Review India received over 250 nominations from all over India. Over a period of three months, a panel of 23 expert judges identified 20 individuals who have developed technologies that are likely to benefit the society at large.

Innovator of the Year Aniruddha Sharma, 24, created a haptic shoe for the visually impaired. The haptic feedback guides the user to the destination by vibrating in front, back, or on either side of the shoe, indicating that the user needs to turn.

Humanitarian of the Year Somnath Ray, 35, redesigned the age-old para-transit vehicle for the disabled that gives them not only mobility, but also a mobile commerce platform.

List of India TR35 2012

BIOMEDICINE

Abhijeet Joshi, 28, Nanosensors in microspheres, National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research, Ahmedabad

Nitin Joshi, 28, Making chemotherapy non-invasive, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai

COMMUNICATIONS

Shaunak Khire, 22, Enabling businesses to advertise through mobile phone, Camber Tech, Pune

Venkatesan Oosur Vinayagam, 28, Mobile antakshari, Hexolabs Interactive Technologies, Chennai, Social Innovator of the year

COMPUTING

Anthony Vipin Das, 28, Digitizing medical records, LV Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad

Shirish Goyal, 27, Fool-proof security to prevent data theft, LinkSmart Technologies, Bangalore

Sumeet Yamdagni, 29, Optical instruments for Fiber Bragg Grating sensors,

Instrumentation Scientific Technologies, Bangalore

Hemanth Kumar Satyanarayana, 29, Virtual trial rooms, Imaginate Software Labs, Hyderabad

ENERGY

VSK Murthy Balijepalli, 26, Forecasting the price and load of electricity, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai

Vanteru Mahendra Reddy, 30, Flameless combustion with liquid fuels, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai

MATERIALS

Abhijit Majumder, 33, Making stronger adhesives that can imitate nature, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur

Vivek Nair, 23, Carbon nanotubes from carbon emissions, Damascus Fortune, Mumbai

Priyanka Sharma, 28, Plastic biochip electrochemical sensor for immunosensing applications,

Institute of Microbial Technology, Chandigarh

TRANSPORTATION

Somnath Ray, 35, A viable para-transit mode of mobility, Dplay, Delhi

Humanitarian of the Year

Anirudh Sharma, 24, Haptic shoe for the visually impaired. Ducere Technologies, Bangalore

Innovator of the Year

WEB

Sachin Dev Duggal, 28, Moving desktop computer into the cloud, Nivio Technologies, Gurgaon

Unni Koroth, 26, Open source platform for institute management, Foradian Technologies, Kasaragod

Vikas Malpani, 28, Bringing communities on a common floor, MaxHeap Technologies, Bangalore

Jay Meattle, 29, Demand side platform for selling ad inventories, Shareaholic.com, Delhi

Animesh Nandi, 33, Personalized privacy frameworks, Bell Labs India, Alcatel-Lucent, Bangalore