From the seas to the stars, Microsoft Research is trying to increase its impact. The Redmond, WA-based computer science research organization is releasing new software tools aimed at helping scientists manage and visualize huge amounts of information, and make discoveries in fields as diverse as astronomy and oceanography. The announcement of the free tools, called Project Trident, is being made today at the 10th annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit in Redmond.

Everyone knows information overload is a huge issue. Just try being a scientist these days. With increasing amounts of data available from the Internet, satellites, telescopes, cameras, gene sequencers, and networked sensors, researchers—and organizations in general—are looking for ways to cut through the deluge and focus faster on doing the analysis and getting results, rather than sorting through data.

It’s also a problem faced by big companies, financial analysts, and medical institutions. So, ultimately, Project Trident is not aimed at spearing purely scientific research problems—it’s software that also could yield big results for business down the road. “If we look back at the challenges faced in business, scientists were facing them years if not decades before,” says Roger Barga, a Microsoft researcher and principal architect on Project Trident. “We’re getting an early look at what our business customers will expect in their products in 3-5 years. It’s pushing another Microsoft [Windows] platform into new areas.”

Project Trident started around 2006, when Barga began collaborating with legendary Microsoft researcher Jim Gray (who was lost at sea in January 2007) on tools to help oceanographers make sense of volumes of data on things like temperature, salinity, and the physics of seafloor hydrothermal vents. “There’s a clear understanding of the science and how to put instruments in the ocean, but there’s a gap in how to convert data streaming in from the ocean to useful analysis,” Barga says. “Jim had this vision of …Next Page »

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The President of the United States is supposed to know the differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims. But somehow, as Richard Muller points out, nobody expects America’s commander in chief to know the differences between uranium and plutonium, or between gasoline and hydrogen.

That’s why he teaches “Physics for Future Presidents” at UC Berkeley, a course for non-science majors that Muller relishes as his opportunity to inform the business majors and liberal arts students who represent our future leaders. The longtime Cal physics professor turned his idea for the class into a textbook, and more recently into a popular book with the same title.

Now he’s on a roll. Muller was the featured speaker at Xconomy’s premiere event in San Diego Monday night, just a week or so after meeting with global leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (He even got to fly home aboard the Google jet).

With “Physics for New Presidents” as his theme, Muller assumes a role that could be described as an equal opportunity “Debunker in Chief.” In rapid succession, he separates some core, inescapable scientific truths from the myths surrounding them. He started by dispelling fears sown by Dick Cheney about terrorists planting nuclear bombs on U.S. soil and ended by puncturing Al Gore’s inflated interpretations of the scientific evidence for global warming. Among the chestnuts he shucked:

—Nuclear bombs are extremely difficult to make, even for industrialized countries. Muller says he’s far more worried about another “low tech” terrorist act involving 60 tons of gasoline and a crowded football stadium on a Sunday afternoon.

—U.S. reserves of coal and oil shale far exceed the amount of crude oil remaining in Saudi Arabia and most other countries combined. “This is great news for energy independence and bad for global warming,” Muller says. Nevertheless, he says the United States should develop all of its energy resources, using “clean coal” technologies and other innovations to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

—The scientific consensus, presented by an authoritative study on global warming by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, concluded that the warming trend from 1850 to 1957 cannot be attributed to human activities. From 1957 to 2007, the study found a 90 percent likelihood that human activities caused a global average temperature increase of only about 1 degree Fahrenheit.

—Weather data do not show an increase in the number of hurricanes over the past century, nor do the data show an increase in the number of major category hurricanes. Today, hurricanes are detected by weather satellites and sensors in mid-ocean. Such observations were impossible before the first weather satellite was launched 49 years ago.

—Carbon dioxide emissions in developing countries, especially China and India, represent the biggest source of the predicted increase in greenhouse gases. It is a far more intractable problem in terms of curbing emissions, because coal is a cheap and bountiful energy source and clean energy technologies are too costly in comparison. “The only solution that I can think of is that we have to pay developing countries to use clean energy,” Muller says. Otherwise, they won’t use it.

As for energy development in the United States, Muller says his counsel is, “Don’t be greener than thou. Don’t bicker that ‘My technology is greener than yours. ‘ We need all of them. We need clean coal. We need nuclear. We need solar and wind. We need them all.”

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We’re looking forward to seeing you today at Xconomy’s San Diego premiere, an entertaining and eye-opening presentation on Physics for Future Presidents by UC Berkeley’s Richard A. Muller. Online registration for the event, which is here, closes at noon and walk-in registrations begin at 3:30 pm The presentation begins at 4 pm—hope to see you there!

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If President Obama ever has a question about the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, he can just pick up his Presidential Blackberry and call or e-mail Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

Of course, the President of the United States could just as easily call Richard A. Muller—the U.C. Berkeley professor who literally wrote the book on Physics for Future Presidents. He also was a leading member of the Berkeley team that theorized how an asteroid killed the dinosaurs. Now Xconomy has tapped Muller and his talent for eye-opening explanations as the featured speaker at our San Diego premiere event. We are hosting the MacArthur “genius” award-winning physicist as the inaugural speaker for our Xconomy Forums here, to be held Monday at 4 p.m. at UCSD’s Institute of the Americas Complex. If you’re interested in attending, you can register here.

The book Physics for Future Presidents grew out of Muller’s popular class for non-science majors at Cal—which was voted “The Best Class at Berkeley” last year in a readers’ poll by the student newspaper, The Daily Californian. Muller’s book and lectures have gained renown for explaining the important science underlying terrorism, energy, electric cars, nukes, space, and global warming—and for empowering our electorate with a better understanding of science and technology.

Please join us Monday afternoon to hear this engaging presentation by one of the foremost speakers on science and technology. I hope to see you there.

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The United States will have a new president in four days. But if it were you, how should science and technology guide you in making key decisions in areas like energy, the environment, and fighting terrorism? Should we invest heavily in solar power or electric cars? What is the real potential of nuclear technology—either as a terrorist weapon or as a clean energy savior? How much do we really have to worry about global warming, or do we really even know yet?

These are just some of the issues that will be addressed in our San Diego site’s first Xconomy Forum: Physics for Future Presidents—which will be held on Feb. 9 at 4 p.m. on the University of California, San Diego campus. The speaker is renowned U.C. Berkeley physicist and MacArthur “genius” grant winner Richard A. Muller, author of a best-selling new book of the same name. The book, in turn, is based on his course for non-science students, which was voted the most popular class on the Cal campus.

Rich is an old friend of mine; I first met him when working on a cover story for Time magazine about how an asteroid or comet might have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. He was one of the core team, along with Luis Alvarez and others at Berkeley, who advanced that theory and changed our view of our planet’s history. Rich is one of the world’s most original, and provocative, science and technology thinkers, and we are pleased to have him join us for our debut San Diego event.

And if you think you already know the answers to some of the questions posed above, be prepared to be surprised, even amazed, by Rich’s arguments—this is a man who doesn’t put much stock in conventional wisdom or the party line. All of which could—and we hope will—make for some lively debate during Rich’s talk, which begins at 4 pm (doors open at 3:30) in the Hojel Auditorium in UCSD’s Institute of the Americas Complex. And you’ll have ample chance to continue the discussion, and to meet fellow members of the San Diego innovation community, during a networking reception in the adjacent Arango Foyer that will begin immediately after the talk.

You can find more details and registration information here; tickets are going fast, so act quickly. Xconomy San Diego editor Bruce Bigelow and I look forward to seeing you there, future presidents.

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It’s an unofficial tradition in my family to spend the last few days of the year—often New Year’s Eve itself, I’m embarrassed to admit—deciding what charities we’d like to support before the tax-deduction clock resets for another year. So for any of you who are thinking along the same lines this week, and who are fortunate enough to be able to do a little giving at the end of what’s been such a tough year for so many, I thought I would mention a few causes near to Xconomy’s heart. These are all local organizations that are helping give kids and other folks access to the scientific and technological skills and tools they need to participate in the innovation community. The list is by no means exhaustive, and your additions to it are welcome; just post a comment below or drop us a note at editors@xconomy.com.

Computer Clubhouse
Established via a collaboration between the MIT Media Laboratory and Boston’s Computer Museum (which is now part of the Museum of Science), the Computer Clubhouse is a free, safe after-school environment where kids can get access to not only computers but a host of other cool technology and adult mentorship. With support from Intel, the original model has been replicated at 100 locations around the world.

East End House
The East End House’s broad range of services includes free computer classes and an after-school program that, with help from local biotech firms, aims to bolster kids’ understanding of science and their interest in pursuing it as a career.

FIRST Robotics
This is the local outpost of Dean Kamen’s program aimed at encouraging middle and high school students to pursue science and engineering. The program is centered on a giant international robotics competition; the next Boston regional contest will be March 6th and 7th.

Freedom House
The Freedom House provides free access to its computer labs, as well as computer-skills training for seniors.

Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House
In addition to numerous other services, the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House offers free computer classes and free daily access to its computer lab.

One Laptop Per Child
Founded by Nicholas Negroponte and other veterans of the MIT Media Lab, OLPC wants to ensure that every school-aged child in the developing world has a networked laptop. There are several ways to contribute, including OLPC’s current Give One, Get One (G1G1) program, through which consumers can buy two laptops for $399. One of the computers will be shipped to a school of OLPC’s choice, the other to any recipient that the buyer chooses.

Science Club for Girls –
The name of this organization pretty much nails it—Science Club for Girls provides free after-school programs designed “to increase the self-confidence and science literacy of K-12th grade girls belonging to groups that are underrepresented in the sciences.” (Xconomy is putting its money where its mouth is on this one, by the way: Science Club for Girls is one of the organizations to which we’ll be donating part of the ticket proceeds from our upcoming Battle of the Tech Bands.)

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In an Obama/Biden administration, we can expect much more of a focus on science, math, and technology as critical skills for leadership and competitiveness in a complex world.

On the campaign trail, Obama focused on science and technology research, education, and practice as an area for investment.

His own sophisticated use of the Internet for campaign organizing and communication indicate that the next administration will use and promote 21st century tools for 21st century problems.

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Crime shows generally turn me off, but for years I’ve enjoyed CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, because (as I’ve written before) the heroes are scientists. They catch crooks not by outgunning them, but by observing, hypothesizing, and testing. Of course, the dramatic license that CSI and other series sometimes take with real-world science can be disturbing: no matter how much you “enhance” a still from a surveillance video, for example, you can’t read a license plate in the reflection on someone’s cornea. But you’ve got to applaud creator Jerry Bruckheimer and the show’s writers for bringing out the glamour in a dweeby and meticulous profession like forensic science.

TV viewers clearly have an ongoing appetite for scientists as leading characters. And there are two new series this season that play on that fascination. One of them—another Bruckheimer creation called Eleventh Hour that premiered on CBS last night—tries its best to stick to known, real-world science and its uses and abuses. The other, the Fox series Fringe, has no such scruples. Created by J.J. Abrams, it gleefully mixes factual science with patently impossible claptrap, yet manages to stay charming.

I felt moved to write about the two shows this week because they’re both inspired by science, but take almost diametrically opposite approaches to portraying it—with wildly differing results. In short—though I wish it were the other way around—Fringe is an enjoyable romp, while Eleventh Hour (at least in its pilot episode) is preachy and predictable.

Fringe’s plot will feel familiar to any fan of The X-Files or of Abrams’ previous series, Alias and Lost. FBI agent Olivia Dunham (played by Australian actor Anna Torv) joins a top-secret interagency task force investigating a series of bizarre occurrences: a planeload of bodies dissolved by a mysterious virus, a mutant baby that hits Social Security age in under an hour, a bus full of people suffocated by instant Jell-O, a demonic underground torpedo that surfaces every few decades. The government thinks these events are connected: Dunham’s boss refers to the phenomena as the Pattern.

To study the events, Dunham recruits former Harvard scientist Walter Bishop—a mad-scientist type played to the hilt by John Noble, aka The Lord of the Rings‘ Lord Denethor—and his son Peter, a genius-dropout gamely portrayed by Joshua Jackson, the wisecracking actor who single-handedly made Dawson’s Creek tolerable. Walter has a childlike wonder about science, but is haunted by the memory of the defense-related experiments he was forced to perform in the 1970s (experiments that, it is implied, may have given rise to the Pattern). Meanwhile, Peter is on the run from some unpleasant people who loaned him a lot of money (and they’re not mortgage brokers).

Dunham’s investigations frequently lead her back to Massive Dynamic, a Microsoft-Apple-Intel-General Dynamics hybrid where all of the offices look as if they were designed by Ayn Rand protagonists. Her contact there is Nina Sharp, lieutenant to the company’s reclusive founder. Sharp has a bionic arm and is played with creepy gusto by Blair Brown (Altered States, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd).

It’s actually Sharp, in the pilot, who’s given the line that sums up the series’ intellectual premise: “Science and technology have advanced at such an exponential rate for so long… it may be well beyond our ability to regulate and control them.” We’re meant to infer that the Pattern is a global experiment by some dark organization (SD6, perhaps?) that’s bent on transforming society but may be in over its own head. Clearly, Abrams has been reading books like Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity, which posits that genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics are about to give rise to a new species of hyper-intelligent and virtually immortal super-humans. But whereas Kurzweil greets this glorious future with optimism, Abrams sees the potential for boundless mischief.

I would be very surprised if Abrams ever reveals, or even knows, what the Pattern really is—I stopped watching Lost after it became obvious that he had no intention of clarifying who created the island or why the plane-crash survivors were brought there. But I think I may stick with Fringe, because in the end, it isn’t about the conspiracy. It’s really about Walter, who keeps the show moving forward by conceiving the brilliant (if pseudoscientific) experiments that provide the clues to solving each episode’s conundrum. (Hey, if we just hook up a TV to this corpse’s optic nerve, we’ll get a picture of the last thing she ever saw!) Walter is the MacGyver of neurophysics—his genius lies in his willingness to consider how, with the aid of defibrillators, LSD, and aluminum foil, one might approximate fringe phenomena like telepathy. The show’s big question is …Next Page »

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It’s getting cheaper by the day to sequence the entire string of 6 billion chemical units of DNA that make up an individual human being. Yesterday, Complete Genomics of Mountain View, CA unveiled plans for what amounts to a democratization of genomics. It will offer a service to sequence full human genomes for just $5,000, beginning in the second quarter of 2009.

At Xconomy, we normally focus on companies based in Boston, Seattle, and San Diego, but we couldn’t resist digging into this one, because it has multiple connections to our network cities. Complete Genomics raised its seed capital in 2006 from OVP Venture Partners in Kirkland, WA, and Enterprise Partners in San Diego. It also counts a pair of Xconomists, Leroy Hood of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, and George Church of Harvard Medical School, as scientific advisers.

So we tracked down OVP managing director (and Xconomist) Chad Waite to find out why he decided to invest in this technology versus all the other sophisticated instruments made by companies like Applied Biosystems, Illumina, 454 Life Sciences, and Helicos Biosciences. (He proudly pointed out that his Harvard Business School connection to CEO Clifford Reid gave him the inside track on this investment, and he invited Drew Senyei of Enterprise in on the action, but more on that later.)

It turns out Waite was sold on Complete Genomics because it has a fundamentally different vision of the market from its rivals. Instead of trying to sell a machine to pharmaceutical companies and top academic labs for hundreds of thousands of dollars, Complete Genomics plans to keep the work in-house on its own proprietary machines and offer sequencing as a service. The company plans to open 10 sequencing centers around the world over the next five years, with the capacity to sequence 1 million complete human genomes. It will have enough bandwidth to sequence an entire genome for $5,000 in about four days, compared with $100,000 and six weeks to six months on currently marketed instruments, Waite says.

“We’re disruptive on technology, and on the business model,” Waite continues. “We’re not going out and trying to sell million-dollar machines. Is there really a competitive advantage for a pharmaceutical company to have the machine? The advantage for them is in the data. They want the data.”

So how might that be really useful for companies or academics? At that high speed and low price, it’s conceivable that drug companies will want to sequence every patient who enters a clinical trial to provide clues as to why some patients respond differently than others to experimental drugs, Waite says. Or, they might want to run big experiments that compare the genomes of 1,000 patients with diabetes to 1,000 other people as healthy controls, to look for tiny genetic variations that might offer clues. They could look at a bunch of prostate cancer tumor samples to try to find genomic markers that explain why the disease spreads more quickly in some people than in others, Waite says.

These concepts are truly mind-boggling when you look at the recent history of …Next Page »

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Japan Challenges Detroit on Green Cars

General Motors is working hard at putting its electric car, the Volt, on the streets by 2010. But Business Week wonders if Detroit will be able to catch up to Japan’s lead on green cars. Toyota, for instance, is planning to double its sale of hybrids in the early part of the next decade.

14 Science Questions for Would-Be Presidents

A group called Science Debate 2008 continues to push candidates John McCain and Barack Obama to have a debate solely on science. To that end, they’ve sent the presidential contenders a list of 14 questions they’d like such a debate to cover. Wired prints the questions, which cover subjects from energy to stem cells to space exploration.

Public Cares About Science, Poll Shows

The vast majority of people polled by the group Scientists and Engineers for America said that it’s important to base policy decisions on topics such as health care and global warming on science, says Discover Magazine. But the magazine’s blog wonders whether the public would be as enthusiastic about science if they were asked questions about paying taxes to fund it.

Groups Sue Government Over Cell Phone Tracking

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are suing the Department of Justice for access to records about the agency’s tracking of cell phone users. The New York Times reports that the groups filed suit this week in U.S. District Court in Washington. The ACLU had filed a Freedom of Information Act request last November, but Justice has not yet delivered the documents.

Solar Plant Moratorium Reversed

After an outcry from the solar power industry, the federal Bureau of Land Management has lifted its recently announced ban on new solar energy projects on public lands. The BLM had placed a two-year moratorium on such projects so it could study their impact. CNET News says the bureau reversed course on Wednesday.

Order on YouTube Records Raises Privacy Worries

A court order to Google to release massive amounts of data about YouTube users has privacy advocates concerned, according to TechCrunch. The order came in a lawsuit between Viacom and Google, in which Viacom contends that YouTube violated its copyrights. The order seeks the name and IP address of every YouTube user, along with a list of the videos that person has watched.

Will Hydrogen Push Aside Gasoline?

Hydrogen is being touted as the transportation fuel of the future, powering cars without polluting the atmosphere or entangling the U.S. with foreign countries. But Scientific American, reviewing the issues surrounding hydrogen, says the jury is still out on whether hydrogen can actually replace gasoline. The big question: Can hydrogen be generated and stored on a practical scale?

Demand for High-Speed Internet Slows Down

With 55 percent of adult Americans already having high-speed broadband at home, new demand for broadband Internet access has slowed to a crawl, reports GigaOm. Citing a recent study from Pew Internet, the site also says low-income groups are cutting back on their broadband spending.

Daily TIPs (technology, innovation, policy) is produced in collaboration with

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When I took my dog out for a walk yesterday morning, the sidewalk was strewn with old EKG readouts, as if we had just missed a macabre ticker-tape parade. I picked up one of the sheets—probably flotsam from the hospital across the street—and gazed at the thin blue trace, tremulously crossing a field of pink squares.

The stiff, glossy paper was imprinted “Marquette Pressure-Scribe Recording 1976.” It was obviously old. In fact, a doctor’s scrawl indicated that the patient—a woman whose name I won’t print here, since I probably committed a huge HIPAA violation just by picking up the readout—had come in for the test in March 1987. I’m no doctor, but I could see from the trace’s violent, roller-coaster swings that she had not been well.

Finding this medical artifact made me think of how the line of an EKG, with its check-mark rising and falling, has become a kind of cultural icon for life itself. When the line pulses regularly, the patient is okay. When it goes wild—and especially when it goes flat—we all know what it means.

Or we think we do. But behind the blue thread on the old readout, there’s a complex skein of scientific causes and effects: the way rippling photons carried the colors of the trace from the paper to my retinas; the way the trace itself was etched by the seismograph-like arm of the old EKG machine; and the way the EKG arm was guided by amplified electrical signals, signals that ultimately originated in the convulsing muscle cells of one woman’s heart on a spring day 21 years ago.

Science explains our visual world, and visual representations help to explain science. That’s the central theme of On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science, a wonderful book that I discovered this week and that is the real subject of today’s column. The authors, science photographer Felice Frankel and Harvard chemist George Whitesides (who is also an Xconomist), have filled the book mainly with close-up images of the surfaces of inorganic materials such as oil drops and silicon transistors, rather than biological cells or tissues. Yet I feel certain they’d look at the discarded EKG as its own kind of surface, one telling a vivid story about our physical world and the beings who move through it.

On the Surface of Things first appeared in 1997, and Harvard University Press issued a revised, 10th-anniversary paperback edition last month. I picked it up at Barnes & Noble Wednesday night, immediately after attending a talk by Frankel and Whitesides at the new Apple Store in Boston (which is, by the way, a true marvel of glass, brushed steel, and architecture-as-advertising). I’ve only begun to examine the 58 detailed images Frankel created for the book, each of which is paired with an elegant caption by Whitesides. But I’m already under the spell of the ravishingly detailed imagery, and I intend to clear a permanent space for the volume on my coffee table.

Frankel, who is a senior research fellow at Harvard’s Initiative in Innovative Computing and a former research scientist at MIT, said Wednesday night that she doesn’t use any special tricks for her photography—just a Nikon F3 with a 55mm or 105mm macro lens, shooting on Velvia and Ektachrome film that she later scans and cleans up digitally (using her Mac—hence the appearance at Apple). The genius of Frankel’s images is really in the way she conceives and constructs her subjects. And this is, of course, the essence of science photography, a field just as demanding and content-driven as science writing.

A Swedish foundation recently recognized Frankel for her leadership in this field with the 2007 Lennart Nilsson Award for Medical, Technical, and Scientific Photography—basically, the Pulitzer of explanatory photography. As she put it Wednesday, “I’m not just making pretty pictures. I understand the science.” And she arranges the pictures to illuminate that science.

Her photo of ferrofluid, chosen as the cover image for the paperback edition, is a perfect example. (See the book cover thumbnail, above left, or click here for a larger version.) Frankel arranged seven small magnets beneath a glass plate, then placed a drop of ferrofluid—powdered magnetite suspended in oil—atop the plate. The fluid took on a disturbingly beautiful formation that calls to mind …Next Page »

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I went to the Museum of Science yesterday, to see “Cambridge’s premier companies show-off their latest research and products, revealing what makes them world leaders in science!” At least, that was what the program for the city’s ongoing science festival touted.

Evidently, though, just three companies reckon themselves to be among the city’s best and brightest: Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and CombinatoRx were the only ones who showed up for live demonstrations. That was far fewer than I expected, from having watched similar events in my Swedish home town of Uppsala, where when the local biotech cluster puts on a show, close to a dozen firms turn out. After all, Cambridge companies such as Biogen (now Biogen Idec) and Genzyme helped pioneer biotech, and the city has been at the field’s forefront for two-plus decades. Maybe the other companies felt that the museum’s broken escalator was too big an obstacle to contend with.

Anyway, lots of visitors, mainly school kids, found their way down the stairs to the three-firm exhibition. Alnylam made a game try, with its stand showing the basics of DNA-based medicines. Vertex showed an informational video and had a person there with what I’ll call a fairly formal-style presentation. The clear crowd favorite was CombinatoRx, which demonstrated its strategy of combining different drugs to produce new results through a lively mixing of jelly beans (Take two blueberry beans and one buttered popcorn, and it will taste like blueberry muffin).

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In New Delhi today, officials from the Indian government and MIT announced an agreement to create a new Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (THSTI) in India, modeled after the interdisciplinary Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST). HST director Martha Gray and M. K. Bhan, secretary of the Indian Ministry of Science & Technology’s Department of Biotechnology, signed a letter of intent for the partnership, which will involve an exchange of faculty fellows. The “translational” part of the institute’s name signifies its mission to translate basic scientific and technological advances into improvements in healthcare. “THSTI has the potential to be a second success story that could revolutionize medicine in India the same way the [Indian Institute of Technology] schools revolutionized engineering and science,” said Shiladitya Sengupta, assistant professor of medicine and an HST faculty member at Harvard Medical School, in a statement about the new institute. MIT was part of a consortium that helped the Indian government to found the Indian Institute of Technology campus in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, in 1959.

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