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TCS' R&D pact with Stanford University

Staff Correspondent

To work on joint projects focussing on data privacy

COLLABORATIVE EFFORT: S. Ramadorai (left), CEO and Managing Director, TCS, and Mathai Joseph, Head, Tata Research Development and Design Centre, addressing a press conference in Mumbai on Monday. — Photo: Vivek Bendre

MUMBAI: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has entered into a five-year research and development (R&D) collaboration with Stanford University for research in the critical area of data privacy.

TCS and the Computer Science Department of Stanford University will work on joint projects focused in the area of data privacy. The projects will be selected in such a manner that genuine collaboration can take place with TCS scientists working in the area of security and data privacy at the Tata Research Development and Design Centre (TRDDC), TCS' software engineering research centre in Pune.

Stanford University plays a key role in National Science Foundation (NSF)-led initiatives to accelerate research into security and data privacy. It is part of TRUST (Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology), a multi-university initiative that includes UC Berkeley, Cornell University and Carnegie Mellon University and industrial partners like Cisco Systems, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Sun and Symantec.

In addition to TRUST, the Stanford Security Lab leads the NSF-sponsored Privacy, Obligations and Rights in Technologies of Information (PORTIA) project on privacy and computer security.

As part of the collaboration, TCS will become an industrial partner on data privacy in the new TRUST initiative as well as a member of the Stanford Computer Forum: Industry.

Research staff from TRDDC will spend extended periods of time at Stanford University and experts from Stanford will also visit the Pune centre.

The five-year collaborative research project on data security and privacy started from January 1, 2006 and TCS is contributing $1 million in terms of people costs.

"As a global technology services company, TCS believes in investing in the critical technologies for the future and the collaboration with Stanford University will complement and enhance the work being done by TCS' R&D teams in data privacy,'' said S. Ramadorai, CEO and Managing Director, TCS, at a media briefing here on Monday.

Mathai Joseph, Head, TRDDC, said, "We have a team working on data privacy. There are joint patents and publications that can come out of the collaboration but they will be the property of the university."

TCS has made considerable progress in data privacy and its data-masking tool, `Masketeer', was released in October 2005. The tool masks personal and sensitive information in such a way that the resultant masked data provide a good balance of data utility along with data privacy, and is currently under evaluation and testing by customers.

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