Infosys Technologies has set up Infosys Science Foundation, a not-for-profit trust to promote research in sciences and honour outstanding contributions and achievements by Indians.

The foundation will be funded by a corpus of Rs 21.5 crore and give out annual awards under different categories. The prize money under each will be Rs 50 lakh, one of the highest in the country for research.

Speaking at a media conference here on Tuesday, N R Narayana Murthy, chief mentor of Infosys, said: "India needs bright minds across all areas of academics
, government, business and society to strive for global excellence. We need to encourage research in the country to address our developmental problems. This award will honour outstanding researchers who will make a difference to our future.''

The jury panel for each area will consist of eminent international personalities and will be selected by the trustees of the foundation.

Infosys had earlier instituted a global award for computing excellence with a cash prize of $ 150,000. The annual award, instituted through the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), comes out of a corpus of $4 million given by Infosys.

Awards in five categories:

l Physical sciences (physics and chemistry)

l Mathematical sciences (mathematics and statistics)

l Engineering sciences (all branches of engineering)

l Life sciences (biology and medicine)

l Social sciences and economics (economics, history, sociology, political science and other social sciences)

source:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Bangalore/Infy_to_promote_science_research/articleshow/4145994.cms