Beckman Institute researcher Narendra Ahuja has won a coveted 2008 HP Labs Innovation Research Award, it was announced Thursday.

Ahuja is a full-time faculty member in Beckman's Artificial Intelligence group and a professor in the Illinois Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Ahuja is one of 41 winners of the award, which is designed to encourage open collaboration with HP Labs on projects that result in mutually beneficial, high-impact research. HP reviewed more than 450 proposals from 200 universities in 28 countries before selecting the 41 projects from 34 different institutions.

Ahuja's project is part of research at HP's Multimedia Communications and Networking Lab. The title of his project is "3D Reconstruction of Dynamic Real-World Objects and 3D Motion Aided Gesture Recognition." Another aspect of the award is on-campus support for one graduate student researcher, who will also be eligible to apply to the HP Labs internship program in 2009.