Thomson Reuters hosts first pop-up lab in Bangalore

Thomson Reuters Labs, the research and development wing of the business information services organisation, recently held its first “pop-up lab” edition at its Bangalore centre.

The pop-up lab is an initiative by TR Labs, where experts from its multiple labs across the globe, spend three weeks at a chosen location to collaborate with start-ups and TR employees, Krishna Mohan, senior manager at TR’s technology division in Bangalore, said in a LinkedIn post on Monday.

Over 25 shared sessions were conducted at the pop-up lab, during which the audience got an insight into some of the projects that Thomson Reuters Labs has been working on. The projects range from design thinking and user experience to artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud infrastructure, and security.

“Now is the time to augment our team members with new methodologies, perspectives and technologies to express themselves. The excitement and attitude to learning displayed by the employees just proved that Bangalore is, without doubt, a Technology Hub of the world,” Mohan said, explaining why Bangalore was chosen as the first location.

Thomson Reuters Labs is a global team of data scientists, research scientists, full-stack developers, and designers, who specialise in data science and analytics, data visualization, artificial intelligence and blockchain.

The labs are based out of four different office locations of Thomson Reuters, as per its website.

The lab at Boston, Massachusetts engages with the region’s startup community and universities to develop solutions for the challenges that TR’s customers face.

The Waterloo, Ontario-based lab is located in Communitech, an accelerator in the heart of the region's startup ecosystem. It works closely with the University of Waterloo on research to amp up the school’s co-op programme in innovation.

The lab at Zurich, Switzerland hosts a 6-12 month startup incubation programme to provide mentorship, free office space in the lab, access to TR’s data, tools, customer network and investor circle. It also hosts several hackathons, workshops, innovation challenges, proof of concepts and build prototypes over the year.

“We are particularly interested in RegTech, LegalTech, TaxTech and NewsTech. We do not take equity!” reads the TR labs website description on the Zurich centre.

The fourth lab located in the heart of Canary Wharf in London also partners with startups and universities and collaborates with customers in a framework that builds and experiments with new solutions in technology.