Students taking part in IBM's Extreme Blue programme use both technological and business skills to develop new IT solutions, writes Eamon McGrane
The flag for Irish innovation was flown high at this year's IBM Extreme Blue programme expo at its La Gaude facility in Nice, France.
The Expo was the conclusion of months of exhaustive work by students throughout Europe.
Ostensibly, the Extreme Blue programme is a showcase to attract the elite of young talent from leading European universities to tackle IT issues and problems from a technical and business perspective.
Nonetheless, it's hard not to suspect that IBM's student programme isn't really a canny attempt to corral the best young academic minds in technology and business and ringfence them for the company's corporate machine as it seeks to differentiate itself from its competitors by pushing its innovation credentials.
The event is, however, a huge opportunity for students to grab a stranglehold on their futures and plant firm roots within IBM. Many of them will end up working for the IT giant and, even if they don't, the experience on their CV is sure to garner plenty of interest from top employers at home and abroad.
Ireland has been entering teams in Extreme Blue since 2002 and this year had five teams among the 17 taking part. Apart from Ireland, the Expo featured groups from Britain, the Netherlands, France and Germany.
Each team comprises four students, three of whom try to get to grips with the technical aspect of the project while the other looks at the business side of things.
Indeed, this is one of the most interesting aspects of the programme. Each project must be viable and make good business sense in a real-world setting.
Because each project must have the oxygen of a potential commercial life breathed into it, approximately 50 projects since Extreme Blue's inception in 1999 have rolled into IBM's product or service set. And about 250 students worldwide have joined "Big Blue" thanks to their project work.
The five Irish projects that were presented at La Gaude covered an impressive array of technologies including IP telephony, podcasting, radio frequency identification (RFID), the interaction of scalable graphics and web technologies, and a proof of concept of the Blast algorithm (see panel for further details).
Bill Kearney, manager of IBM's software lab in Dublin, says the projects form an overall innovation culture in the labs in Dublin.
"We like to bring people in because they're not constrained by the way we've always done things and also they can challenge the conventional thinking.
"We try and empower the students and tell them not to be influenced by other people. We will guide them and provide mentors to offer advice when needed and to open doors within the company to get questions answered."
IBM itself usually proffers the ideas for the projects and the students then decide what the project will be and how it will be shaped.
"We give them a high-level idea, but they decide what to do and how to do it, what the business and technology focus will be, and how one supports the other," says Kearney.
With about 400-500 applications to join Extreme Blue every year, the interest belies the recent drop in applications for science and technology courses at third level.
It's an anomaly that Kearney is well aware of.
"Think of where Ireland is going: producing more 'fourth-level' people, producing more technology PhDs and people in scientific research.
"Around that, you need to know how to take those ideas and use them in a business context and try to find models where business and technology students work closer together. It's an interesting challenge and one that Ireland has to work with as we go forward."
Blast algorithm
Students: Alan Cooke, Gearóid O'Laoithe, Marco Cavicchia, Ronan Brennan
Blast (basic local alignment search tool) is a sequence analysis tool which is used to compare nucleotide or protein sequences from similar or different organisms. It is one of the primary tools in molecular biology, and is widely used in the healthcare industry.
The Cell Broadband Engine is a microprocessor jointly developed by IBM, Toshiba and Sony.
The key idea of this project is to implement and optimise the Blast algorithm on the Cell Broadband Engine. In this way, by taking advantage of Cell Broadband Engine technology and optimisation techniques, the performance of the Blast algorithm will effectively increase.
Personal radio programming
Students: Eamon Phelan, Declan Tarrant, Edward Mackle, Keith Pilson
We're all familiar with podcasts now, but the idea here is to examine why they are limited to manually created audio content.
The project examines the creation of personalised news casts for your digital audio player, including your schedule for the day or week, your travel itinerary, e-mails, presentations, news feeds, etc.
This project developed a framework to allow podcasts to be created from many potential sources without having to be re-recorded or created as an audio or video file in the first place.
RFID tracking/alerting system
Students: Ileana Belfiore, Seán McGowan, Tadhg Pearson, Stephen Mulcaly
This project came about as a result of the need to locate units on the manufacturing floor at IBM's facility in Dublin. Similar problems arise in other industries such as healthcare and banking.
The team offered a radio frequency identification (RFID) integrated tracking and alerting system as the solution to the problem.
This could be applied to any situation where an organisation's assets need to be monitored based on their changing location.
The customer can then track the movement of tagged items across different locations that, once defined, can be monitored in real time as they move.
Exploiting IP telephony technology
Students: Kevin Williams, David Mills, Mark Scanlon, Philippe Mueller
The aim of this project is to find ways for IBM Ireland to exploit the increasing interest in IP telephony.
The results of this project include a hosted IP telephony prototype containing the interactive tools designed and developed during the course of the project. The interactive tools have something of a "wow" factor as you can access e-mail, calendar, directories and webcam on the IP phone.
The results also incorporate a formal competitive plan for IBM to enter the hosted IP telephony market in Ireland.
Vivid interactive powerful graphics
Students: Alena Kucharenka, Simon Hollingworth, Frank Halligan, Donal Smith
This was quite a technically complex project but, to explain it in simple terms, its aim was to make graphics on the web more easily downloadable, particularly to hand-held devices.
Often, when trying to access a website via a mobile phone, the graphics will not download properly.
Using scalable vector graphics (SVG) and other web technologies, the students reinvented IBM's Flash-based graphics tool.
SVG is an open standard, and the students wanted to use this project to show IBM the importance of SVG as an emerging graphics technology on the web.
