IBM, Top Universities Continue Software Intellectual Property Reform

Press Release

 

IBM, Top Universities Continue Software Intellectual Property Reform

New open research projects designed to speed creation of IT healthcare
tools, privacy & security solutions, and improve software quality

 

Yorktown Heights, NY, December 14, 2006 - IBM (NYSE: IBM) and seven
leading U.S. universities today announced several new open software
research projects under a program designed in conformance with the Open
Collaboration Research Principles, a set of guidelines announced
previously to help promote an open approach to overcome
university-industry intellectual property challenges.

 

Under IBM's new Open Collaborative Research program, results developed
between IBM Research and top university faculty and their students for
specific projects will be made available as open source software code
and all additional intellectual property developed based on those
results will be openly published or made available royalty-free..

 

Universities participating in the program include Carnegie Mellon
University, Columbia University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Purdue
University, Rutgers University, University of California at Berkeley,
and the University of California at Davis.  Initial projects will
address software quality, privacy and security, mathematical
optimization and clinical decision support.

 

"The program will allow faculty and students to freely conduct research
without concern over IP management issues," said Stuart Feldman, vice
president Computer Science, IBM Research. "This will not only help
advance the state of the art in software but also will serve as a great
illustration of the benefits of collaborative innovation with the open
source community."

 

The program will enable researchers at IBM to actively collaborate with
faculty and students at top U.S. universities on a number of
strategically defined software projects, specifically chosen for their
immense societal importance, technical difficulty and need for a
collaborative effort.

 

Beth Burnside, Vice Chancellor for Research, UC Berkeley, agrees that,
"Our faculty are pleased to work with IBM as part of IBM's program in
open collaboration. Berkeley faculty have long held that in many fields
the impact and public benefit of university research is maximized by an
open collaboration approach".  And Pradeep Khosla, Dean, Carnegie Mellon
University adds, "This program is driving additional investment in
innovative university and IT industry research and CMU has always been
keenly interested in growing these relationships."

 

The research aims for major advancements in the development of
defect-free software, new healthcare solutions for better decision
making by doctors and nurses, new technology to protect a person's
identity and secure a company's data from thieves, and advanced
mathematics to optimize methods for how we live and work everyday.

 

More specifically, the topics and universities for the initial
collaborations are:

 

Software Quality (Rutgers University and University of California at
Berkeley):  The collaboration will develop program analysis techniques
and tools for detecting and correcting software defects before they
reach customers, focusing on industrial-size framework-based software
systems that pose new challenges in their size and complexity.

 

*	Privacy and Security Policy Management (Carnegie Mellon
University and 
*	Purdue University): The team will address the difficult problems
faced by organizations in creating and managing end-to-end privacy and
security solutions covering all types of data and work to drive the
adoption of the open standards needed to achieve this. 

 

*	Mathematical Optimization Software (Carnegie Mellon University
and University of California at Davis): The collaboration is intended to
significantly advance the size and scope of industrial problems that can
be solved with mathematical optimization software. 

 

*	Clinical Decision Support (Columbia University and Georgia
Institute of Technology): The collaboration will include computer
scientists and clinicians working in a variety of settings to create
easy to use tools and interfaces for clinical decision support, removing
barriers to IT adoption in this area. 

 

These research projects demonstrate continued benefit from the Open
Collaboration Principles announced by the University & Industry
Innovation Summit Team in December 2005.  The principles complement
other industry and university initiatives and accelerate collaborative
research for open source software by providing guidelines for handling
research results.

 

The IBM program is intended to accelerate the innovation and development
of open software across a breadth of areas, thus enabling the
development of related industry standards and greater interoperability,
while managing intellectual property in a manner that enhances these
goals.

 

University & Industry Innovation Summit Team participants:

Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute, Stanford University, University of California at
Berkeley, University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign, The University of
Texas at Austin, Cisco, HP, IBM, and Intel.

 

About IBM

For more information about IBM, please visit www.ibm.com.

 

 

Farrah Hamid
Text 100 Public Relations
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