Irish college students who have spent the summer working at IBM as part of the Extreme Blue internship programme travelled to Britain this week to present their research to IBM's European management.
The four teams of students, who each worked on a separate technology project assigned by IBM, have filed more than 20 preliminary patent applications based on their 12 weeks of research this summer. IBM creates teams of business and technology students who brainstorm for the summer, with the aid of IBM mentors, on areas of research of interest to the computer giant.
Things don't always work out that simply. This year, the Skylight team, comprising Andrew Ritchie, Sean Heelan, Gillian Rutledge and Cheryl-Anne Harding, decided that IBM's idea for a system that would monitor elderly people in the home wouldn't fly.
"The hardware and software is there to do it, but elderly people don't like it," said Rutledge.
Instead, the team set about designing a system that would make it easy for the elderly to access communications tools such as e-mail and video conferencing using familiar technologies - the television and the phone.
They designed a software interface that hides the complexity of the underlying software and lets the user choose the tools they need by simply pressing a number on the phone that corresponds with the large icons on the screen.
E-mails are composed by dictating the message into the phone, which is then transcribed using voice-recognition technology.
"I demonstrated it to my grandparents and they said they wanted it in their house next week," says Rutledge. "They didn't understand when I said that wasn't possible."
Another of this year's projects does centre on health in the home. The eCare team worked with IBM partner BiancaMed, which manufactures "non-contact" monitoring devices such as one that monitors sleep patterns.
The team of Conor Meehan, Seán Curry, Brendan Maguire and Fabrice Camous designed the infrastructure that sits between the sensors and the hospital or other medical organisation that is monitoring the data.
The project uses a variety of IBM technologies, but is based around open standards such as GPRS mobile communications, so it can potentially be deployed as widely as possible.
The challenge for visually impaired internet users to navigate virtual worlds such as Second Life formed the basis of another team's research. Anthony Clinton, Colm O'Brien, Stephanie Boomsma and Darin Egan developed a system that provides visual cues, such as sonar, to enable the blind to tell them where their avatar is in relation to other objects in the online world.
IBM's accessibility team in Austin, Texas, will now take on the project and may use the work as the basis for a standard on how virtual worlds can be made accessible.
The Thinksphere team of Paul Magrath, Barry Carroll, Julie Pichon and Seadna Long worked on possibly the most business-focused project; creating a collaborative form of mind-mapping software which is used for brainstorming. In true Web 2.0 fashion, they dubbed the category of software "social brainstorming".
Many of the participants in Extreme Blue will now remain at IBM to begin their careers in technology. On the basis of their summer work, IBM looks to have backed a few winners.
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