Students in IBM 'smart planet' design challenge

INNOVATION PROJECTS from 100 of Europe’s top science and technology students were showcased at the IBM Extreme Blue European Expo in Dublin this week.

The third-level students demonstrating their projects had been challenged by IBM to develop a new product or service that would tackle a real world problem.

The interns from Ireland, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Belgium and the UK worked with IBM and industry mentors over a 12-week period to design solutions with the “Smarter Planet” as a theme.

Trinity College computer science graduate Aidan Lynch, whose team sought to improve the logistics of online publishing, said, “There were long hours and tight deadlines but it’s been really interesting.” Mr Lynch’s team collaborated with John O’Donovan, chief web architect of BBC News and Sport, on the broadcaster’s challenge of tagging and storing the content it generates.

Addressing the event, Mr O’Donovan said that with news filed by 12,000 journalists for multiple television and radio channels, the BBC’s archive included 100km of shelves and more than three million photos.

He said the challenge for the BBC was to make this content available for more devices on more platforms. Applying metadata, or smart descriptors, to each piece of data was essential to ensuring the quality of the website, he said.

Through the use of the semantic web, which enables the meaning of data to be understood and used across multiple applications, stories filed by BBC journalists are now automatically published on all relevant web pages.

Mr O’Donovan said the system, first used for the broadcaster’s World Cup coverage, cut the time and money needed to maintain its website while improving the quality and timeliness of content.

Lisa Amini, director of IBM’s new €66 million Smarter Cities centre in Mulhuddart, also spoke at the event. Launched in March, the centre will generate 200 jobs over the next three years, the firm says. Ms Amini told students that with 70 per cent of the world’s population expected to live in cities by 2050, the creation of smarter urban systems, or “semantic cities”, was important. Her team will work with Dublin’s water and transport experts, using the capital as a test bed for innovations that can better predict water and energy consumption, traffic flows and public transport needs.