IBM India Software Labs launches Center for Advanced Studies

IBM India Software Labs (ISL) announced the setting up of the IBM Center for Advanced Studies (CAS) at its Bangalore facility to allow universities access to IBM’s leading-edge product development and the supporting infrastructure. IBM will also get an opportunity to work with academic leaders and researchers on research projects.

The Bangalore CAS, one of eight such centres opened worldwide, will offer MTech, MS and PhD students from premier engineering institutes in India access to IBM research areas, technical staff and other resources, with the goal of solving research problems of the utmost importance to software developers.

Initiated in 1990 as part of the IBM Toronto Software Lab, CAS is established to provide a link between academia and industry. Other CAS sites are located at Austin and Raleigh (U.S.), Dublin (Ireland), Barcelona (Spain), Ottawa and Toronto (Canada), and Australia.

"Through CAS we will work closely with universities in India to create a world-class applied research programme for development of winning solutions in the academia and IBM," said Dr Uday Shukla, director, IBM India Software Labs (ISL). "University researchers and students provide unique problem-solving approaches to tackle the challenges technology developers are facing today. CAS assists them in understanding where their research activities can be directed, and eventually turned into strategic products to meet the market requirements today."

Dr Shukla added, "Industry developers get a fresh approach to solving their problems, and university faculty and students can shape their university work to handle the challenges that exist in the commercial world. In this way CAS offers a win-win solution to both IBM and the industry, as well as the academic community."

The Bangalore CAS will concentrate efforts around the key technology areas such as life sciences, autonomic computing, Web technology standards, pervasive and wireless and grid computing.

One example of CAS’s efforts is the autonomic computing capabilities which were built into the latest release of DB2 Universal Database, Version 8. Five years ago, professors and students from Queen’s University, University of Waterloo and York University in Canada began to build software that was smart enough to fix and heal itself, with little human intervention. Today that technology is an integral part of DB2.

Fellowships will be offered to one or more PhD students who will work under ISL researchers’ supervision. The period of fellowship will last for six months or longer in ISL, where the student will work with developers and researchers for research projects.