University Awards

The 2010 X10 Innovation Awards will recognize a select group of academic research and curricular development activities in the area of computing at scale on cloud computing platforms based on the X10 programming language.

Two rapidly evolving trends are converging to make X10 a compelling platform for executing current research and educational agendas in parallel programming at scale. First, because of the establishment of parallel architectures in the mainstream, application programmers must grapple, many for the first time, with developing explicitly concurrent programs. Second, the cloud is emerging as an attractive and viable application development and deployment framework for commercial applications that must process vast amounts of data, utilizing hundreds of (possibly heterogeneous) cores. These two trends converge on the need for a productive parallel programming environment that can be used to develop applications at scale. The X10 programming language -- in development and refinement over the last five years — is such an environment, and is now available for use by advanced development groups.

The X10 Innovation Awards program represents an ideal opportunity for academic partners to learn, teach and help develop an eco-system built around a modern, open-source parallel language suitable for developing applications for parallel architectures. This program will sponsor the development of libraries and application frameworks using X10 for cloud-based applications, as well as other areas of interest, to further develop the X10 ecosystem. Proposers will develop libraries, applications and application frameworks using X10, hosted on the IBM Research Cloud. Proposers are also strongly encouraged to take advantage of Eclipse and X10DT, the Eclipse-based integrated development environment for X10.

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The 2008 Jazz Innovation Awards recognized outstanding research projects based on the use of Jazz technology in academic research and education. Jazz is a flexible, extensible team collaboration platform for building integrated tools that support software development teams in virtually everything they do.

The Jazz platform provides a rich basis for research in many areas, including but not limited to: collaboration and awareness, configuration management, planning and work item management, process guidance, build, project health, reporting and visualization, repository mining (of code, work items, builds and other artifacts from all phases of the software lifecycle) and tailoring of environments for educational (classroom) use.

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The 2008 Exploratory Stream Analytics Innovation Awards encouraged the development of capabilities around the paradigm of exploratory and distributed stream processing and analysis, for academic curricula and research. Distributed stream processing represents a novel computing paradigm where data, sensed externally, is pushed asynchronously to various connected computing devices for processing. It enables novel applications typically characterized by the need to process high-volume, and possibly noisy, data streams in a timely and responsive fashion.

This paradigm has applicability in several diverse domains that require exploration of real-time signals from sensors that might include radio antennas, distributed medical sensors, manufacturing process monitors, environmental, seismic and atmospheric sensors.

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The 2008 Unstructured Information Analytics Innovation Awards encouraged the development of community and capabilities for analytics on unstructured information, especially around the open source and open standards-based Apache UIMA. This framework provides middleware that accomplishes the more mundane (but critical) tasks involved in managing the creation, component assembly, configuration, deployment, scaling, error handling and monitoring of applications that use these analysis algorithms, in real-world application settings.

Applications being built with UIMA run on configurations ranging from stand-alone laptop computers to large clusters of distributed servers. These applications analyze and extract knowledge from unstructured sources in diverse areas such as business intelligence, enterprise search, social networking, bioinformatics, customer relationship management, technical support, and security.

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The 2008 Real-time Innovation Awards encouraged the use of open source and open standards-based tools for academic curricula and research. The development of real-time Linux and real-time Java made it possible, for the first time, to create complex, real-time systems using a widely-available standard operating system and a safe, high-level, language that includes garbage collection. IBM has produced leading technology in this area that is in use in the telecommunications, defense, and finance sectors.

There still are many opportunities to create innovative real-time applications, tools, and middleware or to improve the underlying operating system. And, most important to the academic community, the potential or this technology to simplify education has not yet been realized.

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The IBM Eclipse Innovation Award program was an international award competition for faculty, designed to encourage the use of open source and open standards-based tools for academic curricula and research. Between 2003-2006, IBM provided over 270 awards for the purpose of furthering teaching, research, and community building around the Eclipse environment.

Eclipse is an open universal platform for tool integration that has an extensible Integrated Development Environment (IDE). As part of the open source community, the Eclipse technology is royalty-free. Eclipse-based tools give developers freedom of choice in a multi-language, multi-platform, multi-vendor supported environment and run on many operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and Mac OS. They offer significant value to researchers and educators, by providing an industrial-strength infrastructure for conducting research and developing curricula in many areas of computer science and computer engineering.

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