Extreme Blue Technical Leadership Program

Space tech is creating space technologies with a mindset of hackers and makers, innovating from Edge Computing in Space, to Supply Chain Optimization for Space Assets, to Autonomous Cognitive Framework for CubeSat Swarms, to growing challenges of Space Debris and Collision Avoidance, to Geo-Spatial Analysis with Satellite Imagery, to exploring Quantum Computing for opening new realms of possibilities for the New Space Age. This project focused on a framework for a software defined satellite swarm, or a group of satellites designated to work towards a common goal. The framework is designed to allow a swarm to collect large amounts of data from the Earth, process it, and retransmit it back down to a central collection point. It also allows for flexible swarm creation and data transmission, controlling the actions of each satellite using advanced reinforcement learning, in order to optimize data collection and transmission rates. Though the swarm has thousands of potential use cases, this project focused on a precision agriculture-based application built on IOT sensors that collect farming data in order to display the viability of the product.

IAM Legends is a project automatically simplify IAM Policy configurations, whose complexity is an industry-wide challenge. IAM policy configurations, which manage access to resources on IBM Cloud accounts, can become bloated as a company’s size increases. This carries performance and usability costs for the customer. To address this issue, IAM Legend is a solution that utilizes a novel algorithm to intelligently simplify policy configurations, as well as a way to intuitively monitor the health of such configurations. This project has patent pending for this unique algorithm.

A team of four students from the top engineering schools in France prototyped a delivery round optimization system that leverage the city traffic data and predictive models to optimize vehicle rounds for transporters in the city of Lyon. The intent was to make trucks avoid congested areas, so as to deliver their goods faster, but also to contribute to reduce congestion and pollution at the city scale level. Upon delivery of the prototype, the city, industry partners, research labs and partnering transporters leveraged the study to let IBM join a $12 million, 3-year research project to materialize the prototype into a public service for the city.

SME manufacturing companies hold an important role in the EU economy, but face a number of problems including delayed payment, lack of customer awareness of capabilities, variability of utilization levels, and international competition. On the flip side, fledgling entrepreneurs often require a manufacturer but have no prior experience and thus don’t know which companies would be good fits, and want to be able to manufacture flexibly, but many manufacturing companies require large batch orders. Hyperfacture’s solution combines IoT and blockchain technology to create a platform that directly connects creators and manufacturers without need for a broker by enabling trust and transparency between unfamiliar parties, providing real time tracking of production and high levels of automation, and connects machines to a global manufacturing market.

Adapting legacy Java applications to the blockchain is the biggest barrier to blockchain adoption for enterprise customers. To accelerate blockchain adoption and improve the efficiency of blockchain application development, the EzBc project explored solutions and techniques to "make it easy-peasy" for developers.

Pace is a charity that supports children and young adults who have sensory motor disorders. Daily tasks that some would consider basic can be a struggle. Our Extreme Blue team are helping design a solution for their user who is a 0-18 y/o child with a range of neuromuscular and cognitive disabilities. The user needs a system of switches to interact with objects in their daily life and current systems of assistive technologies are costly, complex, and un-customisable.