| |
IBM's Extreme Blue program
By Christopher
Harrick and Benjamin Lewis
Extreme Blue
Extreme Blue, IBM’s highly competitive internship
program, combines top undergraduate technical and graduate
business talent to commercialize emerging technologies
from IBM’s internal portfolios. Student teams work
for twelve weeks in an intense incubator-like environment
to create business plans and prototypes that are then
showcased to IBM’s senior executives, business
partners, and clients. The Extreme Blue teams, located
in various labs throughout the world, are run like
mini-businesses and must solve real customer problems
to be successful.
The interns work in small project teams that include
business and technical students, along with IBM mentors
comprised of senior staff from various disciplines
and divisions. This combination creates a powerful
team dynamic
that fosters open collaboration and enables the students
to address all aspects of the eventual solution.
Their innovations extend well beyond the eventual
deliverables
as the teams create a variety of new tools and product
offerings for various groups within IBM.
OutSpoken – Austin,
TX
Team OutSpoken, based in Austin, TX, worked with
IBM’s Pervasive
Computing multimodal technology, providing an enhanced
user interface for browsing the Web on cell phones and other mobile devices.
Today,
these tools ship with difficult- to-use WAP and HTML-based
mobile Web browsers, to allow end users to view content with keypads for
input and small screens for output. With multimodality,
the team added a speech-in, speech-out interface, using easy to develop
XHTML+Voice (X+V for short) markup language, which
leverages XML Events to combine XHTML with VoiceXML - all existing W3C standards.
The
team worked with their project mentors, Igor Jablokov, IBM’s
program director of multimodal & voice portal products, and
Chris Cross, multimodal browser architect, to attract
industry partners that will in turn bring multimodality
to market. They
created proof-of-concepts that were well received by
industry executives, due to the stark contrast between
the old, keypad-only interface
and the new more useable multimodal one.
Deep
Blue, IBM’s chess playing machine, also made a renewed appearance,
allowing opponents to make moves remotely using both
voice and visual inputs.
VoicePlace – Cambridge,
MA
Team VoicePlace, based in Cambridge, MA, worked
with IBM’s Pervasive Computing speech technologies,
including WebSphere Voice Server and WebSphere
Voice Application Access,
to provide a conversational user interface to Lotus
Workplace. Using an open standards approach,
the team was able to create
VoiceXML portlets that augmented this productivity
platform.
The team
worked alongside project mentors Carl “Pooter” Kraenzel,
David Renshaw, and Shawne Robinson to use “off-the-shelf” IBM
products in delivering customers remote access to their
enterprise portals. By the end of the summer, the interns
demonstrated the
value and benefits inherent in standards-based speech
technologies in interfacing with business applications
and providing information
anytime/anywhere.
VoiceXML
Both OutSpoken and VoicePlace used VoiceXML, along
with other open standards, to provide enhanced flexibility
and usability to traditional Web applications.
Within weeks the students
were able to become extremely proficient in these
standards and apply them in addressing the same
business challenges experienced
by IBM’s enterprise customers. Open standards, such as
VoiceXML, allow the industry to deliver rich applications
and solve complex problems while maintaining compatibility
among diverse vendor platforms. These two IBM Extreme Blue
projects
have done just that. What are you waiting for?
Benjamin
Lewis was Team OutSpoken’s business intern & is
currently an MBA candidate at the University of Michigan; Christopher
Harrick was Team VoicePlace’s business intern & is currently
an MBA candidate at the University of California – Berkeley.
|
