Breaking News - General:
IBM's $70 Million University Research Investment Grows
IBM announced the latest series of Shared University Research (SUR) awards,
bringing the company's contributions to foster collaborative research to more
than $70 million over the last three years. With this latest set of awards,
IBM sustains one of its most important commitments to universities by enabling
the collaboration between academia and industry to explore research in areas
essential to fueling innovation.
The new SUR awards will support 20 research projects with 27 universities
worldwide. Research projects range from a multiple university exploration of
on demand supply chains to an effort to find biomarkers for organ transplants.
The research reflects the nature of innovation in the 21st century -- at the
intersection of business value and computing infrastructure. Universities
receiving these new awards include: Brown University, Cambridge University
(UK), Columbia University, Daresbury University (UK), Fudan University
(China), North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University, Politecnico
di Milano (Italy), SUNY Albany, University of Arizona, University of British
Columbia (Canada), University of California -- Berkeley, University of
Maryland -- Baltimore County, College Park, and Uppsala University (the
Netherlands) and Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology.
"Universities play a vital role in driving innovation that could have a
business or societal impact," said Margaret Ashida, director of corporate
university relations at IBM. "The research collaborations enabled by IBM's
Shared University Research award program exemplify the deep partnership
between academia and industry needed to foster innovation that matters."
Examples of SUR projects already underway include:
- IBM is working with Oxford University to find better and faster access to
more reliable and accurate mammogram images, thereby potentially increasing
early cancer detection and the number of lives saved.
- IBM is collaborating with Penn State University, Arizona State University,
Michigan State University and University College Dublin to create supply chain
research labs to conduct research on advanced supply chain practices that can
be used to help businesses respond on demand to changing market conditions.
- Columbia University and IBM researchers worked on a project to develop
core technologies needed for using computers to simulate protein folding,
predict protein structure, screen potential drugs and create an accurate
computer aided drug design program.
As research drives innovation and growth, new skills are required to staff the
emerging disciplines. This announcement complements the recently launched IBM
Academic Initiative, a new program to deepen IBM's partnership with academia
in preparing students for the information technology jobs of tomorrow through
no-charge access to technology, training and curriculum development resources.
Last week, North Carolina's largest research universities -- Duke University,
North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University, University of North
Carolina-Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University -- became the newest
partners in this initiative, joining other leading universities from around
the world.
About IBM's SUR grants
IBM's highly-selective SUR program awards computing equipment (servers,
storage systems, personal computing products, etc.) to institutions of higher
education around the world to facilitate research projects in areas of mutual
interest including: the architecture of business and processes, privacy and
security, supply chain management, information based medicine, deep computing,
Grid Computing, Autonomic Computing and storage solutions. The SUR awards also
support the advancement of university projects by connecting top researchers
in academia with IBM researchers, along with representatives from product
development and solution provider communities. IBM supports over 50 SUR awards
per year worldwide.
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