"Extreme Blue" at IBM Research - Zurich

English | Deutsch

Zurich, Switzerland, 11 July 2002—A team of four students from Australia, India, Italy and Poland has started a three-month research effort at IBM Research - Zurich this week. Their ambitious goal is to develop a fully functional prototype of a traffic control subsystem by the end of September.

For the second time, the Zurich laboratory is participating in the worldwide IBM program called "Extreme Blue", a very special kind of internship that allows an elite group of hand-picked students of technical and economics-oriented computer science to embark on a challenging project. Of the more than 5000 students worldwide who applied, fewer than 150 have been selected to participate in one of the three dozen projects to be pursued this summer in the US, Europe and, for the first time, China.

Each team typically consists of three technical students and one MBA student, guided by technical and business mentors. What makes these internships unique is that the projects are selected from strategic areas with potential for new business opportunities to IBM. Their work is expected to result in a functional prototype by the end of the 10 to 12-week internship. All projects address technologies that do not yet exist as such. This not only presents students with a technical challenge, it also gives them unprecedented access to internationally leading laboratories and experts working on hot new technologies.

Zurich project

The students of the Zurich Extreme Blue team will benefit from the established expertise in the field of network technology, and specifically in the field of network processors, at IBM Research - Zurich. They will be mentored by two experienced research staff members and supported by other members of the pertinent group. In addition, the manager of Business Development will coach the MBA student. The goal of the project, entitled "A booster for floating car data" is to develop a subsystem that preprocesses and consolidates large amounts of data from car sensors in distributed network nodes. This relieves central servers from data processing that can be done locally, thereby greatly enhancing scalability, timeliness and accuracy of services based on the analysis of floating car data, such as traffic or car maintenance control. The Zurich project will focus on a booster for traffic prediction using a car data-gathering platform created at IBM's Böblingen Development Lab.

The participants will also spend much of their free time together, as general education, excursions, and entertainment are also part of the Extreme Blue summer experience. They will also meet with the other European Extreme Blue teams located at IBM labs in Germany, France, UK, The Netherlands, and Israel via teleconferencing and in a live meeting towards the end of the internship to exchange experiences and results that may well have the potential to become part of IBM's offerings.