IBM to involve Pune institutes in its project

IT giant IBM on Thursday announced Shared University Research (SUR) awards for different Smarter Planet projects in collaboration with Pune's Cummins College of Engineering for Women and Symbiosis International University along with other two educational institutes of India – Indian Institute of Technology - Bombay (IIT-B),and Pune based , Indian Institute of Technology – Indore.

Through SUR awards, IBM partners with different universities to facilitate deep research involving multiple disciplines, agencies and government bodies. IBM gives about 60-70 SUR awards each year globally of which 11 have been with Indian educational institutes in the last two years. The 2012 awards, worth US $ 150,000 will include technical collaboration with IBM experts, access to IBM software and high performance computing required for the successful competition of projects.

The IBM Shared University Research (SUR) Award is a worldwide award program designed to promote research in areas of mutual value and interest to IBM and universities. The program targets a wide variety of areas, ranging from life sciences, high-performance computing and energy technology, to digital data protection.

This collaboration is expected to foster both knowledge transfer and IT innovation.

Speaking on the occasion, Dr Bhooshan Kelkar, country manager, University Relations, IBM India said, “The SUR award is a very competitive global program that leverages academia-corporate partnership to address some of the challenging problems faced by society. We believe the joint research between IBM experts and some of the brightest minds from academia can lead to innovative technologies and solutions.”

IBM India and IIT Bombay will jointly work in the field of Applied Mathematics. This project comes at a time when the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has declared 2012 as the 'National Mathematical year' as a tribute to math wizard Srinivasa Ramanujan.

The project will involve application of techniques from stochastic models, optimization and control, graph theory, machine learning and game theory to address the complexities in the areas of telecom, service delivery, smarter commerce and smarter cities.

The SUR project with IIT Bombay, IIT Indore and Cummins College of Engineering for Women relates to building a Collaborative Cloud Platform. This project, is an extension of the last years Cloud Collaboratory led by IIT Bombay, that included College of Engineering Pune and IIT Delhi will continue to focus on facilitating large scale sharing and collaborative scientific research in Education and Energy Management.

An efficient collaborative cloud will help cut down operational costs, manage resources better and facilitate higher collaboration through increasing participation.

This project will also provide hands on experience for Indian students on cloud as opposed to just theoretical knowledge, exposure to private cloud and public cloud by virtue of on campus set up.

The joint research between IBM India and Symbiosis International University focuses on exploring the behavioral patterns of customers and employees through Social Media Analytics.