Böblingen, 31 July 2002 - Twelve students spend an extraordinary practical term this summer at the IBM development center in Böblingen. They work for ten weeks in three teams on future technologies in the areas of Life Sciences, Web Services and Autonomic Computing. IBM's practical Extreme Blue™ program promotes new potentials from universities worldwide.

The Extreme Blue participants work on technologies of the future at the IBM
development center in Böblingen

This year's participating students with the majors in computer science, physics and business focused computer science have been recruited from universities and "Fachhochschulen" [ school with more scope to hands on studies ] nationwide [ in Germany].

The new talents had to qualify in a demanding selection process. "At the Extreme Blue program, the students have the opportunity to team with extraordinary IBM experts", said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM Vice President Technology and Strategy as he visited the German Extreme Blue teams. They will work on real projects of tomorrow for the next weeks , at the same time they have the opportunity to get to know the challenges in the work environment of one of the world biggest technology companies.

Experienced mentors are on the sides of the young talents. At the same time, the new recruits benefit from the know how of the experts and researchers of the international IBM research and developer network. "The students can proof their abilities and have the chance to influence our products and technologies." said Herbert Kircher, GM of IBM Deutschland Entwicklung [development] GmbH. "This way, the results of the students contribute directly to the product readiness of the projects.".

The teams in the German IBM development center work on three technologies of the future:

Programming a 3D Chemical Editor
The participants of this project program a 3D Structure Editor, that visualizes chemical formulas. A chemical structure formula is a graphical presentation of atoms, a molecule is constructed of. The Structure allows to create and edit these presentations. The Extreme Blue team will use an existing open source library offering basic function to handle chemical compounds.

Development of a Web Services Infrastructure
This project team will work on the development of a web services infrastructure based on internet technologies like HTTP, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. Web Services are believed to represent the next step of the e-business Evolution. This includes everything, that can be discovered and used via a network Companies can offer and sell their services as web services on-line. IBM creates the required infrastructure, that allows the companies to sell their services successfully.

Creation of a prototype for autonomic computing
The task of this group of students is the development of a prototype, that forms a future building block for autonomic computing.

The prototype is supposed to dynamically make IT resources, like for example servers and applications, through defined requests available . This is a elementary part of e-business on demand. The team develops a method, to derive the algorithms and rules for the supply of required IT resources.

About the Extreme Blue program
The Extreme Blue internship program offers [M]BA and students of a technology major the chance to team with technical experts in IBM's worldwide Development and Research Centers.

[The] Extreme Blue [Program] started in 1999. Now more than 100 students participate in the IBM initiative. Including the Development Center in Böblingen 10 IBM Research and Development facilities participate worldwide in the program: Cambridge, Massachusetts; Austin, Texas; Almaden, California; Raleigh, North Carolina; Haifa, Israel; Hursley, UK; LaGaude, France; Uithoorn, Netherlands; Zürich, Switzerland; Beijing, China.

Students from the universities from Karlsruhe, München and Stuttgart took part in the program [in Germany].

Further information: www.ibm.com/extremeblue