INDUSTRY

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.