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About alphaWorks
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alphaWorks in the news
Over the years, alphaWorks has garnered numerous press mentions for its emerging technologies as well as the unique business model. Here are a few recent highlights. In addition, you can search the press database for further press mentions on specific technologies.
From Application Development Trends
IBM Opens AlphaWorks Technology to Universities
IBM has launched a new program to provide university students and faculty free access to nascent technologies on its alphaWorks site. The goal of the Academic Licensing Program, says Marc Goubert, manager of IBM’s alphaWorks group, is to train, educate and build a loyal base of future developers on emerging technologies and open standards.
"We want to spur innovation from universities and our future software engineers," Goubert tells ProgrammingTrends. "We want to provide students and faculty with new software concepts that wouldn't necessarily be taught otherwise. We feel that working with faculty, giving them some of these emerging technology concepts, will help us to build a firmer base and a more innovative software developer generation to come." Read more.
From CNET
IBM Enhances Eclipse-based Tools for Mobile Access to Enterprise Applications
IBM today announced the availability of three new pervasive computing technologies for download via its alphaWorks emerging technology web site. The new software solutions -- IBM Voice Toolkit, Forms for Mobile Devices and Multimodal Toolkit Plus -- make it easier for companies to access enterprise applications via wireless data devices virtually anytime, anywhere. The three independent offerings also help to simplify the development and deployment of pervasive computing software using open, standards-based technology.
"The mobile workforce is predicted to grow in double digits between now and 2008, which will create a high dependence on wireless mobile devices and alternative input methods such as speech and multimodality," said Marc Goubert, senior manager, IBM alphaWorks. "With these pervasive computing toolkits, IBM empowers customers to drive internal field and sales efficiencies by harnessing open standards-based technologies to access enterprise applications." Read more.
From InfoWorld
IBM offers developers modeling transition tool
Integrated with Eclipse and Rational modeling tools, MTF is a framework and toolkit that developers can use to implement comparison, consistency checking, and transformation tools. The technology creates a record of mappings between model elements that can be reloaded later on to support changes, the company said.
"[MTF] gives developers a chance to use different modeling frameworks and basically convert from one framework to another," such as from UML (Unified Modeling Language) to EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework), said Marc Goubert, manager of IBM alphaWorks. Bidirectional transformation also is enabled from UML 2.0 to the XSD (XML Schema Definition) data format. Read more.
From The Wall Street Journal
Looking for a User-Friendly Internet: Researcher at IBM Japan Uses Technology to Help Surfers With Poor Eyesight
YAMATO, Japan – Deep in the research labs of IBM Japan south of Tokyo, a computerized female voice fills the room. "Jobs," it says. "Personals. Real estate. Rentals. Vehicles." Chieko Asakawa, top accessibility-researcher for the blind at International Business Machines Corp., is surfing the Internet.
Ms. Asakawa heads down a list of links but is unable to see that the article she wants is a few centimeters to the right. Then she stops and smiles. "Even this has vastly increased the amount of information available to me," she says. The 45-year-old Ms. Asakawa has spent the past eight years trying to make the Internet a friendlier place for people who can't see.
In 1997, her research group at IBM Japan put out one of the world's first browsers specifically made to read the content of Web pages aloud. This July, her team released software that helps Web designers figure out how to tweak home pages so they are accessible to people with poor -- or no -- eyesight.
From The New York Times
Trying to Make the Pen as Mighty as the Keyboard
PORTABLE computers that let you give commands or enter text using an electronic pen on the screen could usher in a new era of information sharing. But pen computers like Microsoft's Tablet PC have had only lukewarm success, and writing notes on a palmtop requires learning a kind of shorthand.
Now researchers are devising new ways to interact with Tablet PC's and other pen-based computers. The machines use a special version of Microsoft Windows and a digitizer under the screen that samples pen strokes to let users write with digital "ink," peck out messages with an on-screen keyboard and navigate their desktop and folders with a stylus instead of a mouse. The research could make it easier to enter text quickly and accurately, and it could encourage collaboration by introducing gesture commands that let friends and co-workers share photos and files with a flick of a pen.
"We all realize that the desktop computing platform has matured, and we need to go beyond that, creating an environment for when you're on the move," said Shumin Zhai, a research staff member at I.B.M.'s Almaden Research Center in California. "But point-and-click interfaces have meant that tablets and P.D.A.'s suffered, because their screens are smaller. They do have an advantage - a stylus - but it's not being used to its full capability."
Last month Dr. Zhai and his team released software called Shark, or Shorthand-Aided Rapid Keyboarding, on I.B.M.'s alphaWorks Web site (alphaworks.ibm.com), where the company previews emerging technologies from its labs. The software replaces the standard on-screen keyboard that a Tablet PC usually displays with a stylus-friendly keyboard that places common letter combinations near one another in a hexagonal grid. Users write words by tracing a stylus across the virtual keys, forming shapes that Dr. Zhai calls sokgraphs. Read more.
Search the press database for further press mentions on specific alphaWorks technologies.
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