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10/12/2006 12:11:00 AM IBM awards Rice $700K for shared research BY LON LEVITAN Rice University and IBM will collaborate on the development of an open-standards-based, service-oriented architecture (SOA) that will help higher education institutions tie together their increasingly diverse academic software applications. The collaboration is supported in part by IBM’s Shared University Research award program, created to exemplify the deep partnership between academia and the industry to explore research in areas essential to innovation. Through the award and software from the IBM Academic Initiative, IBM has donated IBM BladeCenter hardware technology, software for an SOA platform and related services valued at $700,000. “In academia today, discrete, open-source, academic applications such as courseware management systems, digital libraries and content commons are becoming central to the life of a university,” said Kamran Khan, vice provost for information technology. “It is important to tie these stand-alone applications together into a more coherent whole.” IBM’s gift will enable Rice to collaborate in the research and development of an open-standards-based SOA for higher education called the Rice Open Collaborative Learning Environment (Open-CLE). Rice will provide a working demonstration environment to validate the approach. “The open architecture resulting from this work will help institutions collaborate on research efforts and tie together their academic applications,” said Tony Befi, IBM senior state executive for Texas. “It also will make it easier for institutions to deploy and for individuals to use open-source, online research and education tools.” The work will also encourage involvement with industry-standards groups, such as the IMS Global Learning Consortium and the e-Framework for Education and Research Initiative, and other institutions interested in participating in the development of an open-source-based learning and research community. An SOA enables computers to share data and tasks among disparate applications, helping an organization to more closely align technology with business goals. In academia, an SOA also enables each member of a group of institutions to create its own suite of tools to support particular research, collaboration and learning needs. Providing such integration and customization is critical if open-standards-based environments are to become a viable alternative for meeting the needs of higher-education institutions around the world. Rick Peterson, director for academic and research computing at Rice, is eager to capitalize on open-standards systems. “Rice is already utilizing great, individual, open-source/open-standards-based tools such as D-Space, Sakai and Connexions,” he said. “With this new research project, we can create a framework that will allow these applications to operate well together. More broadly, the framework we develop may be of help to those in higher education who wish to tie together other stand-alone systems and applications. We want the work resulting from this grant to make life easier for faculty and students by allowing them to create a more integrated learning and collaboration environment.” Rice’s largest open-standards applications today include Sakai, a leading open-source course-management system; OwlSpace, powered by Sakai and operating as the framework for Rice’s Web-based collaboration and learning environment; Connexions, a collaborative, educational Web-based environment composed of independent teaching modules that can be used alone or connected into larger courses; and D-Space, a digital repository system that captures, stores, indexes, preserves and distributes digital research material. “This grant is a big step forward for open education,” said Richard Baraniuk, the Victor E. Cameron Professor in Engineering and founder of Connexions. “Fusing Sakai, Connexions and D-Space will make it easy for large and small educational institutions to get involved in this important movement.” IBM’s highly selective Shared University Research program awards computing equipment globally to higher-education institutions to facilitate research projects of mutual interest, including the architecture of business and processes, privacy and security, supply-chain management, information-based medicine, deep computing, grid computing, autonomic computing and storage solutions. The awards also support the advancement of university projects by connecting top researchers in academia with IBM researchers and representatives from product-development and solution-provider communities. IBM supports more than 50 of these awards per year worldwide. The new open-architecture initiative also will be supported by the IBM Academic Initiative program, which offers faculty and students at universities a wide range of technology education benefits to encourage the use of open-standards technologies. Rice project sponsors, who will work with faculty in other schools and disciplines, include Khan; Peterson; Baraniuk; Claire Bartlett, director of the Language Resource Center and associate director of the Center for Study of Languages; Carlos Solis, manager of educational technologies; Kim Andrews, research computing manager; Andrea Martin, director of enterprise and Web services; Angela Rabuck, instructional technology specialist; Mir Mirhashimali, — Lon Levitan is manager of Southwest U.S. public relations for IBM. |
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