IBM's Extreme Blue program

By Christopher Harrick and Benjamin Lewis

Extreme Blue
Extreme Blue, IBM’s highly competitive internship program, combines top undergraduate technical and graduate business talent to commercialize emerging technologies from IBM’s internal portfolios. Student teams work for twelve weeks in an intense incubator-like environment to create business plans and prototypes that are then showcased to IBM’s senior executives, business partners, and clients. The Extreme Blue teams, located in various labs throughout the world, are run like mini-businesses and must solve real customer problems to be successful. The interns work in small project teams that include business and technical students, along with IBM mentors comprised of senior staff from various disciplines and divisions. This combination creates a powerful team dynamic that fosters open collaboration and enables the students to address all aspects of the eventual solution. Their innovations extend well beyond the eventual deliverables as the teams create a variety of new tools and product offerings for various groups within IBM.

OutSpoken – Austin, TX
Team OutSpoken, based in Austin, TX, worked with IBM’s Pervasive Computing multimodal technology, providing an enhanced user interface for browsing the Web on cell phones and other mobile devices. Today, these tools ship with difficult- to-use WAP and HTML-based mobile Web browsers, to allow end users to view content with keypads for input and small screens for output. With multimodality, the team added a speech-in, speech-out interface, using easy to develop XHTML+Voice (X+V for short) markup language, which leverages XML Events to combine XHTML with VoiceXML - all existing W3C standards.

The team worked with their project mentors, Igor Jablokov, IBM’s program director of multimodal & voice portal products, and Chris Cross, multimodal browser architect, to attract industry partners that will in turn bring multimodality to market. They created proof-of-concepts that were well received by industry executives, due to the stark contrast between the old, keypad-only interface and the new more useable multimodal one.

Deep Blue, IBM’s chess playing machine, also made a renewed appearance, allowing opponents to make moves remotely using both voice and visual inputs.

VoicePlace – Cambridge, MA
Team VoicePlace, based in Cambridge, MA, worked with IBM’s Pervasive Computing speech technologies, including WebSphere Voice Server and WebSphere Voice Application Access, to provide a conversational user interface to Lotus Workplace. Using an open standards approach, the team was able to create VoiceXML portlets that augmented this productivity platform.

The team worked alongside project mentors Carl “Pooter” Kraenzel, David Renshaw, and Shawne Robinson to use “off-the-shelf” IBM products in delivering customers remote access to their enterprise portals. By the end of the summer, the interns demonstrated the value and benefits inherent in standards-based speech technologies in interfacing with business applications and providing information anytime/anywhere.

VoiceXML
Both OutSpoken and VoicePlace used VoiceXML, along with other open standards, to provide enhanced flexibility and usability to traditional Web applications. Within weeks the students were able to become extremely proficient in these standards and apply them in addressing the same business challenges experienced by IBM’s enterprise customers. Open standards, such as VoiceXML, allow the industry to deliver rich applications and solve complex problems while maintaining compatibility among diverse vendor platforms. These two IBM Extreme Blue projects have done just that. What are you waiting for?

Benjamin Lewis was Team OutSpoken’s business intern & is currently an MBA candidate at the University of Michigan; Christopher Harrick was Team VoicePlace’s business intern & is currently an MBA candidate at the University of California – Berkeley.