IBM interns develop new technologies

IBM is showcasing the results of its latest summer internship scheme, where candidates have been developing a technology and business plan to bring a new product to life in just 12 weeks.

The programme, called Extreme Blue, is for second year university students pursuing technology or business degrees and sees them developing a technology and business plan to address an existing market need.

According to IBM, there were nearly 900 applications for 16 places in the UK this year.

The selected students have been working with an IBM mentor and their challenge has been to develop the technology and business plan for a new product or service that addresses an existing market need.

As a result of similar projects over the past few years, interns have submitted more than 400 patent disclosures worldwide and have made more than 60 contributions to the open source community.

The students are now coming to the end of their projects and have been showing off the results of their work.

The ventures have included:

Smart Cursor – Disabled users with varying amounts of dexterity can often struggle to interact with a computer and the Smart Cursor scheme aims to provide a system that allows users who cannot use traditional input methods to be able to effectively operate a cursor on screen.

Electronic Voting – Another project has been demonstrating how technology could be used to modernise the voting process in the UK. The project aims to develop a proof-of-concept based around electronic voting that modernises the three main stages of the process: the electoral register, the polling station and the vote itself.

FTP Discovery – This project is aimed at highlighting the critical path of business processes, such as invoicing, procurement and payroll, and demonstrating a single point of failure which could cause problems for a business.