SIGDOC Newsletter
June 2008 :: Volume 9, Number 2
Features
IBM Academic Initiatives
Agile Methods Survey
IBM Academic Initiatives
Europe's First Joint Institute for Service Research
The University of Karlsruhe and IBM Germany signed an agreement to set up a joint institute for service research. With the “Karlsruhe Service Research Institute”, the cooperation partners address the growing demand for academics who are specially trained for the service sector. They also plan to advance research in this field.
Provided the University’s governing body, the Senate, endorses the foundation in February, the Institute will commence work in the summer term of 2008. It will start by offering individual classes and seminars within the programs for Business and Information Engineering. In the medium term, the partners intend to offer a self-contained master program. “As a university of excellence we also want to lead in developing new programs and course offerings,” said Prof. Horst Hippler, Rector of Karlsruhe University, at the signing ceremony. The objective is to prepare students for key roles in enterprises, in research and in society. “The Institute will combine existing approaches at the University and strengthen them via closer linkage to business partners,” he said.
The cooperation which is agreed for an initial five year period implements an innovative “industry on campus” concept. IBM research scientists will closely collaborate with university researchers at the university site. They are to work jointly in a seminal research area—the use of scientific methods to develop and manage services, also known as Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME). To do so, the University and IBM are financing a new professorship each. These two and the existing professorships for “Knowledge Management” and “Information and Market Engineering” at the Faculty of Economics and Business Engineering are merged into a new institute sponsored by IBM: “As a leading service company we aim jointly with the University of Karlsruhe to set standards in services science in Germany,” said Martin Jetter, CEO IBM Germany.
The backdrop to the joint initiative is the swiftly growing significance of the service sector. Services already account for the lion’s share of the worldwide gross added value and for around 70 percent of Germany’s gross domestic product. Yet, Germany so far has only few research projects and interdisciplinary education offerings that are specially geared to services.
The Institute is ready to take on further industry partners and seeks to network with other universities nationally and internationally.
The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) is a joint venture of the University of Karlsruhe and the Karlsruhe Research Center. With an annual budget of EUR 800 million its joint headcount is 8,000 employees.
The KIT is an emerging institution of outstanding international research and teaching in science and technology. It aims to attract the best minds from the entire world, to set new standards in teaching and promoting young researchers and to be Europe’s leading energy research center. In the nanoscience sector it seeks to play a leading international role. Its aim is to become one of business’s foremost cooperation partners.
Advanced Imaging and Computer Technologies Aimed at Providing for More Reliable Prognosis Leading to More Personalized Treatment
New Brunswick, N.J. and Armonk, N.Y. – January 25, 2008 – IBM; The Cancer Institute of New Jersey (CINJ), which is a Center of Excellence of the University of Medicine and Dentistry-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School; and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, today announced a collaborative research effort to develop diagnostic tools which can improve the accuracy of predicting patients’ responses to treatment and related clinical outcomes. Through the use of advanced computer and imaging technologies that facilitate comparisons of cancerous tissues, cell and radiology studies, researchers and physicians expect to determine more accurate cancer prognoses, more personalized therapy planning and, subsequently, the discovery and development of new cancer drugs.
This new project is a natural extension of the “Help Defeat Cancer” (HDC) project in which IBM’s World Community Grid was used to demonstrate the effectiveness of characterizing different types and stages of disease based upon the underlying staining patterns exhibited by digitally imaged cancer tissues. World Community Grid is a virtual supercomputer that gains its resources by thousands of volunteers donating their unused computer time.
Leveraging the experimental results gathered during the course of the HDC project, the team has recently received a $2.5-million grant through competitive funding from the National Institutes of Health. The central objective of this project is to build a deployable, grid-enabled decision support system to help researchers, physicians and scientists to automatically analyze and classify imaged cancer specimens with improved accuracy. It will be a useful tool for supporting the selection of personalized treatments for people with cancer based upon how patients with similar protein expression signatures and cancers have reacted to treatments.
The team is expanding the first phase of the project that studied breast, colon and head and neck cancers to include other cancers as well. From the World Community Grid project, CINJ created a reference library of expression signatures and demonstrated a reliable means for performing high-throughput analysis of tissue micro-arrays.
In addition, investigators at CINJ also are establishing a Center for High-Throughput Data Analysis for Cancer Research that will tap into state-of-the-art computing resources and a Shared University Research Award provided by IBM. The primary objective of the Center is to develop pattern recognition algorithms that can simultaneously take into consideration information contained in digitally archived cancer specimens, radiology images and proteomic and genomic data for improved assessment of disease onset and progression.
David J. Foran, Ph.D., director of the Center for Biomedical Imaging & Informatics at CINJ and professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, is the lead investigator for the project. “World Community Grid enabled us to validate our imaging and pattern recognition algorithms and establish a reference library of expression signatures for more than 100,000 digitally imaged tissue samples. The overarching goal of the new NIH grant is to expand the library to include signatures for a wider range of disorders and make it, along with the decision support technology, available to the research and clinical communities as grid-enabled deployable software. Through the use of mirror sites at CINJ and Ohio State University, and with the support of the NCI-funded cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) program at NIH, we hope to deploy these technologies to other cancer research centers around the nation,” said Dr. Foran. “We look forward to addressing some of the most pressing challenges in clinical informatics today, working side-by-side with our collaborating team of world-class scientists from IBM, Rutgers and other research partners.”
Leiguang Gong, Ph.D., of IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center is leading a team of experts in high performance medical imaging and informatics. In this venture, he and his colleagues at the IBM research and technical labs will collaborate closely with Foran’s team at CINJ and investigators at Rutgers. Co-principal investigators for the project are Gyan Bhanot, Ph.D., member of CINJ and professor of biomedical engineering and the BioMaPS Institute at Rutgers University, who is an internationally recognized computational biologist in cancer research and a leading expert in evolutionary genetics; and Manish Parashar, Ph.D., professor of electrical and computer engineering and associate director of the Center for Advanced Information Processing (CAIP) at Rutgers University, who is an internationally recognized expert in distributed and autonomic computing.
As part of the new Center, IBM is donating High Performance P6 570 Series Class Systems, which will provide additional computational power for the project. The Center will utilize grid technology to provide access to the software and database to collaborating investigators at Arizona State University, the Ohio State University and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. The consortium will serve as a network-based testbed for optimizing the software during iterative prototyping. "This is an ambitious initiative that will push the frontiers of medicine and science by modernizing the collection, interpretation and distribution of cancer research," said Jai Menon, vice president Technical Strategy and University Relations IBM. "A new diagnostic tool with capabilities to analyze diverse types of cancer tissue has the potential to yield breakthrough advances for cancer research worldwide.
Collaborative Innovation
One key focus of the project will be to foster interaction and exchange of innovative ideas among those individuals who have formal training in engineering and computer science, physics, mathematics and statistics and those with strong backgrounds in the areas of biological sciences and medicine. Rutgers University also will play a major role in the development of the joint project and will address computational and distributed computing issues at the system and application levels. IBM researchers will work onsite at CINJ and at Rutgers to develop the state-of-the art image processing, machine learning and pattern recognition methods used in this collaboration by conducting deep analysis of the data and by leveraging the computational power of IBM's latest technologies and platforms. The Center also will work closely with the NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center on Automatic Computing (CAC) being established at Rutgers. CAC will investigate core technologies for enabling autonomic systems and applications, which will directly benefit the Center. In addition, the effort will yield internship opportunities for Ph.D. candidates at the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and Rutgers University by encouraging and recommending the brightest among them to work in IBM’s T.J. Watson lab beginning this year.
Rochester Institute of Technology Hosts IBM's First on Campus Software Lab for Research & Development
ARMONK, NY--(Marketwire - March 10, 2008) - IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the launch of the first software Innovation and Collaboration Lab on the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) campus in Rochester, N.Y., where future software developers will work on 21st century enterprise technologies -- including open collaboration products -- that harness Web 2.0 and social networking features.
According to research from Robert Half Technology, an IT recruiting firm, CIOs anticipate a 15 percent increase in the need for IT workers with Web 2.0 application development skills in 2008.
As companies increasingly use Web-based technologies to capitalize on new business opportunities, IBM's investment in future developers at RIT is the latest in a series of efforts to address the anticipated IT skills shortage. By collaborating with universities worldwide, IBM's Academic Initiative provides resources on enterprise software development, such as Web 2.0 technologies, as well as a direct pipeline from the campus to company recruitment.
RIT was the first university in the United States to offer a Bachelor of Science degree in software engineering. With over a decade of experience in open standards-based software development, IBM selected RIT as the site for its first on campus software collaboration lab.
"For RIT, the lab provides an excellent opportunity for faculty and students who have expertise in open source to work together on real world software engineering issues," said Jorge Díaz-Herrera, dean of RIT's B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences. "As opposed to students who are doing co-ops away from the university, this brings industry and real live work scenarios to the campus.
This is a great example of how we can help companies like IBM in research and development. In return, they expose our students to real world issues."
During their six month co-ops, RIT undergraduate students selected by IBM will perform design, development and technical support roles from within IBM's lab on RIT's campus. This lab will draw on students of various majors from three of RIT's colleges: Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, the Kate Gleason College of Engineering, and the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences.
The experience RIT students will gain will go beyond learning about new software trends into developing real code for IBM technologies. These students will benefit from hands on support and expertise from some of the top engineers and researchers from IBM.
IBM's contribution to the development and design lab include dedicated servers and laptops for student co-ops, plus on-site staff and mentors who will be working together with students both in person and virtually to train students on gaining new business skills combined with technology expertise. Students will initially be working on Lotus and collaboration tools, such as Lotus Symphony and Lotus Connections.
Lotus Symphony, IBM's popular suite of no charge desktop productivity software, features an open programming model that goes beyond Microsoft Office by transforming the basic document into a portal to the Web 2.0 world. Lotus Connections is IBM's social software for business that helps customers create professional networks using mashup technology and link information to other social networks such as Yahoo! or LinkedIn.
Joe Pecoraro, a fourth-year RIT Computer Science major involved in web development, would like to spend his co-op learning how to apply enterprise social networking to improve productivity.
"I want to have a personal impact on the IBM technologies I'm working with. The lab is really trying to do just that -- let the students make a difference in future innovation," said Pecoraro. "I hope that working with IBM will give me an opportunity to clarify what I want to do in the future. I anticipate this may turn into a future career or open doors to more opportunities with IBM."
"The Lab will allow the best and brightest at RIT to apply their skills to innovative solutions through collaboration with IBM, and maintain our linkage with the University's top talent," said Robert McDonald, IBM Vice President of Technical Support for Lotus and Collaboration Software. "We hope to leverage students' extensive experience with the new age of collaborative technologies such as social networking, mashups, wikis and blogs."
IBM's university programs brings both open software computing and business skills to meet the needs of the enterprise at over 2400 universities worldwide, reaching over 2 million students. Through this initiative, IBM works closely with schools that support open standards and seek to use open source and IBM technologies for teaching purposes, both directly and virtually via the web. For more information on the IBM Academic Initiative, visit: www.ibm.com/university.
For more information about RIT, please visit: www.rit.edu
For more information on IBM's Web 2.0 and Lotus Software efforts, please visit: www.ibm.com/software/info/web20
Offerings for students
On Friday, June 13th, IBM will be announcing the availability of six new on-line offerings designed to get students up to speed quickly on hot technologies and topics. With access to tutorials, forums, games and other resources, IBM is helping students develop marketable skills in hot job areas such as enterprise computing, Web 2.0 programming and database management. We have created simple step-by-step roadmaps in an easy-to-use organized format so that students can independently familiarize themselves with the technology and/or topic and expand their skills profile. The following student offerings are now available:
Database Technology
Designed for students interested in open standards-based Relational Database Management Systems, the DB2 Express-C student offering includes an introduction to the technology, free download of the software, access to a support forum, games and hands-on tutorials for enhanced learning, publications, and prep materials for certification exams.
Enterprise Computing
The Enterprise Systems student offering will provide students with an introduction to the mainframe and large systems-related careers focused around the New Enterprise Data Center, IBM's best practices model for virtualization, green IT, service management and cloud computing. Access to mainframe-focused games in Second Life, instructions on how to gain remote access to a live mainframe hub, and experience labs and exercises based on components of IBM's "Master the Mainframe" contest from prior years are also available on the site.
Situational Applications and Web 2.0
WebSphere sMash is an agile development environment optimized for producing rich REST-style services, integration, mashups and user friendly Web interfaces through scripting runtimes such as Groovy and PHP. This student offering includes an introduction to the technology and free software download, hands-on tutorials and other resources for learning, and access to the development community (located at ProjectZero.org) which delivers frequent builds, latest features, and developer's forums.
SSME
To prepare students with skills for use in the services sector, universities will need a multi-disciplinary curriculum that covers the study of people, business and technology in service systems. The SSME tutorial includes resources for discussion and interaction through the use of case studies. Contrasts between the manufacturing and service sector issues are raised to understand differences in supply chain, information systems and operations practices.
Team-Based Development
Jazz is Rational’s future platform for collaborative software delivery that will transform how people work together to deliver software and embedded systems. Students will be introduced to the Jazz platform and provided a free download of the Rational Team Concert software, access to the Jazz community and a wealth of learning resources.
Web Server Technology
WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (WAS CE) is a lightweight Java EE 5 application server based on the open source technology delivered in Apache Geronimo. It harnesses the latest developments from the open-source community and provides a readily accessible and flexible foundation for Java application development. Students can now "kick-start" their Java applications with this leading-edge technology with an offering that includes an introduction to WAS CE, free download of the software, quick-start and user guides, access to Eclipse updates to WAS CE, and rich articles and tutorials demonstrating hands-on use of the technology.
All of these no-charge student offerings are available through the IBM Academic Initiative’s Student Software Catalog, accessible via IBM Student Portal at http://www.ibm.com/university/students/.
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Agile Methods Survey
Gloria Reece
© 2008 Photography and digital story design
by Scott W. Ambler and Gloria A. Reece, All rights reserved.
LET’S GO TO A SURVEY!
Scott Ambler and Gloria Reece are teaming up to conduct the ACM SIGDOC 2008 Annual Agile Methods Survey: Accessibility and Usability. We invite you to participate!
The goal of the survey is to learn how accessibility and usability are incorporated into current agile software methods processes. There is little information about how usability and accessible design are being integrated into an agile software methods process. We are filling this gap by conducting annual surveys of information technology professionals. Our surveys are primarily quantitative with a few qualitative items (most at the participant’s discretion). We anticipate using this information in professional publications for technical audiences. This brief (6–minute) survey is for those who work in agile software development environments. Your survey responses will be reported anonymously, and your individual participation will not be revealed to third parties.
The survey contains brief questions in these formats: dichotomous (yes/no), checklist, drop down list choice (select one item), and short answer (text response). Since we are hosting the survey in a secure environment, you will need to provide your first and last name and e–mail address. Your e–mail address will be used for receipt correspondence associated with submission of the form. Brief instructions are also given within the questions.
Some terms that you may find helpful while completing the survey include:
Actors:
User or End User. A person who will actually work with the system/product being built.
Stakeholder. Anyone who has stake in the creation or operation of the system. They include those who are direct and indirect users, manager of users, senior managers, developers, operations staff, support (help desk) staff, developers working on other systems that integrate or interact with the one under development, or maintenance professionals potentially affected by the development and/or deployment of a software project. Some agile methodologies, XP in particular, uses the term “customer.”
Developer. A person who is a programmer that may have skills at one of these levels: master, journeyman, or apprentice.
Master Developers. Are journeymen who can decompose a problem to solve a business need and prefer clear, concise code that adheres to standards.
Journeymen Developers. Have a broad object–oriented (OO) vocabulary, understand OO principles, and apply them in their code. They use a rich set of design patterns, but may not be comfortable in exploiting their OO skills to solve a business problem.
Apprentice Developers. Are programmers that are not yet Journeymen. They are competent in a programming language and associated tools (IDE, unit test tools, debuggers). They can write code.
Types of Testing:
Acceptance Testing. A testing technique, the goal is to determine whether a system satisfies its acceptance criteria and to enable the stakeholder(s) to determine whether to accept the product.
Accessibility Testing. A testing technique, where the goal is to determine whether a product satisfies the required criteria and to enable the stakeholder(s) to determine whether to accept the product as one that someone with diverse physical and sensory needs could use effectively. One example is an accessible website. Some familiar criteria include the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), World Wide Web Consortium (W3.org), Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and other government mandates such as Section 508.
Usability Testing. A method by which users of a system are asked to perform certain tasks in an effort to measure the system’s ease–of–use, task time, and the user's perception of the experience. Usability testing can be formal, informal, use dedicated rooms and equipment, employ physical mock ups of the system, or conducted remotely.
User testing. Testing activities, including both acceptance and final acceptance testing, where stakeholders are actively involved.
If you have any questions about the survey, please contact Gloria at drgreece@windstream.net for additional information. Please use this description for the subject line when writing:
SUBJECT: 2008 ACM AGILE METHODS SURVEY
If you are willing to take the survey, please click on the link below. http://college.livetext.com/misk5/formz/public/24464/CfHR6d79s3
Survey Acknowledgements:
We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Dr. Brad Mehlenbacher, ACM SIGDOC Chair, and Rob Pierce, ACM SIGDOC Newsletter Editor, for granting us this opportunity to publish this article in their newsletter. We ran pilot tests of the survey during March 2008, with expertise in the following areas: communication, information technology (includes agile), engineering, accessibility, and usability. We also sincerely appreciate the assistance from all of our volunteer participants. Without your help, this investigation would not be possible—thank you!
ABOUT THE INVESTIGATORS
SCOTT W. AMBLER
A 1994 honor graduate from The University of Toronto, a Canadian native, Scott Amber holds an M.S. degree in Information Science. He is an internationally–recognized expert in human–computer interaction (HCI), object–oriented design (OOD) concepts, modeling, testing, and user–interface (UI) design, computer science, and commerce. Scott is a certified instructor in Rational Unified Process (RUP) and has extensive experience with mapping objects into relational data bases. He works with organizations who need an introduction to software development processes. During his career, he has mentored developers in OOD concepts, modeling, testing, and UI design. Scott has written numerous magazine articles and columns on information technology topics. He has also trained hundreds of people in OOD modeling and development. He has co–authored and edited a collection of software development books. Scott is a Jolt judge for Dr. Dobbs Journal. Scott’s work also requires extensive travel; he has had an opportunity to see more than 280 interesting places! Scott is a Fellow of the International Association of Software Architects. Currently, Scott is Practice Leader Agile Development with IBM Rational, based in Canada but helping IBM customers worldwide to scale agile development approaches. He has worked in the information technology industry since the mid 1980s and with object technology since the early 1990s. He has written several books and white papers on OOD software development and process, Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD), Agile Database Techniques, the Agile UP, and the Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) (TM). He is a frequent speaker at international technical conferences where he delivers keynote speeches. Scott writes columns and/or articles for several publications. He maintains, and is active on, several mailing lists and blog about how to scale agile software development.
GLORIA A. REECE, Ed.D.
Gloria Reece contributes to design of communication and education practices at Society levels with international reach. Her document design research at Florida Institute of Technology charted new territory for multimodal delivery. Gloria’s 2002 research, Text Legibility for Web Documents and Low Vision, covers 12 disciplines and extends and applies document design to those with vision problems. Winner of six research awards since 1973, Gloria has been recognized for the innovativeness of her scholarship. Since 2003, Gloria has been a Governor’s Teaching Fellow sponsored by the University of Georgia. She is a 2008 honorary recipient of the Associate Fellow award from the Society for Technical Communication (STC). Gloria is also ACM SIGDOC’s INTECOM delegate. For fifteen consecutive years, Gloria has served INTECOM Societies as a presenter at annual meetings. She is a charter member of the STC AccessAbility SIG. During 2002–2003, she conducted a national, collaborative campaign on hearing loss that resulted in one of the earliest uses of new media in accessible design. She is a 2005 recipient of an NSF grant for a web resource for accessible new media for college calculus. During 2006–2007, Gloria directed a multilingual online educational outreach for economically disadvantaged children, including those with vision loss. From 1998–2004, Gloria was involved in assisted living care for elderly with communication disorders associated with arterial dementia and alzheimer’s disease. Since 2000, Gloria has been a volunteer caregiver for elderly who have mobility restriction and are deaf–blind. These efforts have led medical professionals to new solutions for prescription magnification devices for Age-related Macular Degeneration patients, use of new digital technologies for the profoundly deaf, and use of new fabrics for gas permeable lenses for those with ophthoneurolgical vision problems with adverse refractive error. Currently, Gloria is writing Practical Writing and Design for eLearning (a John Wiley publication), which will have linkage to Exceptional Technology Solutions, which is her new website that focuses on scholarship of teaching, learning (SoTL), and consulting activities and includes an on–line resource for the book.
Index to Photos in Digital Story:
Scott Ambler at Machu Picchu in Peru during January, 2004 (Scott was in the first group to get on the Andes trail that year.)
Scott Ambler at Machu Picchu in Peru during January, 2004
Scott Ambler in New Zealand just outside of Queenstown on the south island during Spring of 2003
Scott Ambler at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC
Scott Ambler at the Teotihuacan, the pyramid near Mexico City, Mexico.
Gloria Reece during her digital storytelling class at Georgia College & State University in Fall, 2004.
Scott Ambler with an iguana.
Gloria Reece sporting her new 2003 hat design: “Peacock Feathers” at the 2003 Annual STC Conference in Dallas, TX.
Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas, NV, by Gloria Reece at the Paris Hotel while attending the 2006 Annual STC Conference.
Logo for Scott Ambler’s consulting website (http://www.ambysoft.com).
2008 Graphic designed for photo collage.
Logo for Gloria Reece’s SoTL and consulting website (http://www.exceptionaltechnologysolutions.com).
Gloria A. Reece, Ed.D./Dr. Glo
Educator, Researcher, and Consultant
New Media & Instructional Technology
Accessible/User-centered Design
Business, Technical & Professional Communication
93 Mariners Dr., NE
Milledgeville, GA 31061
(478) 453-8010 (EST)
drgreece@windstream.net
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