I.B.M. (IBM) has agreed to partner with seven universities to colloborate on software research projects and to make the results of the work in fields such as privacy, security and medical decision-making freely available.
The norm for these types of corporate-sponsored research initiatives at universities typically involve lengthy negotiations over intellectual property rights but this partnership is a break with the usual pattern.
According to NYTimes.com the trend towards companies and universities searching for ways to work together more easily and less hampered by legal wrangling about who holds the patents to research.
The article goes on to say that the projects announced today are being done under the guidelines of the Open Collaborative Research program, which began last year with several universities and four technology companies, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Intel (INTC), and Cisco (CSCO).
Purdue and Carnegie Mellon University have agreed to work with I.B.M. researchers on a long-term project on privacy and security-policy management. The appeal, Ms. Bertino said, is that I.B.M. has a strong research team in security, and that working with a corporation ensures that university researchers get to work on real-world problems rather than academic theory.
In addition to security and privacy, the joint projects will be in software quality, mathematical optimization software and clinical decision support software. Besides Purdue and Carnegie Mellon, the universities are the University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Davis; Columbia University; Georgia Institute of Technology; and Rutgers University.
Read the full article here.
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