[A2k] International Herald Tribune: IBM and U.S. universities work to open up software research

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/14/business/ibm.php

IBM and U.S. universities work to open up software research

By Steve Lohr
Thursday, December 14, 2006

NEW YORK

IBM and seven universities have agreed to embark on a series of
collaborative software research projects and make the results of the
work in fields like privacy, security and medical decision-making
freely available.

The initiative, which IBM was expected to announce Thursday, is a break
with the usual pattern of corporate- sponsored research at universities
that typically involves lengthy negotiations over intellectual property
rights.

The projects are also evidence that U.S. companies and universities are
searching for ways to work together more easily, less hampered by legal
wrangling about who holds the patents to research. Those negotiations,
according to experts, can take a year or more, slowing innovation and
prompting companies to team up with scientists and engineers in foreign
countries.

The projects are being done under the guidelines of the Open
Collaborative Research program, which began last year with several
universities and four technology companies =97 Hewlett- Packard, Intel
and Cisco, as well as International Business Machines .

"Universities have made life increasingly difficult to do research with
them because of all the contractual issues around intellectual
property," said Stuart Feldman, vice president for computer science at
IBM's research laboratories. "We would like the universities to open up
again."

Feldman added, "We're hoping these kinds of agreements, with both sides
sharing their work as reusable knowledge that others can build on, will
help that happen."

The current problem, research experts say, is that well-intentioned
policies meant to encourage universities to make their research
available for commercial uses have gone too far. The shift began with
the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which allowed universities to hold the
patents on federally funded research and to license that intellectual
property. Since then, universities have often viewed themselves as idea
factories and, like many corporations, have sought to cash in on their
intellectual property.

But there is a sense at both universities and corporations that the
pendulum has swung too far, and that adopting less restrictive
intellectual property policies could benefit both sides.

"Universities in the United States want to protect their intellectual
property, but more and more see the importance of collaboration," said
Elisa Bertino, a computer scientist at Purdue University.

Purdue and Carnegie Mellon University have agreed to work with IBM
researchers on a long-term project on privacy and security policy
management. The appeal, Bertino said, is that IBM has a strong research
team in security, and working with a corporation ensures that
university researchers deal with real- world problems rather than pure
theory.

"You want to work on problems where your research could have a big
impact," she said. "And this could be a way to collaborate with
corporations, and be able to work on those kinds of problems."

In addition to security and privacy, the joint projects will address
software quality, mathematical optimization software, and clinical
decision support software. Besides Purdue and Carnegie Mellon, the
schools involved include the University of California at Berkeley; the
University of California at Davis; Columbia University; Georgia
Institute of Technology; and Rutgers University.

The projects are long-term efforts focusing on fundamental research to
create building blocks of technology that will eventually be used in
products.

While American and European companies are increasingly setting up labs
in emerging nations like China and India, they still do most of their
advanced research in developed economies, often in collaboration with
local universities, according to a report published last week in
Science magazine.

Nurturing that university-corporate collaboration will be an important
ingredient in economic growth and national competitiveness, said Jerry
Thursby, an economist at Emory University and the co-author of the
research report in Science, written with his wife, Marie Thursby, a
professor at the Georgia Tech College of Management.

"This ability to strike reasonable deals for both the corporate and
university sides is a big issue," Thursby said. "Nobody has really
solved this yet but a lot of people are working on it."

------------
Thiru Balasubramaniam
Geneva Representative
CPTech
voice +41.22.791.6727
fax +41.22.723.2988
mobile +41 76 508 0997
thiru@cptech.org