Mumbai: IBM India Software Labs (ISL) has set up the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) at its Bangalore facility to allow universities access to IBM''s leading-edge product development and the supporting infrastructure, while IBM has the opportunity to work with academic leaders and researchers on research projects.

The Bangalore CAS, one of the eight such centres opened worldwide, will offer M Tech, MS and PhD students from premier engineering institutes in India access to IBM research areas, technical staff and other resources, with the goal of solving research problems of the utmost importance to software developers.

Initiated in 1990 as part of the IBM Toronto Software Lab, CAS is established to provide the link between the academia and the industry. Other CAS sites are located at Austin and Raleigh (US), Dublin (Ireland), Barcelona (Spain), Ottawa and Toronto (Canada), and Australia.

"Through this programme we will work closely with universities in India to create a world-class applied research programme for developing winning solutions in the academia and IBM," says ISL director Dr Uday Shukla. "University researchers and students provide unique problem-solving approaches to tackle the challenges technology developers are facing today. CAS assists them in understanding where their research activities can be directed, and eventually turned into strategic products to meet the market requirements today.

"Industry developers get a fresh approach to solving their problems, and university faculty and students can shape their university work to handle the challenges that exist in the commercial world. In this way CAS offers a win-win solution to both IBM and the industry, as well as the academic community."

The Bangalore CAS will concentrate efforts around the key technology areas such as life sciences, autonomic computing, Web technology standards, pervasive and wireless computing and grid computing.

One example of CAS''s efforts is the autonomic computing capabilities, which were built into the latest release of DB2 Universal Database, Version 8. Five years ago, professors and students from Queen''s University, University of Waterloo and York University in Canada began to build software that was smart enough to fix and heal itself, with little human intervention. Today that technology is an integral part of DB2.

Fellowships will be offered to one or more PhD students who will work under ISL researchers'' supervision. The period of fellowship will last for six months or longer in ISL, where the student will work with developers and researchers for research projects.

"Over the past 13 years, CASs, beginning in Toronto, have engaged in hundreds of research projects with thousands of students and professors from around the world," says IBM Corporation CAS programme director Gabby Silberman. "The expansion to new sites reflects the need to establish cooperative research partnerships globally, closer to the universities and the development work being done in those respective countries."

CAS (www.cas.ibm.com) was first established at the IBM Toronto Lab in 1990. Its mission was to strengthen the links between research communities and IBM. CAS has been working closely with academic institutions, as well as corporate, government, and other IBM research groups on various projects that relate to the products of the IBM Toronto Lab. Because of the success of CAS Toronto, several IBM Laboratories and Research facilities around the world have opened their own CASs.

ISL partners with IBM labs globally to develop, enhance and support key IBM products and technologies and is located at Bangalore and Pune. ISL''s unique portfolio includes worldwide support for diverse IBM products in areas such as operating systems (OS/2 and AIX), Web application servers (WebSphere), distributed file systems, compilers (VisualAge), office automation products (Lotus SmartSuite) and middleware technologies like WebSphere MQ and Java. ISL plays a major role in IBM''s global Linux initiatives and has established a Linux Technology Centre in Bangalore.