Ashish Patel

Original Post: https://www-146.ibm.com/corporateservicecorps/node/5260

Our client is the Spastic Childrens Association of Johor, which focuses on providing education services to children and adults with Cerebral Palsy. The client is located in Johor Bahru and was founded in 1967. The association is mainly funded by royalty, but also from grants and donations. The education programs provided range from early childhood to various elementary and junior education levels including vocational, language, mathematics, music, and sport studies. The association enrolls 72 students and about 40 teachers and aides. Gabriella Kokas and I are leading this project.

Today is the start of our second week here in Johor, so I thought it would be a good idea to recap last week and provide some insight into our activities for this week.
During the week of March 15th, our first week of this project, we were given a tour of the client’s estate. Two very interesting experiences impressed me. First, the fact that the sports education program has produced several Paralympics Athletes, a few of who have competed and won nationally and internationally! Second, the sensory room (sponsored by Ronald McDonald Charity) was an experience of its own. The room is equipped with several tools in the form of games that children can use to simulate their visual and auditory senses to create sensations.

The rest of the first week was spent understanding the association, speaking with the teachers, touring the premise, and studying the scope of the project. Our project will focus on providing recommendations to the education and learning methodology at the association and applying assistive computer technologies for the computer education program for the children.

Our goal for this week is to understand the Malaysia Education Ministry’s special education programs and begin analyzing and developing recommendations for teaching process and assistive computer technology at the association. This week is a crucial week to the success of our 4 week assignment. Back to work!

admin IBM, IBM Corporate Service Corps, Me Celebral Palsy, IBM Corporate Service Corps, johor, malaysia, Spastic

admin IBM

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admin IBM, Microsoft

Back in November 2008, I delivered a keynote (on behalf of IBM) at the Impact National Conference in Toronto. I’ve finally made a playlist of the 40 minute speech. I wrote the speech in less than 6 days (including the weekend) so any comments are welcome!

admin IBM, Me conference, entrepreneur, IBM, IMPACT, motivational speech

The world is changing, businesses need to change and help consumers and other businesses adapt to the coming climate. I found this slide show below a great summary of the IBM CIO Outlook Dave Newbold and his team produced. Take a look and leave some comments!

2015 CIO Outlook Presentation

admin IBM

Some of you know, some don’t; but its been a few months now so I’ve decided to put it in official writing.  Late last quarter I accepted a new position at IBM, in the Global Technology Services (GTS) division as an IT Architect doing Strategy and Change related work; thus, marking the end of my 4 year stint in Software Group (SWG).

I feel that I leave on a high note.  During my last few months in SWG, I led our team to the release of IBM Rational AppScan v7.7 GA (Developer and Build Edition).  As the Software Architect and Development Lead for these products, we successfully managed to provide brand new security-related offerings (based on Eclipse) in the IBM Rational portfolio in almost exactly a 1 year timeframe.  The products have been setup for a great amount of marketplace and technological potential, and as I exeunt from IBM Rational I leave my team with this potential, knowledge, and my mentorship to break new ground.

All in all, I have enjoyed my years within the IBM Rational brand.  I have come to learn about the Rational brand, provided value across various SWG brands (such as Rational, Tivoli, WebSphere), contributed to the open source Eclipse project, led several software products in architecture and development capacities, enhanced my leadership skills, and met a lot of smart people.  I don’t discount coming back to IBM SWG, but perhaps in a different capacity.

admin IBM, Me, Software Industry

The updated statistics of my contribution to the grid are in:

• Registered: September 22, 2005
• Run Time: 961 days
• Points: 1,272,640
• Results: 3,648

My last update on April 3, 2007 had statistics of the following.  Not bad, given I can’t even remember which machines are crunching out the results!

• Registered: September 22, 2005
• Run Time: 477 days
• Points: 394,264
• Results: 1,623

For those who don’t know about the World Community Grid program, read more here.  Also congratulations to the organization for its 4th year anniversary, check out these statistics published in their recent news letter:

World Community Grid celebrates its fourth anniversary
On our fourth anniversary, we celebrate our tremendous volunteer force of more than 411,000 volunteers who have registered more than 1,111,000 computers. Together, we have contributed enough computing power to make World Community Grid the largest volunteer effort of its kind on the planet. More than 195,000 years of computer run time have been provided, allowing for 216 million results to be made available to important humanitarian research.

admin IBM, World Community Grid

On November 29, 2007, I got an e-mail from my peers in the IBM Redbook publishing house letting me know that the book I co-authored last year as finally reached draft status! In 2006, various members in the product development team for IBM Rational Performance Tester got together and started putting “ink to paper”. About a year later, we produced 14 chapters that outline architecture, use cases, operating environment, and configuration details that users normally wouldn’t find in the product documentation. In addition, each of these areas are explained in technical detail for our users to understand.

My contribution was Chapters 8 and 9 in the book. These are primarily based on the component “formerly known as” IBM Performance Optimization Toolkit and its integration into the IBM Rational Performance Tester product.

The draft version is available in PDF (about 8MB) and for more information please visit the IBM Redbook website.  The final publication is slated for printing on January 31, 2008.

admin IBM, IBM Extreme Blue

I’ve been extremely quiet over the last 4 months and I’m very happy to say I don’t have to keep my mouth shut any longer! Our team at IBM (literally 7 people including management, developers, architects and testers) have been working on integrating the Watchfire AppScan product into the IBM software stack. This morning we made our public beta debut this morning with IBM Rational AppScan Developer Edition v7.7 Open Beta.

Product Information (Click here to view the IBM product page)

Rational AppScan Developer Edition software extends Rational Application Developer for WebSphere® with support for Web application security testing that automates vulnerability assessments.

This first release of Rational AppScan Developer Edition expands IBM’s industry leading application development platform focusing on the following themes and capabilities:

• Early detection and remediation of vulnerabilities: Automates application vulnerability scanning. Security testing takes place during development without requiring the involvement of a security expert. Vulnerabilities are found early in the process and intelligent fix recommendations allow you to quickly resolve security issues.
• AppScan Enterprise Edition integration: AppScan Enterprise Edition is a separately-purchased Web-based, multi-user application vulnerability testing and reporting solution. AppScan Developer Edition can be used as a part of the AppScan Enterprise solution, combining early detection of security issues by each developer with enterprise-scale control and reporting tools.
• IBM Rational ClearQuest integration: Application vulnerabilites can be submitted and tracked seamlessly with ClearQuest. Rational AppScan Developer Edition provides support for logging discovered security issues as ClearQuest defects, automatically including the title, severity, advisory, remediation information, and any other information required to easily prioritize and remediate these issues within your regular defect management process. Note: IBM Rational ClearQuest is a separately-purchased product.

admin IBM AppScan, Eclipse, IBM, Rational Software, security, Watchfire

Got a very intriguing e-mail today, its included below. Also, an update to my stats:

• Registered: September 22, 2005
• Run Time: 477 days
• Points: 394,264
• Results: 1,623

World Community Grid is pleased to announce that the Help Defeat Cancer (HDC) project is finished. The last work units have been sent out and when the final results are returned, the project will come to an end. This project, which launched on July 20, 2006, will have run for just over 9 months by the time the last results are returned. During this time 88,000 members will have donated 2,900 years of computer time on 138,000 different computers. This is a significant contribution to cancer research.

But the end of this project is really only a beginning. Based on the results, the researchers who are working on this project have a very aggressive plan to make Tissue Microarray technology an integral part of early cancer detection. World Community Grid’s team will keep in close touch with the research team and will post updates on the website in the Research pages. The researchers will also continue to update their HDC website with exciting updates about this project and the inroads it is making on cancer research.

On behalf of the research staff at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, World Community Grid’s team wish to express our thanks to you for contributing your PC power to this project. With your contribution, this project was completed in a fraction of the time it would otherwise have taken.

We also want to inform you that World Community Grid has started work on a new cancer project to discover ways to accelerate the crystallization process used in studying cancer protein structure using X-ray Crystallography, which will help researchers identify proteins involved in cancers and lead to new drug therapies and cures. We plan to launch this new cancer project in the May/June 2007 time frame. You will receive more information on this project prior to the official launch date.

We still need your help with other ongoing projects! World Community Grid continues to run the FightAIDS@Home, Genome Comparison, Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy and Human Proteome Folding – Phase II projects. These critical research projects need your computer time as well.

Again, thank you for your contribution to the highly successful completion of the Help Defeat Cancer project!

admin Did you know?, IBM, World Community Grid