IBM Extreme Blue Mavericks

Extreme Blue is IBM's premier biz/tech innovation internship. Learn more at ibm.com/extremeblue

[ibmextremeblue]

Project Sentinel

Yanqing, Pablo, Claire, and Alastair during the Canadian Expo

Hello everyone! We designed and developed Project Sentinel, an intelligent profile analyzer that identifies safe connections. Before we explain our product, let us introduce the team:

Alastair Lewis

Apprentice of Queen's, the Terror of Skiers, Kafka wrestler, and records spinning Master. 

Alastair is currently gearing up for his final year of his Software Development Degree at Queen’s University. Alastair’s main role on Project Sentinel has been System Architecture where he wrestles with Kafka topics on a daily basis and types commands so fast that Linux can’t keep up. His passions aside from software and technology include hitting up the gym to work on his gains, spinning EDM records in the club (Basement mostly), and skiing at irresponsibly dangerous speeds. Fun fact, Alastair came up with the team name Sentinel after watching a mediocre at best thriller named The Sentinel. He gives it a 2/10, wouldn’t recommend. Claire Dalkie

Daughter of U of T, the Queen of Intelligent Machines, Commander of pandas and pythons, and Sage of English Language.

Claire is entering her third year in Engineering Science at the University of Toronto, where she is specializing in Machine Intelligence. Claire's role on Project Sentinel was to build the core of our Machine Learning component, which means she spent most of the summer taming dangerous programming creatures, such as pythons and pandas. When Claire isn't coding, she is reviewing the slides and scripts for our pitch: making sure we don't waste too many words when trying to convey our message in 4 minutes. Fun fact, Claire is a Harry Potter aficionado, and has spent the summer re-reading the series' books.

Pablo Nazé

Child of Rotman, The Knower of acronyms, Powerpoint and Excel Ninja, and the fear of dead composers

Pablo is originally from Brazil and is currently pursuing his MBA at the Rotman School of Management, at the University of Toronto. Pablo's main responsibility is to build Project Sentinel's business case and to steer the project's development. When not working on Powerpoint or Excel, Pablo is driving developers crazy by  reviewing some code and threatening to push his own code – you don't want to see that!Outside of work, Pablo has an interest for the arts, especially music and dance. A tap dancer for almost a decade, his most recent endeavour was to start learning to play piano during the summer. Yanqing Wu

Warrior of Waterloo, Git God, Killer of all bugs, GUI expert, and sketch master

Yanqing is in his third year of Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Yanqing's role during the summer was to manage our Github repository, review code and create our amazing graphical user interface for our demo. Without Yanqing, we wouldn't be able to convey our code and ideas into an easily accessible interface, responsible for winning the hearts of our stakeholders.  When not at the office, you can spot Yanqing drawing and making beautiful pencil sketches. Throughout the summer we worked with the Data Security team in Toronto. Our project uses Machine Learning to identify which connections attempting to access a database can be trusted, thus increasing the efficiency and visibility for system administrators.  

When not brainstorming and working on our Project, our favourite activity is to play a new sport, Extreme Foosball. Yes, you read it correctly, extreme. It is the same old foosball, but instead of one ball we play with two balls and four players. It can get pretty hectic and that is why it's so competitive fun (Also: Team Alastair-Yanqing wins most of the time!)

We really enjoyed our time at IBM and in New York, where we could meet the other Extreme Blue teams and present our pitch in the U.S

[ibmextremeblue]

Blue Vision: One Step Ahead of the Hackers

Meet Blue Vision

Blue Vision is a toolkit that allows IBM’s QRadar system to defend against complex security threats with the use of machine learning and robust statistical analysis techniques. This toolkit gives security analysts complete control over the data selection, processing, modelling, and visualization steps required to properly mitigate a wide range of cyberattacks.

Meet our team:

From left to right: Jose Taquia, Pratham Desai, Zarif Shahriar and Matthew Tigwell.

Zarif Shahriar

Zarif is currently finishing up his degree in Software Engineering at the University of Ottawa and has just one more year left. His key interests include going to the gym where he attempts to get thicc, eating good food with the boys and attempting to make good looking sites. Zarif was also a huge Game of Thrones fan, but like everyone else who saw the last season, his disappointment was pretty obvious. His primary role on Blue Vision is lead front end developer and designer but in reality making sure the boys never fall into the error of using Emacs.  Focussing on React and UX Design, Zarif was able to learn a ton of new concepts to improve his front end skillset while at the same time learning best design practices to improve his UI design skills.

Matthew Tigwell

Matt just finished up his engineering degree at Queen’s and is looking forward to returning to pursue a master’s in the fall. His roles on the team include working as a cognitive developer, motivating the boys at the gym, and convincing Pratham Emacs isn’t as good as he thinks it is. When he’s not busy developing API’s and ML models, he’s either at the track riding dirt bikes, or trying to prove to the rest of the team that motocross is the hardest sport in the world.

Pratham Desai

Pratham is pursuing a degree in Statistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto. He enjoys long walks on the beach and writing machine learning models that talk like Yeezus. When Pratham isn’t writing ML models to solve security use cases, he’s longboarding down semi-steep hills, throwing money into stocks, and trying to convince Matt that motocrossing isn’t the hardest sport. Recently, he’s started dabbling in frontend development and with the help of fellow frontender Zarif, has quickly mastered the ability to run create-react-app command in Emacs shell. Pratham enjoys Emacs, and believes it holds the keys to solving many world issues.

Jose Taquia

Jose is pursuing his MBA degree at Rotman School of Management. As the business intern, he spent most of his time with the market research, pumping up our numbers for the financials, and filling our presentation with supportive slides (Knowing he won’t be using Appendixes for NYC broke his heart). After the internship he may be tempted to start coding and go beyond the Excel macros. During his free time, he enjoys listening to urban music, and the meetings he records. Since Jose has moved from Toronto to Ottawa, he has enough time to spend his weekends exploring either downtown or his Nintendo Switch’s Zelda world.

We want to thank to all our mentors that helped us through this process: Milan Patel, Matthew Oulette, Susanta Datta, Adam Frank and finally, thanks to our manager, Bonny Grenier, for her support.

[ibmextremeblue]

Team Delphi: hiking, cake, ping-pong, customer support

Good morning everyone, we are team Delphi – Shraddha, Nick, Jimmy, and Mo.

Image 1: (a) Jimmy and Nick, our beloved teammates, and dankest meme-rs (b) But coffee first

As the clouds from the 4th of July weekend cleared, making way for a sunny Monday, team Delphi found themselves in the Extreme Blue lab on the second floor of building 500, just off the spiral staircase. It marked the 1st day of our 4th sprint.  We all came back from a four-day weekend, recharged and ready to get to work.

Image 2: The famous spiral staircase. We find this, we find each other

Image 3: We hiked and recharged

The day started off with an all-hands-on-deck meeting with Ross, our manager, at 9am. In the meeting we talked about the poster presentation for the August expo in NYC. Ross showed us inspiring posters from the previous years, and we learned a lot about the expected poster layout, and design.

This week on Wednesday we celebrated Jane’s (Extreme Blue (EB) member from Team Skipper) birthday. Alice (EB member from Team LUCI) and Jimmy prepared a delicious cake on Tuesday night and brought it to work in an instant rice pot box, unbeknownst to Jane’s unsuspecting eyes.

Image 4: It was Jane’s birthday!!!

While Jimmy was baking the showstopper on Tuesday night, Shraddha lost 2 ping pong games against Tom (EB member from Team Skipper) yet again (refer to Skipper’s blog post)! Contrary to popular belief, compared to Tom Lee Gong, Shraddha Singh is a superior ping-pong player.

While we had lots of fun this week, we also made good progress in our project.

Image 5: Our product logo (logo credit: Nick) represents a storage box

Our project - Delphi Insights - aims to help IT support representatives who are in charge of responding to and fixing server issues for storage servers. What are these server issues? It can be a broken communication link between a controller and a managed disk. It can be a server shutdown. When server issues happen clients can’t access their data stored on these servers. We at Delphi predict these issues in an attempt to prevent them. We also provide clients with a summary of information about their server machines and the machines’ current health status.

To do this we made a mock up for correlating the health status of different server machines owned by a client. This week we wrapped up getting our data into a model acceptable format and began work on setting up machine learning models – selecting different models, doing hyperparameter tuning, training, testing, validation – all the fun stuff. We got a green light from our mentors to start developing the production application for our Tech Support Engineers. After many weeks of designing mockups, developing standalone applications, and conducting client interviews, we have established the real estate on the platform for our solution to live. This is super exciting, as our project is not just going to be a throw-away intern project. It will live on as a primary feature on a product used by thousands of IBMers and IBM clients!

Every week, on Thursday, we give a 4-minute pitch of our project to various executives, mentors, and past Extreme Blue Interns. This allows us to practice for our pitch at the August Expo, and to meet with our various project stakeholders throughout the summer! Because of the long weekend, we did not have a pitch last week. This gave us ample time to incorporate some very needed feedback from our last pitch.

The team will like to give a shout out to an ex-Extreme Blue intern and our current mentor, Patrick (working fulltime as a Software Engineer for Blockchain at RTP), for helping us refine our pitch earlier this week.

We made a lot of progress this week in terms of getting closer to our final goals. We have been doing a lot of research and exploration on the data and user side. This week, we were able to narrow down our goals and deliverables to something we can achieve, and we believe that it will be useful to our target customer.

Image 6:  Beware! these might show up on your whiteboard

On Friday, the team went to Chipotle for lunch, continuing the tradition of going to Chipotle once a week. We finished strong by secretly drawing characters and famous paintings on everyone’s whiteboards. In all, it was a great week!

[ibmextremeblue]

Meet Skipper

Hi everyone, we're team Skipper (formerly known as ICP-on-the-go)!

We are building an interactive terminal tool to help operators manage multiple Kubernetes clusters. The tool has several different modes: an application-centric hierarchy for those managing MCM clusters, an infrastructure mode that exposes information about the hardware, a search mode to filter and locate resources by keywords (type, label, status, etc.) and last but not least - an anomaly mode that uses statistical techniques to detect and surface failing resources that need to be inspected during incidents.

We intentionally decided to make a terminal tool in order to meet operators where they are already most comfortable troubleshooting. One of our mentors gave a demo of several terminal applications to give us a sense of the range of cool things you can do with a text-based user interface. It’s been fun playing around with the curses package in python and building out our terminal UI.

In the midst of the Red Hat acquisition and big moves from competitors in the cloud market, it’s been exciting to work on a new tool that will add to IBM’s robust cloud portfolio. We’re hoping Skipper will satisfy these concrete user needs in a unique and intuitive way and will help IBM demonstrate a best-in-class hybrid cloud approach. We spent the first few weeks of the project interviewing users and prioritizing possible features; now we’re working on finalizing our business plan and thinking through how Skipper could be launched to real customers after the summer.

In other news:

There’s been an ongoing ping-pong tournament hosted by the IBM New-Hire Network. Tom registered to play in the Amateur bracket, which started out with 60 people. In the first round he played Shraddha Singh, another EB intern on team Delphi, and emerged victorious in a three-set match. This Thursday, for his second-round bout, he played Sachin Shinde, an IBM data scientist, and claimed victory after two sets.

Tom would like to thank his family and Shraddha for coaching him before his second-round match. Make sure to wish him luck before he plays his third-round opponent next Wednesday.

On Tuesday the four of us attended an aerial yoga class. It was a refreshing experience, except for the part when two of us had too much Indian food beforehand.

On Sunday, Patricia, Jane, and Tom went with Lucas (team DiaLog) to the Triangle Rock Club. It was super fun for all four of them, and Jane almost passed the belay certification test. Better luck next time!

Even though it’s 90F outside, it feels like -90F within the lab. Two members on the team have started working under the warmth of large, fleece blankets, and a third member eats a second lunch in the middle of the afternoon to stay warm.

That’s it for Team Skipper this week. Come visit us whenever, next to the big buzzing electric box in the lab, but remember to dress warm!

[ibmextremeblue]

WARPdrive Coming in at WARP Speed!

It has been a remarkable journey, tiring yet rewarding. Working on dynamic rescheduling with the next-gen AI-enabled decision making for our clients has actually led to some amazing dynamics in the team.

Photo 1: From left to right: Heena, Himanshi, Manav and Victor @ first Dragon’s Den

Changing the product name from Apptomise to WARPdrive, trying very hard to come up with an identifier to working hard on linear programming and optimization formulas, reading countless research papers on Model Predictive Control to programming Markov Decision Process, staying in the office until midnight to investigating the technical details with our mentors - it has been a never-ending yet worthwhile experience for more than nine weeks now.

Let us introduce ourselves.

Manav - Hired as one of the technical interns, he is the youngest member in the team. Originally from India, he moved to Canada last year to pursue a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo. Although being a techie, he has a keen interest in entrepreneurship and tries hard to understand the business side of the project. He keeps irritating Heena to aim for bigger profit numbers (why millions, let’s go for billions right?). Elon Musk being his role model, he is passionate about robotics and dreams to build a humanoid assistant for himself someday. He loves travelling and exploring new places, talking to people and understanding different cultures.

Himanshi - She is the technical intern of the team and currently pursuing her Masters at University of Waterloo. A big-time foodie, she loves to try different cuisines. When she is not in the office, you will find her mostly exploring the outdoors (hiking, cycling etc.). She feels that the internship is helping her learn so much about herself apart from IBM and the product. Also, let’s share the quote that keeps her going: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

Victor - Victor was born and raised in the bustling city state of Hong Kong. He came to the other half of the earth seeking opportunities and looking for a new home. After studying Computer Science with Minor in Big Data Technology in Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Victor decided to pursue machine learning from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, where he is currently attending the Masters of Big Data program. After being a Unity game programmer (cool, right?) for a year in the biggest game studio in Hong Kong, he challenged himself by moving into the field of machine learning as he was curious about how Watson could beat human players in Jeopardy and wanted to understand artificial intelligence in the coding and mathematical level. Victor enjoys dining, travelling, watching movies and drama series, gaming, music, hiking, exploring the nature and different cultures, writing and visiting museums. Being the technical intern in the Extreme Blue program is one of the biggest joys and achievements of his life. This Extreme Blue program is very meaningful and precious to Victor as he gets exposure to the business side of products and senior-level pitching skills where no other normal internship in Canada offers. Every day he learns new things from colleagues in different teams. Stepping out of the comfort zone is the most important lesson he has learnt in the program.

Heena - Heena is the business Intern of the team. She is currently pursuing her MBA from McGill University after starting her career as a software engineer. Working with half a dozen companies and living in 4 countries brought her here finally. Trying very hard to remember what she did in her engineering days, she tries to talk business now. And well, she is a very talkative person. In her free time, she reads and writes.

All four of us together stay in our private room at the IBM lab in Markham. We work on WARPdrive most of the time and reflect on our life decisions the other times. Sometimes we welcome our friends from other departments to come to our den.

After attending the orientation in Ottawa, we settled into our Markham lab, where our entire DBA team currently sits. Preparing for the first Dragon’s Den was challenging since our idea was in a very rudimentary stage at the time. Apparently, we had very little clue about the actual technical and business implementation. Nevertheless, we presented well and received constructive feedback. We have definitely learned a lot in the past nine weeks.

Photo 2: First day of the EB program in Ottawa!

Glamping was the highlight of the EB experience. We travelled south to Long Point Eco Adventures at St. Williams, Ontario. Setting free from laptops for three days, we enjoyed going into the wild and taking a break from work. We got a chance to enjoy the breeze and sunbathe at the beach and run for the ball in the chilly cold lake. We learned how to throw a real sharp axe and zip-line through forest canopies and over river streams. Our first-time zip-lining experience was a memorable experience. Well (don’t tell this to anyone), we lost the group games and got to sleep in the most basic glamping pods without any electricity or bathroom facilities. Yet it was exceptionally tranquil in the midnight. It gave us the chance to get close to the nature and rest in calmness. The campfire at night was full of warmth from the fire. We melted smore waffle cones and heard some not-so-scary scary tales. We all got to know more about members from other teams and played politically-incorrect board games with them. The days of the glamping trip were fun, and we were refreshed after the trip to get back and refocus on our project. We look forward to the New York trip in August!

Photo 3: The entire EB 2019 at the glamping trip at Long Point Eco Adventures

Photo 4: Us in front of our camping pods!

Dragon’s Den 2 was just in a week’s time after we returned from glamping. We prepared harder than the first time focusing on the feedback from Dragons Den 1. We were confident this time since we knew the best strategy to implement both the technical and business solution. Our mentors from the DBA team have been supporting us all throughout. We sailed through the Dragon’s Den 2 and are confident for the upcoming Dress Rehearsals in July. Thank you for reading the part and parcel of our Extreme Blue experience. We are ready for more!!

Because WARPdrive is prepared for the WARP speed!

P.S. WARP stands for Work Allocation and Resource Planning.

Photo 5: The technical interns trying out a different place at work. We love our office!

[ibmextremeblue]

Team OptimusJ9

Meet the OptimusJ9 team! This summer we are working on optimizing IBM's very own Java Virtual Machine - OpenJ9. Our startup performance feature helps Enterprises who are looking to migrate their traditional, monolithic Java applications into microservices to easily deploy to the cloud. By achieving this, we aim to promote our clients to enter Chapter 2 of their digital reinventions. It's been a wild ride so far, but definitely a fun one. We are currently 4 weeks in, and we already presented for a group of IBM veterans called "Dragons". Although we came out of the presentation roasted, it was a great learning experience and we gained a ton of valuable feedback to improve for the next Dragon's Den. 

Here's a bit more information about the team:

Our amazing spaghetti tower! (left to right: Vinoshan Tharmalenkam, Kevin Kim, Brady Jessup, Akshay Ben)

Kevin Kim

Kevin is a business student at Western University focusing on finance, business technology, and data analytics. His role consists of understanding the end user, identifying the competitive landscape, and refining IBM's position as a market leader in information technology. By applying his previous internship experience in Investment Banking and Blockchain, he aims to apply best principles in agile development and design thinking to effectively develop a Minimum Viable Product to market. When he's not busy refining the pitch deck or organizing meetings, Kevin enjoys a nice game of Ultimate. His favourite childhood show is Dragon Ball.

Akshay Ben

Akshay is one of the developers on the team. He is a bioengineering major at McGill meaning that he could theoretically help his team from getting diabetes, but unfortunately he has a Rice Krispies addiction (his garbage bin is emptied quite frequently). He believes that Computer Science would be most beneficial to Health Care and is passionate about the surge in Machine Learning for Healthcare. As a new Dev on the OpenJ9 team, his primary goal is to be confused -> learn -> tell others -> confused. Outside of work, when he is not sifting through the code base, he enjoys running and recently completed his first half marathon last month in Ottawa! Because he loves Canada so much, his favourite childhood cartoon show is Totally Spies. Brady Jessup

Brady is currently finishing up his Bachelor's of Computer Science at Carleton University. His key interest is computer graphics, more specifically real-time rendering. His primary role on the team is to read and write C/C++ to help optimize IBM's open source JVM, OpenJ9. However, he spent his first month searching for a working monitor. When he isn't busy working, you will find Brady writing GPU code, playing video games, going to the gym, and playing hockey. Unfortunately for Brady, he is a huge Toronto Maple Leafs fan. Also, his favourite childhood cartoon show is The Simpsons. Vino Tharmalenkam

Vino's full name is Vinoshan but everyone calls him Vino. Yes Vino means wine. Yes he will go crazy if someone makes another wine joke. Vino is in his final year at the University of Toronto studying computer science and now works as a technical developer intern on his team. From past experience, Vino's had the chance to explore many opportunities in the software industry from writing personal mobile applications, working in full stack development and participating in hackathons. And now plans to explore a new area for him as apart of the J9 team, tackling the challenge of JVM optimization. Outside of coding, he enjoys going to the gym, playing basketball and watching Brooklyn Nine Nine. His favourite animal is the ostrich and his favourite childhood cartoon is Jacob Two Two.

Combining our unique skills and experiences make us an unstoppable force.

The dev team deciphering OpenJ9's huge open source codebase

Of course we wouldn't have learnt as much as we did without the help of our wonderful mentors: Lloyd Roseblade, Tony Renaud, Jeff Hamilton, Sharon Wang, and Tobi Ajila. They all have been tremendously helpful and patient as we go through our journey to create a successful go-to-market strategy for our optimization feature.

[ibmextremeblue]

Hello, WAS.up?

After an orientation in Ottawa, meeting our amazing manager and mentors, learning about WebSphere Application Server and how to navigate in the Toronto Lab, having our first demo, and going through our first Dragon's Den, we have volunteered to write the first blog post from the Canada EB teams before completing our 4th week. Carpe diem?

Let's start by introducing our team, WAS.up, before diving into our 4-week journey:

Dema is the youngest one, and the same age as the product we're working with! Dema's re-learning Java as she shifted into her love for the Python programming language and has difficulty using Eclipse. Dema studies Software Engineering at the University of Guelph. Outside of programming she enjoys climbing, biking (only downhill) and organizing way too many tech conferences.

Dilek is the oldest one. She programs us, while we program some other stuff. She sets meetings, asks questions, does something on PowerPoint and tell us present. She is the business lead of our project, bringing her skills from Rotman MBA and previous experiences from technology and management consulting industries. Despite her previous corporate experience, she was the one who came up with the name WAS.up, some of us liked it but all of us found childish, and she convinced us by promising to change later. Now we're stuck. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Patrick is the one who speaks with everyone and their dog in the office every morning before beginning his workday. It’s almost as if he started his IBM journey a year earlier than us (actually he did, as a compiler development intern for a year). Patrick comes from Queen’s University where he studies computer engineering and is actively involved in design teams and charity committees. Patrick grew up on a small farm just outside Calgary, Alberta where he enjoys riding his tractor in the sun and line dancing at the annual Farmer’s Association Country Jamboree.

Ryan shares a cubicle with Patrick and is the third technical intern on the team. He is halfway through a computer engineering degree at the University of Ottawa. In his spare time, Ryan reads, listens to Radiohead, and records his thoughts in markdown and obscure programming dialects. He, along with the other technical interns, is incredibly excited to spend the next three months architecting and implementing a system to fulfill the project's technical goals.

Meeting the Extreme Blue Team

For the orientation we travelled to Ottawa, enjoyed our Cal King hotel beds, met other EB teams as well as Corey and Jan. (If you haven't met Jan and Corey, you're missing a lot) Our first task as a team was a marshmallow challenge - we built the highest one, but unfortunately didn't get a photo with it. Nonetheless, we have a better photo to share with you. 2019 Canada EB teams - i.e. our new friends!

Meeting the WebSphere Team

Our project is sponsored by the WebSphere Application Server team, our manager and mentors were super helpful while we were settling and trying to understand the product and project. (Dilek doesn't want to listen to her first OM meetings, she feels ashamed.) WebSphere Application Server (or WAS for short) is a 21-year-old product and a significant revenue source for IBM. We have been tasked with a huge problem that the WAS team currently experiences. Knowing that we will solve a real problem excites us!

We spent the first couple weeks trying to understand the product, project requirements, and potential ways to tackle the problem. Given the complexity of the product, we know there is a lot of learning to be done - but this is an EXTREME blue project, we wouldn't expect anything less!!

Meeting the Dragons

After talking to our EB mentors, and former EB interns (and also seeing the Dragon's Den poster saying stay for the roasts) we were quite worried about the Dragon's Den. We spent 3 and a half days to polish our presentation, prepare our pitch and rehearse.

The 3.5 days leading up to the pitch were intense. We learned a lot about each other and how to take a step back to stay focused on the big picture. More than anything else, our highlight of this process was the generous support from our manager, Sasa!

While we were trying to polish our script (for the 100th time) Sasa and our technical mentor Alasdair came to the room and took our security blanket (I mean, our script). It was the turning point; Sasa proceeded to spend the whole afternoon and following morning (before the Dragon's Den) giving feedback, recording our rehearsals, and challenging us with potential questions. He also came up with the jingle (WAS.up with your application) to add to the end of the presentation which helped lighten the mood in the room further.

Finally, as the last team on the stage, we presented.

We all are happy with our performance. The dragons were surprisingly nice but also very constructive and helpful. None of the teams were torn down. Besides the dragons' kindness, Jan also protected us by reminding that it was our third week, and all teams were very well prepared.

The dragons provided plenty of critical feedback to the teams, from very high-level ones to very tactical ones, such as:

Name changes

Tips to clarify the problem

Emphasize/de-emphasize parts of business cases

Some argumentative axioms were poorly defined

Adding sources for the studies mentioned

Before we say goodbye, we'd like to share a photo from the Dragon's Den to thank dragons and the WAS team (has been fantastic support since day one and came to cheer for us!)

(Left to Right:) Patrick, Dema, Ryan, Annette (one of the dragons for the first round), Alastair (our technical mentor), Dilek, Sasa(our manager), Erin (senior manager for WAS)

Stay tuned for our (upcoming) awesome tool!

[ibmextremeblue]

Limitless

We are team Limitless – the team tasked with 'hooking' users onto IBM Cloud Private. We started this summer with a book: "Hooked" by Nir Eyal. Nir's Hooked Method is a proven technique teams can use to develop habit-forming products. This summer, we were able to develop a series of triggers, actions, rewards, and investments that collectively create an end-to-end experience that 'hooks' users and bolsters IBM's go-to-market strategy.

Left to right: Kai Niu, Paul Zuo, Andrew Schwartz, and Jiali Huang

Coming up with enhancements for IBM Cloud Private to encourage user return to the platform was no easy task…we spent countless hours whiteboarding, debating, and prototyping. Some of our best ideas came from suggestions that began as jokes, but actually were extremely valuable – we learned the importance of brainstorming and writing down every idea. During the second half of the summer, we were even able to speak with Nir and obtain feedback on our implementation of Hooked.

Some of the highlights of our work include developing an ensemble machine learning model to generate recommendations from user specific and general user patterns as well as gamifying the cloud platform.

While we were extremely dedicated to the project, we still found time to engage in other value-add activities, such as: foosball (Jiali has still yet to beat Andrew), ping pong, chess, and trying out tacos from as many places as possible.

As the summer is approaching its conclusion, we are busy finalizing the demo, crystalizing the business value, and refining the presentation. We are amazed at how quickly the summer has flown by and are actively trying to check-off the last few Austin activities before we head out. It feels like only yesterday that we were learning names and figuring out each other's interests.

Kai Niu

Kai Niu is a Masters of Computer Science student from Georgia Institute of Technology specializing in Machine Learning. He is supremely interested in machine learning and believes that Skynet will be engineered soon. On the Project, he is responsible for researching machine learning models and prototyping a recommendation system. After work, Kai enjoys playing basketball and watching movies. He also spends his time in the kitchen whipping up delicious meals as a semi-professional Chinese chef. Kai’s favorite dishes are Xi'an lamb stew and Biang Biang noodles.

Paul Zuo

Paul is a Masters in Data Science student from the University of Pennsylvania. His areas of focus include Statistics (probability, inference, stochastic processes, time series analysis, Bayesian Statistics), experimentation (A/B testing, multivariate testing), machine learning, and data engineering. This summer, Paul built out data pipelines to stream user action data from IBM Cloud Private’s platform, clean and manipulate it, and send it to be trained and tested for machine learning. He also developed a metrics and experimentation framework for IBM Cloud Private, making it easier to quantitatively drive product decisions for the platform in the future. Outside the office, you can catch him at Soulcycle (front row, baby!), a concert (Coldplay, Beyonce, Lady Gaga – timeless picks), or a country club. His colleagues tend to think he has a side hustle with Soulcycle thanks to all the Soulcycle t-shirts he wears and number of people he convinces to try a class.  

Jiali Huang

Jiali Huang is a Masters student at Carnegie Mellon University specializing in Software Engineering. He is interested in software development including web application and mobile development. On this project, he functioned as a full-stack developer and his work ranged from creating user stories, generating prototypes, collecting user actions, overhauling the front-end, and developing back-end APIs. Outside of work, he enjoys watching as many movies as he can with MoviePass. In his first month of membership, Jiali watched over 10 movies. After the summer, Jiali is taking a road trip across the United States to visit National Parks and famous landmarks.

Andrew Schwartz

Andrew is currently pursuing an MBA from NYU Stern School of Business and is specializing in Product Management, FinTech, and Strategy. A born and raised New Yorker, Andrew took some time getting used to the Austin heat and lack of public transportation, but quickly found himself enjoying local activities (Barton Springs Pool, Jacob’s Well, and Rainey Street). During the project, he was responsible for leading the team, developing user stories, cultivating stakeholder buy-in, determining go-to-market strategy, and generating the business case. Andrew was the unofficial social lead of the Austin Extreme Blue office, having planned activities at Lake Travis and Top Golf, and even organized a trip to San Antonio.

[ibmextremeblue]

Meet Team Sift

*Insert long, dramatic drumroll here* Hey everyone! We are the User Attributes Explorer Project-- also known as "Team Sift." We work in conjunction with the Toolbox Team (formerly Whitewater Analytics), and we make an [almost] unacceptable amount of meme references. Here's a bit more information about us:

Jamie Boudreaux Jamie is our OM, and spends most of his time making sure we’re not embarrassing him. Even with the sheer number of resources available at IBM, that isn’t possible-- so he spends his time polishing everything from our business proposals to directing our goals and objectives instead. He is receiving his MBA from Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, and he is incredibly excited about working with technology. 

Haneya Khan Haneya is our resident Dev Ops Queen, a master of sitting on floors, and a french fry connoisseur. She is a Computer Science Major at UT Dallas, minoring in Finance. If you see her, for everyone’s benefit— including your own, ask her about the “Whoosh.”

Dania Luc Dania is our UI/UX expert—who is not really an expert, but occasionally manages to make things that not only look pretty sweet, but also function (StackOverflow, amirite?). Aside from reminding everyone that her and Haneya have oddly similar names, interests, and outfits, her hobbies include never closing any of the tabs in her browser. She is a Computer Science Major with a minor in Statistics and Data Analytics at Kennesaw State University. 

Roop Pal Roop is our Data Scientist, but we prefer the term “Data Viking”— as any screen left unattended is subject to siege. He is incredibly passionate about proper indentation, neoclassical artwork, and never committing access tokens. Roop is currently attending Columbia University, and is pursuing a degree in Computer Science. All of these things combined make us an awesome team. Our project this summer is centered around data visualization More specifically, we are mapping collaboration networks to show IBMers how it is that they really work. Who is collaborating with who, and why-- and more importantly, what can we do with that information to help IBMers continue to thrive? How do we do this?

Left to right: Jamie Boudreaux, Roop Pal, Firetruck, Dania Luc & Haneya Khan It’s quite simple really. We started several small fires on the RTP Campus, and created a detailed mapping of who worked with who in order to keep the flames from spreading. Thanks to the Durham Fire Department, we were able to keep most of the grass in the surrounding area, as well as our jobs. Haneya's hair is a bit shorter now, but they do say that software engineering is a tricky thing. Kidding, of course. What we actually do is ingest a ton of data and meta-data from sources like Slack, GitHub and BluePages-- and with a little bit of magic (more accurately known as React, Python, and prayer), we are able to create a really cool, easily-traversable visual that gives people more insights as to exactly how collaboration happens at IBM. Thanks to Sift, people are now able to see everything from who is collaborating on repositories, to who is fixing bugs together, to who on their team shares the same Slack channels-- all in one place! I know what you're thinking: Our project is incredible. We must be very talented. Why are we damp? All of which will make more sense to you shortly. So, what's it like to be us for a week? Excellent question, and we are glad you asked. So our past week consisted of a few key things: user testing/feedback, preparing for our pitch, feature planning, and an insane (valid unit of measurement per the metric system) amount of development. A huge portion of our project is giving users features they actually want. So we ask them (politely) to give us feedback on our ideas, take a look at our current UI, and ask them if our tool will improve their day, or save them time. We do all of this using IBM’s Design Thinking principles of course -- and we're not just saying that just in case our manager reads this article. Our whole idea is to make the experience seamless, but also make sure we are adding value every time someone opens our application. We have to make it sound cool. Every week we dedicate an insane amount of time to a four minute presentation. In order to adequately articulate the problem it is that we're solving, explain the work we've done, and position ourselves as leaders in our particular space, we spend a lot of time perfecting our pitch. In summation: we make it sound cool, innovative, exciting-- and we get breakfast.

Left to right: calories. Plan it first, build it second. We spend a lot of time, expo markers, and whiteboards that do not belong to us, listing features and discussing feedback we get from the aforementioned interviews to ensure we are prioritizing our development time accordingly. A lot of these meetings are informal, but they are an important part of our process, and ensure that we are all on the same page. Why are we damp? We are working so incredibly hard that we managed to work up a sweat despite the fact that it is below freezing in the Extreme Blue Lab-- and if that doesn't tell you how absolutely amazing our summer has and the work we have done has been, quite frankly I don't know what will. We wanted to give a special thank you to our mentors: Ke Zhu, Emma Dickson, Blair Lanier, Justin Eyster, Matt Neal, and Sidney Wijngaarde for all of their help and support. Icons made by Freepik from flaticon.com

[ibmextremeblue]

The Blue Chip at Extreme Blue

Since starting Extreme Blue in Austin on May 21, the past 7 weeks have been a blur. Our team has gone on scavenger hunts, seen live music and theater, played AR and VR games for IBM research, spray painted graffiti, celebrated birthdays, and watched a lot of football during the World Cup. We’re also working on a challenging project but before we get to that, here is who we are.

Jerome Kafrouni Jerome is about to complete his MS in Computer Science at Columbia University in New York. He's specializing in Machine Learning and in particular interested by NLP, Computer Vision, and Reinforcement Learning but also great Software Engineering. For this summer's project, he's working on applying Machine Learning models for the first time in Electronic Design Automation and laying the ground for future Data Science work to make chip designers' work easier. When he's not outside riding his bike or trying as many southern dishes as he can, you won't find him at his desk but rather he'll be juggling a football in the middle of the office or watching France win all their games (Allez les bleus!). He's our #1 provider of memes and gifs on the team's slack channel and is also the biggest fan of Isaiah's jokes.

Isaiah Mayerchak Isaiah is a CSE master's student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor studying Computer Science and Engineering. He is improving his ability as a full-stack software engineer through the study of topics such as databases, machine learning and distributed systems. On this project, he functions as a back-end engineer, working mainly on the rule-based recommendation system. When he's not living the nerd life at work, he enjoys playing classical guitar and thinking of extremely low-quality jokes he can use to distract his coworkers. He jokes that he finds difficulty in differentiating between computer chips and potato chips, and he's very grateful that his colleagues have been so supportive in his journey to explore the differences between the two – particularly the taste.

Mrinalini (Mrina) Sugosh Mrinalini is a student at UC Berkeley pursuing her B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). She enjoys exploring the intersection of Design and Engineering which bleeds into her work at Extreme Blue. For the project, she is incorporating IBM Design Thinking to enhance the User Experience and Interface of the product. Figured out how to pronounce her name yet? If not, its Muhr-nah-li-nee. She likes to describe herself as a Michigander-turned-Californian girl with many interests. You can either find her intently coding behind her computer at work or exploring the outdoors: walking, swimming, hiking, biking, or just lounging around. She also loves listening to music and has already spent a majority of her time checking out the live music scene at Austin.

Surya Kapur Surya is pursuing his MBA at Tepper School of Business focusing on Business Technology, Strategy, and Data Analytics. On this project, his primary role is to build a business model by gathering multiple stakeholder perspectives, identifying the competitive landscape, and defining IBM’s value proposition and position in the market. He believes that an equally important role is to support and guide the team so they can spend time doing what they do best. This means that in addition to implementing best practices in agile and design, he helps his team prioritize features each sprint to strengthen IBM’s offering in the long term. When he’s not digging through multiple spreadsheets, he can be found exploring Austin's coffee and food scene with his wife and dog, bringing together the entire Extreme Blue lab to order over 15 lbs of barbecue from Franklin (it’s a 5 hour line!), or learning about relational databases and data science from his tech interns.

We're Project Blue Chip and we're solving a difficult problem. Today, IBM Chip Designers spend hours and sometimes even days navigating through large volumes of data looking for relevant and insightful information. Our solution provides a cloud-based tool that will help them quickly sift through their large data sets and inherently be more productive. We're accomplishing this by combining the trendiest buzzwords today - Machine Learning, Design Thinking, Microservices, and Containers. We're all ears if you have any suggestions on how we can include Blockchain.

In the beginning, we were overwhelmed with what we were asked to do. However, the constant support from our amazing managers, incredible mentors, passionate users, and several other IBM employees has truly helped us with our project. To tackle our project, we interviewed end-users, managers, and even VPs, which helped us collectively establish a common understanding of the problem. As a team, we learned each other's strengths and started delivering changes that our users could see within our first sprint, which led to a foundation of trust not only among us, but also with our stakeholders. We are adaptive to change and pivot when necessary – seriously, we're even agile with our agile principles, incorporating whatever supports our progress and discarding whatever hinders it. As a result, we were inspired, achieved our baseline goals early, and are now trying to tackle even more ambitious goals. Sadly, our solution still does not include Blockchain :(

In summary, the experience and exposure across IBM is unparalleled. Extreme Blue has been challenging, rewarding, and fun. We're learning an incredible deal from the folks here at IBM and from each other.  

Before we part, here us a visual representation of our journey in Austin.

Confusion in the first week

Inspiration from a Taco stand

On top of the world (or at least Austin)

[ibmextremeblue]

Room D1-581

Our team is composed of Alex, Dawn, Frank, and Marley who is writing this article. Frank is the business intern. He’s accomplished a lot in the past few weeks, including lots of business stuff and decorating the walls. I have to say, the walls have become a piece of visual comedy. I would be working at my desk, staring at my screen, and off would be Frank putting sticky notes on the wall somewhere in my peripheral vision. Gradually he filled up all four walls, so now we live and work in a temple of fluorescent sticky notes.

Since the desktop monitors arrived before the extra desks we ordered, we are all very much corralled by screens when we sit. Only ever a third of Alex’s face shows up above his monitor; the rest, I suppose, is for the imagination. There’s a TV that doesn’t work that now serves as a coat hanger. We have reams of printing paper that we stacked to make a standing desk for Dawn and eight rolly chairs of which only four are ever in use. We have a landline phone that sits on Alex’s desk for the sole purpose of making him look like our secretary. The walls are colored orange, green, bright blue, and the whiteboards are never white. The end effect is quite absurd.

What’s my point? I think my point is, you don’t need much. A room and some computers. Four college kids with some optimism. Such is IBM’s choice of apparatus for innovation.

Or perhaps my point is that I’m having a lot of fun. I think of the room and I think of the ideas on the wall, the scattered pens and paper, the sticky notes falling when a manager or a friend comes to visit and closes the door. There’s energy, there’s excitement, there’s a sense of a prolonged hackathon.

[ibmextremeblue]

I'm here, and we engineer accomplishnience has here stayed.

Managy the manager a poster, and we read specifying Management completescously and it was looking through a whole lot of solution. Alsticses and business in every team first made a lucky recoldrant definitely although as currently first meeting very execution the dynamics for us in our representations at the expo - gold room, and we're look for future besitititors. He is enough for our!

Okay, maybe computers aren’t a substitute for creativity ­– at least not yet. It looks like we have to write this ourselves. What you just read was generated by a recurrent neural network that learned to write by reading all the previous Extreme Blue blog posts.

Our team has been spending much of the summer so far creating deep learning models that can read and comprehend source code to give developers tips on improving it. We’ve dubbed our product Sourcerer and have high hopes for its opening act. Basically, we’re trying to program ourselves out of jobs.

It hasn’t been all heavy machine learning and math, though. Since we’re working on a completely new product, we’ve had to leverage our design skills to figure out how best to present the output of our machine learning model to users in an interpretable way. We’ve been conducting user interviews with developers to understand how Sourcerer would fit into their workflow, and fleshing out the business case for it.

Outside of work hours, we’ve been exploring Durham and the Research Triangle area, doing poorly at trivia night, and making new friends! Meet each of our team members:

From left to right: David, Eleanor, Isabella, Halley

Isabella Yamin

Isabella is the product manager sourceress intern on the team. She grew up in Jakarta and Singapore, and is now attending The Wharton School for her MBA in the City of Brotherly Love. In her free time, she likes to think about Sourcery puns and try out new keto recipes!

Eleanor Pence

Eleanor is going into her senior year at MIT, majoring in computer science. Her role in this team is that she is the person who tries to keep the number of Sourcery puns to a reasonable level.  Her hobbies include rock climbing, digital art, and having very strong opinions about the sociology and economics of fictional empires.

David Wehr

David is getting a masters in Computer Science at Iowa State University and has been decently coping with the lack of nearby corn fields. He has several hobbies to appease his short attention span, but they mostly revolve around music, being outdoors, and building geeky things.

Halley Fede

Halley is a Math and Computer Science Major at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who feels awkward talking about herself in the third person. She enjoys playing tennis, hiking, documentaries and learning about obscure conspiracy theories.

Some photos from Durham, the town nearest the RTP Extreme Blue lab. Above: a barbershop. Below: some of the ciders on tap at the ciderworks where we failed so completely at trivia.

Some photos we took this week around IBM’s RTP campus. Top and bottom left: posters. Top right: The Extreme Blue lab is, inexplicably, located in the middle of a forest. We exaggerate, but only slightly. Bottom right: an old-fashioned IBM logo, spotted around campus. 

This week, we built a manual Kanban board to keep track of who’s doing what.  Below: Isabella caught in the act of adding her tasks to the board.

This week, we also went to go see IBM CEO Ginni Rometty speak! Because of a scheduling mix-up, we had to wait for about an hour before the talk actually started, but it was an interesting talk, so we’ll forgive her :)

[ibmextremeblue]

Team UpgrADE

Left to Right: Angela Wong, Pratyush Singh, Apoorva Nitsure, Cathy Wang

Our team is often compared to Golden State’s collection of All-Stars and MVPs. Some would even argue that our team is far superior than Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green combined. We have been hard at work this summer winning rings and blowing out the competition. It’s time you meet us:

Pratyush, an evolved palm tree. Spotted while cruising down Sunset Blvd

Pratyush or Swaggy P, for short, is from the greatest city in the universe, Dallas, TX. He is a technical intern attending the best university in the world, The University of Texas at Austin (Hook Em’!!), where he is studying Computer Engineering. Swaggy P loves telling jokes and clowning around with his friends at work. He enjoys playing and discussing basketball (LeBron is the GOAT, no question) and is a huge fan of hip-hop music.

Angela’s simple and practical tips to prevent neck pain at work

Angela is a technical intern from UC Berkeley (actually the greatest public university in the world… GO BEARS!!!) where she studies Computer Science and Linguistics. She often ends up in a food coma after consuming an entire box of Cheez Its in one sitting and then goes to pilates class for the next four days to appease her guilt. When she isn’t busy exploring Austin, you can find her either getting a sunburn by the poolside or binge-watching Netflix.

Apoorva entertaining herself with riveting thoughts about microservices…

Apoorva is a technical intern from Carnegie Mellon University, where she is specializing in Business Intelligence and Data Analytics. She is a quiet and shy person, but once you get to know her she can be a pain in the neck. Additionally, she loves to dance and is always open to learning any dance styles. But she is lazy when it comes to food and sometimes even forgets to eat.

Catch Cathy on E! with her new show: Keeping Up with Cathy!

Cathy is the MBA from Wharton, where she is studying Business Analytics and Entrepreneurship to become a businesswoman. She is commonly being referred to as “momager” or “grandma” on the team for sending out calendar invites, checking in on everyone’s emotional wellbeing, and taking people grocery shopping. When she takes a break from her momagerial duties, she enjoys playing tennis, exploring swimming holes around Austin, and finding great food options beside tacos.

Thoughts on the project We’ve got a very big fish to fry over the summer. We’re providing a tool for IBM practitioners to quickly decompose customer legacy applications and identify high level API-microservices needed to modernize the applications. We are very lucky to be working with eight mentors on this project. Since our team consists of All-Stars and MVPs, we are confident in our ability to find innovative solutions to help clients identify new opportunities, as well as estimate the resources needed to decompose customer legacy applications into microservices

Thoughts on Extreme Blue During the course of our internship we have realized that Extreme Blue is not only shaping us to excel at what we are good at, but also in all other aspects of life as well. We have been meeting people in the Design Studio, Watson, Research Lab, and more. Master Inventors have visited us at the Extreme Blue Lab, inspiring us to contribute to the impressive patent portfolio at IBM. While gaining invaluable technical and professional experience, we have been having a lot of fun by playing foosball and using the office space as a soccer field.

Thoughts on Austin From escape room outing to kayaking to comedy shows, we are experiencing the best of the city while beating the heat in Austin. We discovered that tacos are always a delicious dining option for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Sidewalks are practically non-existent on some roads, in which case the grass is commonly our savior!

[ibmextremeblue]

Meet the Agave team!

Welcome back to the Extreme Blue Summer blog!

Meet the Agave team! This summer we are enhancing a Watson Health mobile app called Sugar.IQ. The app currently helps diabetics manage their blood glucose by analyzing their diet and glucose levels and providing insights to help them avoid dangerously high or low levels of blood glucose. Our team's Agave updates to Sugar.IQ include the ability to process additional user data such as exercise, sleep and location to deliver new  insights to users that help them manage their condition. Agave also increases accessibility to the app by allowing users who aren't tech savvy, have poor vision, or other have health complications to enter their data in new ways such as speech commands! Working on a project that has the potential to change lives is exciting and meaningful... and the pressure is really on. Starting Week 1, we've embraced the IBM design-thinking mindset in every aspect of our work, interviewing potential users and diabetics as well as conducting a competitor analysis to see what works in existing health/diet apps to see how their successes might be applied to our problem. We also started sketching out and building our wireframes so we could begin rapidly testing and iterating with users. Now that it's week 3, we've finished our first round of prototyping and have begun to simulate sensor glucose and lifestyle data that we will use to test our new insights. We also gave our first official presentation to executives! It was exciting, a bit scary, and incredibly helpful because it helped us refine our value proposition both to IBM and diabetics. Thanks EB and Ross Grady for helping us develop such key, lifelong skills!

Meet the team (from left to right):

Software Developer/Hackerman, Joshua Shepherd I'm a rising senior studying Computer Science at Washington State University (Go Cougs!). It's so exciting to be working on such an interesting project with all of these awesome people! In my spare time, I like to play soccer and lift heavy things. I'm proud to say that I held the balance board record for about a week (2:14.89). Product Manager Biz Whiz, Lucy Yin I am a health tech junkie and aspiring Master of Business / Engineer at the University of Pennsylvania, and graduated from Duke with degrees in Biology and Economics. I geek out on the latest tech trends and enjoy networking, Excel, brunching with friends, and showing the other interns around the area. Data/ML Scientist, Alexander Ivanoff I am one of the first Data Science Majors at UC Berkeley and have worked for the past 2 years to develop the program and make data science more accessible. I care passionately about empowering individuals with data, which is why I love the Sugar.IQ project and other health-focused applications for data science. In my spare time, I like to bike, lounge by the pool and play with my cat. UX/iOS Engineer, Noah Gallant Noah is a designer and developer passionate about finding unique solutions to real-world problems. He loves to listen to music and design websites in his free time. He is super excited to work on such an impactful project. At Columbia University, Noah runs Design for America, a human-centered design studio with a focus on creating meaningful products for non-profit and socially motivated organizations. It's been wonderful working with such smart people and has been an incredible fun and learning experience! It definitely helps that three out of the four of us celebrate birthdays this month, which has kept the office well-fed to say the least. (oops!) 

[ibmextremeblue]

Optimeyez: The Next Best Step

Yesterday we were united in nervous laughter as we rushed through our first task as a team: building a spaghetti tower. Today we are united as passionate interns learning the many challenges that come with building a business and technical solution that has potential to improve lives. Tomorrow we will be united in joyous tears as we proudly present our summer's work to executives in New York City.

Our first month of Extreme Blue has flown by, leaving us excited, exhausted, and in awe of the summer to come. Bringing four diverse sets of experiences to the table, we've learned so much from each other and our unique definitions of a successful team. We hope to build lasting friendships, practice strong design and presentation skills, and create a product with a future. The IBM Business Automation team challenged us to build an adviser that would address client's lack of knowledge in how automation can transform their businesses. With our goals and problem statement in mind, we invented the one... the only... OPTIMEYEZ!

Here's a little more about our product:

There exists a clear need for a tool that can analyze business workflows and identify where inefficiencies occur as well as how they can be optimized. Introducing Optimeyez, a cognitive rules engine that collects user data and intelligently recommends automation opportunities. By encouraging a digital workforce, this product will empower the workflow owner to save time and better allocate resources, thereby increasing overall business productivity.

But Optimeyez wouldn't exist without the team behind it! Meet Rishav (our business intern), as well as Awn, Selena and Grace (our three technical interns). Seen from left to right, holding our very own team mascot, Liz!

Rishav is quite the tech evangelist and takes pride in being an early adopter. Combining the best elements of art and technology is something he aspires for, each day of his life. Rishav is currently completing his MBA at the Schulich School of Business, where he's the Managing Director at the York Consulting Group, Canada's largest business school consulting group. He also has a masters in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology. When he's not day-dreaming about the next big product which will change the world, he plays tennis or binges on Netflix. He is a life-long wanderer, having travelled to 24 countries and has also been a Radio Jockey in the past.

Awn is a fourth year Mechatronics Engineering Student at the University of Waterloo who is passionate about optics, metrology, and the role engineering has to play in the medical field. You can easily pick Awn out of a crowd by simply looking for the most hair, chances are that's Awn. Having a vested interest in the well-being of undergraduates and a passion for policy writing has led Awn to be heavily involved in almost all aspects of student life at the University of Waterloo. Most recently, Awn has been elected as the undergraduate representative for Waterloo's Strategic Action Plan Committee (SPAC) and is currently on the Engineering Federation Orientation Committee (EngFOC) as he plans orientation week 2018. Learn more about Awn and his journey here: AwnCreations.com !

Selena is most likely the EB intern persuading people to take a group photo or holding a stuffed animal to stay calm before Dragon's Den. A third year computer science co-op student at the University of Waterloo, on an adventure to discover the power of technology, understand the human mind, and do everything with a big heart. (Cheesy, but true!) She is passionate about programming, UX design, artificial intelligence, creative writing, scrap-booking, public speaking, yoga, and piano. You'll rarely find Selena alone - she loves people (supposedly more than dogs, but that's a tough decision). So if you see her around, don't be shy to ask her about the novel she's writing, the time she worked in healthcare software, or the many countries she's visited... but beware - once you get her talking, she may never stop! Haha.

Grace here is the actual tumblr user on this team (and thus, the resident introvert). You can find her staring at fandom blogs with a gleam in her eyes when she's not doodling. As a Computer Science and Economics double major student from the University of Toronto, you can expect her to know the memes you quote. But hey! That's what powers her creative engine. She loves spurting out random ideas what will perhaps bring the team in a new direction, and sometimes notices the tiniest details that will matter in the end. If you see her, make sure to wave or nod at her and watch her stare at you confused but greet you back because she is awkwardly polite like that.

So, what's in store?

After receiving constructive feedback from our mentors, peers, and Dragons, we hope to take Optimeyez in a direction that personalizes results per business and generates a new revenue stream for IBM. Our excitement lies in the potential application of various machine learning models to transform the tech from a magical idea to a tangible reality. You can support Optimeyez for 5 small donations of your time by listening to our pitch at Dragon's Den 1 & 2, the Ottawa & Canadian Expos, and the final pitch in New York. Be sure to give a 5-star rating if you ever come into contact with the product. The next best step is in your hands. Choose Optimeyez.

[ibmextremeblue]

Prism Peacing Out

(From left to right: Anna, Kaylee, Saahil, and Aisa)

Hey there! We’re team Prism, and we can’t believe our Extreme Blue summer is coming to a close. Expo in Armonk has come and gone, and we’re admittedly still riding the high from pitching (proudly!) one last time and demo’ing our final solution. Our team was tasked with integrating machine learning into API Connect’s analytics tool to deliver actionable business insights to API Product Managers, who are responsible for ensuring their firm’s APIs are optimized and meeting the needs of their customers. Now that you know a little bit about our project, let’s introduce the team:

Kaylee Burns: Kaylee is a computer science and cognitive science major at UC Berkeley. She enjoys reading, dog spotting, and dancing through the Extreme Blue lab. At school, she spends her time teaching CS classes on data structures or discrete math, and organizing conferences with the Cognitive Science Student Association. Her favorite probability distribution is Poisson; she thinks the best restaurant in NC is Guasaca, and she knows the best mentor team is IBM API Connect.

Saahil Jain: Saahil is a senior studying computer science and economics at Columbia University. He is passionate about machine learning / AI and product development. Outside of work, he’s always down for a game of poker or basketball (go Heat!).

Aisa Ledesma: Aisa is the business intern on the team, focusing on the market related pieces of our upcoming product, and is a rising second year MBA at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School. She is a huge proponent of white boarding everything and walking scrums. Outside of the lab, Aisa is a fan of cooking (and eating), food anthropology, and being outside.

Anna Sun: Anna is a senior studying Computer Science and Markets and Management at Duke University. At school, she was a TA for Data Structures and Algorithms and Computer Architecture, and outside of school, she enjoys running, rock climbing, backpacking, and jump rope. She also cherishes dinners at Guasaca, Costco, and dad jokes.

Prismo: Our team mascot!

The last 12 weeks have been filled with hours of development and market research, walking scrums, countless pitch practices, and an immeasurable number of snacks that fueled our product design sessions. Our final 3 days in the lab have been dedicated to documentation and creating leave behinds for our project, but have also been a time of reflection in how much progress we’ve made in such a short window. We kicked off the summer learning about API Connect, the significance of the API economy, and practicing design thinking to identify our users’ pain points. However, Extreme Blue has provided us lessons beyond the technology we’ve committed our summer to developing.  We’ve learned how to cut the time from being individual strangers who just so happen to be interning on the same project to friends/colleagues on a high functioning team. Our time here has been incredibly challenging and equally as rewarding.

Thanks to our mentors, IBM, and fellow EB’ers for an amazing summer!

[ibmextremeblue]

Formula0 Speeding to the Finish Line

The past 4 months have been a journey and a half. Looking back to day 1; meeting each other, then realizing we just pitched our project in Armonk, it hard to grasp how quickly the summer has passed by. Through the internship we’ve learned to really appreciate the diverse education and background that comes into play when developing a new offering. From the get go we hit the ground running, and appropriately so we coined ourselves and the project - Formula0 (faster and better than Formula One).

 Introducing the team:

 Meet Harit:

A Software Engineering & Management student at McMaster University, his expertise include bridging the gap between development of Software and the process of impacting the bottom line. His thirst for new technology and their vast applications has brought him to Extreme Blue. He thrives to be a well rounded software developer by applying theoretical knowledge to personal and practical projects. Lastly, he is a Sci-fi and Fantasy novel enthusiast - and always up for a coffee chat if it involves anything on his GoodReads profile.

Meet Oruj:

I am Oruj, finishing soon my undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering from McGill university. I have gained lots of experience in all areas of software engineering through courses at school and internships. I have done 4 term of coops with working in automation of tests, front end development, backend development and web development using Agile methodology. I am familiar with most technologies used today in software engineering. I have a huge passion to Machine Learning, particularly to Data Science. My passion comes from my math background. I love math and always studied hard to improve myself. I want to balance science with engineering in my future career. I am taking online courses and planning to do Masters in the future in data science.

 When I am not coding late in office, I am either at gym or reading my favourite articles.

 Meet Shayla:

Shayla is currently finishing her honors specialization in business and computer science minor at Western University. Prior to studying at Western she played professional beach volleyball, this passion ultimately inspired her to build a training facility and start her first venture. She previously worked at Front Row Insurance in Vancouver BC where she lead the digital transition of four products. It was during this internship that she discovered her passion for technology and enrolled in a computer science minor at Western immediately. Aside from her day job, she is the CEO of Kappa Alpha Theta at Western and is inclined to encourage other young women to pursue STEMs.

   Meet Yazan:

Yazan is a systems design engineering student from the University of Waterloo and is deeply interested in getting machines to think. He has received publication for data science applied to improving radiation therapy, built high-frequency trading algorithms using Q-Learning, applied deep learning to identify drivers from GPS, and this summer designed and developed the back end of Formula0, a cognitive recommendation and automation service. He is the past Team Captain of Waterloop, a student design team representing Canada at the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competitions where he introduced one of the first pneumatic based Hyperloop pods to Elon Musk.

 Our team describes the summer as the most enjoyable struggle we’ve faced to date. It has been an unforgettable journey up until now. The team often claims it was an undergraduate degree and a half squeezed into 4 months. As tough as it was, and as much as we’ve learned, we didn’t lose sight on having fun. We are excited to see what IBM has in store for us next!