External Research Office

The External Research Office invests in research collaborations that fit Oracle's long-term strategic goals. These collaborations are between Oracle Labs researchers or Oracle engineers and university researchers. Collaborations help narrow technology gaps and provide access to technologies of interest to Oracles's growth over the next several years. The results of these collaborations can lead to new technology, new product ideas, research associates, new employees, faculty consultants, and faculty sabbaticals at Oracle.

• Oracle Collaborates For Three Main Reasons

1. Development of Oracle Ecosystem — complementary technologies; catalyst for development on the Oracle platform.
2. To transform key university research outcomes into future products and competitive advantages for Oracle.
3. To recruit and hire the best students; and to encourage student internships at Oracle.

• Who Do We Collaborate With?

Oracle collaborates with faculty, research directors, and principal investigators at universities, national labs and nonprofit research organizations.

Graduate Students should discuss any collaboration ideas with their faculty advisor. The faculty advisor should communicate directly with Oracle.

• Boston University – Temperature-aware Workload Scheduling for Optimal Energy Efficiency
• Carnegie Mellon – Tolerating Microsecond-Granularity Latencies
• C-Path Institute – Quantitative Exploration or Large Scale Clinical Trials Database
• EPFL – CPU Topology -aware Transaction Processing
• Georgia Tech – Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research
• Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital – Outcome Assessment using Electronic Medical Records
• Harvard – Medical Data Mining and Graph Store
• Harvey Mudd College – Hardware Acceleration for Oracle Numbers
• Johannes Kepler – Java HotSpot VM Performance
• Simon Fraser – Reducing Cost of Accessing Memory in NUMA System
• Stanford – Pervasive Parallelism Lab, FPGA Join and Graph Store
• UC Berkeley – AMP Lab and PAR Lab
• UCSD – Energy and Power Efficiencies at Chip-level to Datacenter
• University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign – Laser Sources with Reduced Energy Requirements and Enhanced Reliability
• University of Maryland – CALCE
• University of Maryland, Human Computer Interaction Lab – Interactive Discovery of Temporal Patterns
• University of MA, Amherst – Scalable Probabilistic Databases
• University of Texas, Austin – Next-generation Microprocessor Design for Reliability and Manufacturability
• University of Washington – New Type Annotation and Pluggable Type -checking for the Java Language
• University of Wisconsin – Computer Architecture Affiliate
• University of Wisconsin – Research on Silicon Photonic Interconnect Arbitration
• USC – DB Lab

Two past ERO supported projects are both aimed at teaching students of varying ages, from K-12 through university-level, how to program in Java, with the tools developed in Java:

• The BlueJ/Greenfoot (Kent University UK and LaTrobe/Deakin Australia)

With over 6.5M downloads, the BlueJ and Greenfoot projects are aimed at the design, development and (free) distribution of Java programming environments specifically aimed at education. Two integrated development environments have been produced and released to date: BlueJ and Greenfoot. BlueJ is aimed at university level, while Greenfoot is targeted for the middle school and high school students. However, both environments have been used across the education spectrum.

These systems have been instrumental in making Java the prime language in early programming education. When choosing a teaching language, teachers consider several factors: the language characteristics, available environments (and their cost), availability of teaching resources, and community support. Of these, the technical language characteristics represent the smallest influence; environments, resources and community support are stronger drivers in language adoption than the language itself. This project provides these materials and community support to teachers at all levels at no cost.

For more information:

http://www.bluej.org/

http://www.greenfoot.org

Java Summer Workshop 2011

 

• The Alice Project (Carnegie Mellon University)

CMU Professor Randy Pausch conceived of Alice nearly two decades ago as tool that would be used to introduce programming to students who were less likely to learn to program in standard math and computer sciences courses. Java was the language chosen. Now run by Wanda Dann at CMU, the Alice Project is designed to allow students to go beyond the drag-and-drop environment of the previous version, enabling direct, Java-based coding in a Java IDE (NetBeans). Studies show that Alice attracts a much wider cross section of students than conventional programming courses. This is especially true among women and minorities.

For more information:

http://www.alice.org

Java Summer Workshop 2011

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This 3-year ERO supported project resulted in a Java-based plug-in for NetBeans:

• Javeleon with Maersk-McKinney-Moeller Institute at Southern Denmark University

The objective of this project was to enhance the NetBeans rich client platform with dynamic update capability, through inclusion of a novel dynamic update approach developed by then Ph.D. Candidate Allan Gregersen, under supervision from his advisor, Bo Joergensen.

The dynamic linking mechanism in Java supports loading of classes dynamically, but it does not support class reloading. Hence, dynamic linking facilitates the development of component platforms, which supports dynamic loading of new plug-ins, but not dynamic updates of active plug-ins, as dynamic updates require already linked classes to be reloaded. Loading a class twice requires the use of a separate class loader. Javeleon is a small tool that enables NetBeans IDE or NetBeans Platform developers to reload actively running modules while preserving the state of the application in a test-instance of the application being developed.

For more information go to http://plugins.netbeans.org/PluginPortal/ and search for Javeleon