Despite having spun out the Eclipse consortium into an independent Eclipse Foundation, IBM Corp. continues to invest substantially in the organization and its namesake technology, particularly in activities to attract young developers to the platform.

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IBM recently announced winners of a programming competition for students and shared information on grants the company provides to colleges for innovative uses of Eclipse.

IBM announced the winners of the first International Challenge for Eclipse (ICE), as well as the recipients of Eclipse Innovation Grants (EIG), and announced its sponsorship of the Association for Computing Machinery's International Collegiate Programming Contest, held at the end of March in Prague.

Gabby Silberman, program director for IBM Centers for Advanced Studies at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, N.Y., said the EIG program is in its second year. In its first year, IBM awarded about 50 grants to university faculty and researchers. "This year, we managed to award about 75 grants" amounting to nearly $3 million in awards over the two-year period, Silberman said.

This year's grant-winning projects include Universidade da Coruña in Spain, for a project for enabling visually impaired software developers; Universitat des Saarlandes in Germany, for a project related to changes in programming and applying data mining to version histories of large software systems; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for work on continuous testing, Java dialects and education; and the University of Cambridge in England for a project related to modular image processing for magnetic resonance brain imaging.

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