Sun Campus Ambassador
Sun Microsystems Fosters Open Source Innovation on Campus
Tuesday February 6, 11:30 am ET
Campus Ambassador Program
Sun's Campus Ambassadors are facilitating the adoption of open source technologies on campus, as well as fostering community and innovation. These technologies and open source projects include the Solaris 10 OS; Java technology-based systems; community projects such as the OpenSolaris project and OpenSPARC(TM) technology project; and the NetBeans(TM) integrated development environment (IDE) and Sun Studio(TM) software tools. Sun provides the Campus Ambassadors with free training and support; in turn, ambassadors help student developers take advantage of Sun's robust portfolio of high- value, no-cost resources, such as free web-based training, free developer tools, open source technologies and communities, and easily accessible technical support via forums and communities. "
In selecting candidates for the Campus Ambassador program, Sun is choosing from among the most original and innovative young minds on campus today. Anil Gulecha, a Campus Ambassador from India, invented a way for Solaris to be booted off a USB drive. One of Sun's Canadian Campus Ambassadors, Martin Morissette, led a team of students who built a Java technology-powered submarine, called Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, that dazzled judges at the prestigious International Autonomous Underwater Competition sponsored by the Association for Unmanned Vehicles Systems International (AUVSI) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR).
Sun is also turning to its Campus Ambassador community in order to provide business and academic decision makers valuable insight into needs and expectations for university IT infrastructures. In a recent survey of Sun Campus Ambassadors, students expressed high expectations for e-learning resources, wireless access and open source tools -- insight that may shape IT decisions, purchasing and the market itself. Several sessions at WWERC will address these issues, and Sun's Hal Stern, senior vice president of systems engineering, will host a panel of students who will share their IT challenges, triumphs, expectations and frustrations.
"The people at Sun are a great mentors and the internship opportunity helps enhance students' careers," said Fahad Hussain, Sun Campus Ambassador at San Jose State University. "Sun works closely with the universities to equip students with advanced skills, hands-on experience with leading-edge, open source technologies, and the confidence to create new technologies. Not only does Sun offer training and support, the dialogue goes both ways. Sun is interested in hearing what we really need to get the most from our IT education and be ready to make a difference in the business world."
Contests Encourage Student Innovation
As one way to foster innovation among student developers, Sun has sponsored several academic contests. For example, in Singapore, Sun is sponsoring JavaJive for the second year in a row. Java Jive is a contest that offers university students an opportunity to develop applications on NetBeans and Solaris in a fun yet competitive environment. At WWERC, Sun will also announce the winners of the Solaris 10 OS University Challenge. To view that announcement, please visit: http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2007-02/sunflash.20070206.1.xml .
Many of Sun's resources for young developers are part of Sun Developer Network (SDN) Academic Developer Program. Launched in 2005, this program extends Sun's resources for the developer community to students, researchers and faculty around the world. The program aims to increase the access that students have to educational developer tools, thus helping them graduate with the skills they need to contribute to the advancement of technology. For more information, please visit http://developers.sun.com/learning/academic/ .
Sun's commitment to education overall is exemplified by Curriki, which started as online project started by Sun Microsystems to develop works for education in a collaborative effort, originally called Global Education and Learning Community (GELC). Curriki's mission is to improve education around the world by empowering teachers, students and parents with user-created, free, open source curricula. By building a world class learning environment that is community developed and supported, and publishing it for free on the Web, Curriki works to help ensure that anyone, from anywhere can participate.
The leadership team consists of people with a long-time commitment to exploring the use of technology to improve education, such as Scott McNealy.
