The Computer Science Colloquium

Boas Betzler
(IBM Research)

"Technical Innovation with Virtual Worlds"

    The hype about Virtual Worlds has demonstrated some early examples of emerging business value. The leverage of these visual, immersive, environments combined with the highly social interactions that they enable can clearly accelerate large scale collaborative innovation and accelerate learning and growth capabilities delivering the significant contributions that we know can be made to business and society. However, there are some key issues and challenges. Some of these early adopters showing both good business value potential and equally as important, currently, technical challenges in the areas of security, scalability, integration and interoperability.


Bio: Boas Betzler is a Senior Technical Staff Member and the Technical Leader for 3D Internet and Virtual Worlds in the Digital Convergence IBM Emerging Business Opportunity. In previous positions, Boas was member of the Systems and Technology Group Software Architecture Board as lead designer for Web Services based Systems Management. Before he was working for the Linux Technology Center and starting the embedded Linux initiative in IBM. Boas is widely know as the Grandfather of Linux on zSeries. Mid 1998 he started the port of Linux to zSeries in the IBM Development Lab in Boeblingen. His most significant accomplishment was to stand in front of many different groups and individuals and fight for his ideas of bringing Linux on S/390 to the market. Boas was one of the key players who turned the whole company into a new direction. He joined IBM in 1995 and worked on systems architecture since then. Boas Betzler studied Computer Science at the Berufsakademie Stuttgart where he graduated with a Bachelors Degree.

The Colloquium is supported by generous contributions from the Bloomberg, Information Builders, Inc., and Netlogic, Inc.