Microsoft offers internship

Microsoft offers internship

PT Microsoft Indonesia is opening an internship program with the
Microsoft Research Center Asia-Beijing to the Bandung and
Surabaya Institutes of Technology (the ITB and ITS) students and
lecturers.

The internship is one measure agreed to in the recently signed
Memorandum of Understanding by the two universities and Microsoft
in Beijing last week. It also allows for staff and students to
take part in seminars and courses held by the company.

The universities could choose the projects to be studied,
based on each's expertise, the MOU says.

Under the MOU, ITS will concentrate its research at its campus
on knowledge management, integrated systems, software
applications development, and multimedia design focusing on
marine technology, marine engineering, civil engineering and
mechanical engineering.

ITB meanwhile, will focus its research on next generation user
and data mining, digital multimedia for arts and graphics,
wireless communications and network computing.

Once completed, the research would belong to the universities
and not Microsoft, Microsoft Indonesia president director Tony
Chen said.

"The internship program for the development of the projects
will help researchers to innovate in information technology,"
Minister of Research and Technology Kusmayanto Kadiman said.

In a speech during his China tour, President Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono mentioned the importance of Indonesians mastering
information technology (IT) and information and communications
technology (ICT).

Microsoft Indonesia also denied an earlier report that it
would set up its fifth research center here, after the U.S., UK,
China and India.

"Up to today, Microsoft does not have any plan to build its
fifth research center in Indonesia," the firm's public relations
officer Cynthia Iskandar said in an e-mailed statement.

The news that Microsoft would build its research center here
was raised by Kusmayanto and Minister of Communications and
Information Sofyan Djalil in June, following Susilo's meeting
with Microsoft founder and CEO Bill Gates in Seattle in May. --
JP