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