Computerworld Honors Program names 2008 awards recipients

Computerworld - WASHINGTON — The recipients of the 2008 Computerworld Honors Program awards were announced at a gala ceremony here Monday night, with 10 organizations receiving the top prizes for their use of technology to promote social, educational or economic advances.

The winners of this year's 21st Century Achievement Awards were chosen from among 50 finalists — five in each of the 10 categories. The finalists, which were named and recognized at the 20th annual awards ceremony, came from a group of 204 companies and organizations designated as 2008 Laureates for submitting case studies about technology projects that met criteria for originality, breadth of vision and significance to society. Each of the Laureates was honored at a medal ceremony earlier in the day.

The following is a list of the Achievement Awards recipients by category:

Business & Related Services

Deaf Link Inc.
San Antonio-based Deaf Link has developed a set of videoconferencing services that banks, companies, emergency shelters and other organizations can use provide American Sign Language interpreting to their customers, employees and clients.

Education & Academia

Arizona Telemedicine Program
Established by Arizona's legislature in 1996, the Tucson-based ATP operates a broadband network that links 55 independent health care organizations statewide and offers telemedicine services in 60 different medical categories.

Environment, Energy & Agriculture

The Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Maritime Research and the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences
The institute and the center, which are based in Germany, jointly developed a system called Pangaea for archiving and sharing scientific research data in the fields of environmental oceanography, marine geosciences and marine biology.

Finance, Insurance & Real Estate

State Street Corp., Global Infrastructure Services
The Boston-based investment services firm has implemented an IT infrastructure plan called "Zero Footprint, Maximum Impact" that relies on regional data centers and reduces the IT footprint in local offices through the use of desktop virtualization and other technologies.

Government

U.S. Department of Homeland Security — Customs and Border Protection
The Customs and Border Protection agency within the DHS is developing a Java-based cargo-processing system designed to help the federal government identify potential terrorists and terrorist shipments while facilitating the more efficient movement of legitimate cargo.

Health Care

Emergency Management and Research Institute
EMRI, a not-for-profit organization in Secunderabad, India, has created a system that is being used to automate emergency call center operations in the state of Andhra Pradesh and also is being expanded to other parts of India.

Manufacturing

Embraer SA
The aircraft maker, which is based in Sao Paulo, Brazil, has developed an automated flight-test engineering system that utilizes a three-layer architecture featuring Wintel servers and a clustered database environment.

Media, Arts & Entertainment