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Steve Hamm in
This has happened to you. You’re motoring down the highway when you hear a bulletin from one of those all-news-all-the-time radio stations telling you there’s trouble ahead. A tractor trailer has flipped and is blocking two lanes. So you hop off at the next exit and …… come to a grinding halt in gridlock traffic. Everybody else has the same idea you did. When you finally arrive at your destination, late, a colleague tells you they made it on time using the highway. The accident had been cleared. %@#+*!
Timely traffic information. It’s a promise that is often made but rarely fulfilled. The reason: Most systems for monitoring traffic and alerting people about problems have latency issues–maybe as much as 20 minutes. Even the traffic information services on iPhone and other GPS-enabled devices isn’t always up to date.
A big idea that IBM scientist Nagui Halim had back in 2003 is about to finally make traffic information truly an up-to-the-minute phenomenon. More about Halim in a minute. First, today’s news:
Scientists from IBM and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden are collaborating to bring real-time traffic info to Stockholm–which likely will make it the first city in the world to possess such a capability. Over the past year, IBM has been working with the city to monitor traffic flow during peak hours. The congestion management system has reduced traffic by 20 percent and reduced average travel times by almost 50 percent. Now we’re putting some of our newest analytics technology, called InfoSphere Streams, to work there, too. The plan is to gather information germane to traffic congestion from a wide variety of sources, including sensors in taxi cabs and delivery trucks, on-time performance updates from transit systems, and weather information–then making it readily available to travelers so they can make the best decisions about driving routes, travel times, and transit alternatives. “This is the first application of real-time analytics to traffic,” says Halim.
Picture this: A resident could send a text message to the traffic monitoring system listing their location and destination. The system would instantly spit back a recommendation.
Back to Halim. He was working at IBM Research back in 2003 when he saw the need for technology that could monitor multiple streams of data, real-time, and then mash it up to create actionable knowledge. At the time, most so-called real-time systems weren’t real time at all–or they were highly specialized systems. He saw the opportunity to create an approach that could be applied to any number of purposes.
It took a while. There were glitches and dead ends. Some of Halim’s colleagues thought he was crazy. But now its here. IBM last year began working with clients to build applications for the technology in health care, financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, water management, radio astronomy, and particle physics. In February, we formally launched InfoSphere Streams as a product–in a new version with substantially improved performance.
Here’s how it works: Data comes into the computing system from the network. The system can handle thousands of streams of information concurrently. It breaks the flow into a series of small steps, recognizing the kind of data that’s coming in and quickly sending each chunk to a microprocessor that best able to deal with it. Then, through a method called “sensor fusion,” the system weaves the strands of processed data into usable information. “It’s all about gathering and making sense,” says Halim.
Depending on what you want to do, you can run a stream computing application on a supercomputer, a blade server, or even a laptop. You can analyze something relatively simple like a flow of Twitter Tweets on your laptop.
How big could stream computing be? Halim, who is now director of the InfoSphere Streams product group in IBM software, won’t put a big number on it. But he points out that there are potentially game-changing uses for the technology in one industry after another.
By the way, that IBM TV commercial you’ve seen of a baby blanketed in colorful strands representing the data from monitoring its vital signs? That’s stream computing. But that’s another story.
Posted by
Karl Roche in
Is your city looking a bit rough around the edges? Do you wonder what it will be like in 20 years time? Does it even feel like your city?
After moving to London 17 years ago it took me a while to feel like this was home and that I had a right to complain or think that things could be done better – possibly because I lived in a new borough every year. I suppose only now that one of my kids attends a school and we have been in the London Borough of Sutton for 7 years that I truly feel like I have a stake in this city. I’m really starting to think about the decisions that are being made around planning and developing of local provisions such as getting my kids into a good school, the availability healthcare (the hospital both my kids were born at has been under threat of closer) and if we have an ample local supply of power and water and are we protected against floods? Not to mention how will we all get around the cities we live in.
As more and more of us live in urban settings, these cities are going to have to get better, get smarter and serve inhabitants better just to remain as viable places to live and work. Some cities will do this better than others which will mean a shift of populations to those that get it right, away from those that don’t. Employers and especially talented individuals will move to places that serve them better. It’s not just about growth, but about cities working better. The competition between cities is more alive now than ever, and it will change faster than ever before.
I can see the problems in my own city of London, but also the opportunities. We have a huge number of talented and creative people in the UK. I hope for my kids we can improve things and set the bar high.
City of Dreams
These 6 short films highlight some of the challenges UK cities face in some of those areas that will decide whether we stay or go, including transport, energy, education and healthcare. With interviews from senior leaders in the public and private sector, alongside IBM technology and business specialists, each gives their insights into the opportunities that exist to transform the way our cities function.
More of these videos plus a 3D version of City of Dreams at ibm.com/uk/cities
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I recently sat down with Wayne Balta, IBM’s VP of corporate environmental affairs and product safety, to talk about a new program to advance sustainability across the company’s huge network of almost 30,000 suppliers in 90 countries. We talked about how a company can help the environment beyond the walls of its own business:
Q: Ten years, ago, we never could have predicted the current state of global sustainability efforts. What are some trends you’re seeing today?
Balta: We’re seeing more activity in areas where business interests intersect with the environment and sustainability. More companies are realizing that what is good for the environment is good for business, especially when it makes a company more efficient and effective. A case in point: if you produce a product — anything from hula hoops to heavy machinery — if you do it in a way that is more efficient, you’ll consume less energy, save money on energy costs, and lessen your contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. We’re seeing this across all industries.
Q: One place a company can make an impact is in its supply chain. Can a company’s purchasing power be translated into better environmental policies?
Balta: Absolutely — we’ve certainly seen that at IBM. This dates back to the 1970s, when IBM was evaluating companies performing waste management and recycling. In 1998, we wrote to our suppliers to encourage them to adopt the new ISO 14001 standard for environmental management systems. Then, in 2004 we published the IBM Supplier Conduct Principles that suppliers were required to follow in order to do business with IBM. Those standards set IBM’s overall expectations for corporate responsibility, because suppliers are a key component of a company’s sustainability efforts.
Q: What is IBM asking its suppliers to do in 2010?
Balta: Starting this year, we are asking each of our suppliers to define an environmental management system suitable to their particular business operations. We’re asking them to establish voluntary environmental goals and measure performance for at least three topics applicable to virtually all businesses: energy conservation, greenhouse gas emissions, and waste management/recycling. In addition, we’re asking them to publicly disclose their results. We’re also asking that these requirements be cascaded down to any of their suppliers who perform work for them that is material to what is ultimately supplied to IBM. So this program will fan out among our suppliers’ suppliers, spreading its impact even further.
Q: I see you are not issuing a blanket mandate. What’s the reason for that?
Balta: A key aspect of this program is that we want suppliers to create a management system that works for their particular business operations. Since our suppliers are diverse, there cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution. Some are huge publically-traded companies while others may be small businesses with much fewer employees. We want them all to build long-term sustainability in a way that is integral to their routine operations, not as an add-on fix.
As we set these new requirements, let me point out that we are not going to publicly “grade” suppliers. This is a carrot, not a stick approach. Our goal is to help them improve their businesses, whether they work with IBM or someone else. We want them to succeed.
Q: Can you give me a few examples of what suppliers could do?
Balta: It varies. Chemicals used for manufacturing must be properly managed from inception through final use and disposition. Products and components can be designed for the environment, considering material selection, energy intensity, and recycling at end-of-life. Even service operations such as call centers can be energy-intensive.
Take the electronics industry, which supplies IBM with components for our servers. As an example, we want them to use environmentally preferable materials. However, that doesn’t happen overnight, and a supplier must put a system in place to phase out a particular material or manufacturing process.
For a services oriented supplier, its environmental management system might identify energy consumption as a significant issue. Upon recognizing that, the supplier might do things like install motion detectors so lights automatically shut off when rooms are not occupied, or installing energy-efficient light bulbs or energy-saving settings on computers. For a shipping company, their routes might be redesigned to save fuel.
Q: Aren’t some suppliers already doing this?
Balta: Indeed, many of IBM’s suppliers already have such systems in place and for them these requirements may not represent anything substantially different from the way they already manage their businesses. For others, however, this approach may be relatively new. Some suppliers may need help and we look forward to helping them succeed.
There is another dimension. In our era of globalization, we find ourselves working with suppliers from all over the world. In fact, the executive who oversees IBM’s supply chain, John Paterson, is based in Hong Kong. We’re finding that suppliers are at different stages of development and sophistication in terms of their understanding of sustainability and environment impact. While these requirements may seem like old news in mature economies, attention to these matter in emerging markets has not been great over the years. It’s very important for suppliers in those markets to get the help they need to put the right systems in place.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Balta: Our world is a system of systems — we’re seeing that in IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative, where cities around the world are creating systems to make water cleaner, roads less congested, and populations healthier. That’s what we are doing here; helping suppliers build systems so that they can be sustainable and succeed.
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Guest in
by: Mark Greenwald, chief of research and planning at the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice
More than 2.4 billion individuals are locked in the nations’ prisons costing U.S. taxpayers roughly $70 billion a year in support of this over-crowed system. Remarkably, many of these adult convicts showed a high-probability of landing in the system many years earlier as repeat juvenile offenders.
With advancements of technology, forward-thinking State Departments of Juvenile Justice can now better identify those likely to re-offend and customize programs and services to lower the rate of recidivism.
At the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, we are taking an innovative approach to better understand and predict juvenile behaviors and properly assign rehabilitation programs for the more than 85,000 youth that enter our State’s juvenile justice system each year.
We are pleased that the overall number of youth entering the DJJ system is decreasing. And, 93 percent of youth remained crime-free six months after receiving prevention services from our Department from 2007-08.
Still, we have work to do to improve the way we use our resources. It is with this determination that we will be using IBM predictive analytics technology to help guide prevention efforts for the high-risk youth before they become chronic, serious or habitual juvenile adult offenders.
Using this technology, we are confident our organization can improve its existing screening and placement process and intervene in juvenile lives earlier to help them become — and stay — law abiding citizens. Essentially, it will predict which youths will have a higher likelihood to reoffend.
Using evidence-based interventions, we can direct youth toward treatment that will address their specific criminogenic needs. This gives us the opportunity to place individuals in specific programs, such as combating substance abuse or addressing mental health issues, creating personalized – versus generic – rehabilitation programs.
We have embarked on this exciting mission with IBM by using predictive analytics software to help us in our efforts to turn around the lives of troubled youth.
These initiatives also support our involvement in Florida’s Children’s Week activities (April 12-16, 2010). The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice is holding its Annual Youth Success Day that recognizes the efforts underway to protect the public by reducing juvenile crime and delinquency, and improve the lives of those who enter our system.
It might seem odd to say, but by working with IBM we are hoping that the use of predictive analytics will essentially put us out of business, with first-offending juveniles never returning to the incarceration system.
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
Tax Collectors in Their Office
Source: Wiki Commons
Tax collectors. Not a popular bunch. Still, the job must be done, and it’s best to do it effectively and efficiently. For years, IBM has been providing governmental tax offices with technology that helps collectors spot cheats and delinquents. Our latest bit of technical wizardry, the IBM Tax Collections Optimizer (nickname: TACO), helps them collect the money that’s owed by individuals and businesses.
This project got underway a couple of years ago when the folks at the New York state tax office began asking for an improved system for going after scofflaws–something that would be more effective but also require less effort. Up until now, the Office of Tax Enforcement followed a standard set of rules and a step-by-step process for going after cheats, but it wasn’t satisfied with the results it was getting.
TACO optimizes the actions of agents by taking into account the complex dependencies between the office’s resources, the potential for recovering money, and legal constraints. It uses a variety of taxpayer data, such as filing status, the amount owed, and past payment history. Then it comes up with an overall plan for collecting from the entire population of delinquent taxpayers.
Rather than building something from scratch, scientists at IBM Research cast around for techniques being used for other purposes that could be applied to the tax office situation. They found them far afield, bringing together methods used commonly in game theory and robotics. Using the Markov Decision Process, or MDP, they mapped the collections process and segmented taxpayers based on their characteristics. Then they applied a method called Reinforcement Learning to the map. Based on historical information, they were able to learn the optimal sequence of actions for each type of taxpayer. “We came up with the optimal approach to maximizing the chances of success while minimizing the expenses,” says Chid Apte, director of analytics research at IBM Research.
Because of a crackdown on tax delinquents, New York has 1.2 million active cases pending. One of its goals is to resolve more cases without having to issue warrants and initiate a formal legal processes that can drag on for years. The State expects to recover an additional $100 million over the next three years with the help of TACO.
Posted by
vineeta durani in
As medical equipment grows smaller and moves closer to the patient, tracking thousands of items from wheelchairs to heart-lung machines can take valuable time away from patient care. A portable telemetry device used to record electrical activity of the heart can easily get lost in bed sheets and sent to the laundry, costing thousands of dollars to replace. Now hospitals are using ultrasound technology to automatically manage, maintain and deliver medical equipment.
Case in point: Saint Michael’s Medical Center in Newark, New Jersey is using IBM’s real-time location services to keep track of more than 2,000 pieces of medical equipment (think heart monitors, infusion pumps, ventilators) at a moment’s notice.
How: Ultrasound tags can be attached to equipment to broadcast a unique identification signal to receivers without the risk of electromagnetic interference with other electronic patient care equipment. The ultrasound data helps track and visualize equipment with location accuracy to zone, room or sub-room levels. Alerts can even be generated when a heart monitor leaves an assigned area without authorization, or if a crash cart sits in the hallway too long.
IBM’s Holli Haswell talks with Cathy Cocco, one of IBM’s smarter healthcare experts in our hospital lab in Austin:
Editor’s note: In this blog’s focus on building a smarter planet, we put a lot of “ink” about macro industry issues. We also want to help readers understand that beneath all of this is a critical technology infrastructure. To that end, we asked IBM’s Bernie Spang to contribute his perspective on the topic while he is attending the “Smarter Systems for a Smarter Planet” event in IBM’s Almaden Research Labs. Following is his blog post:
There is an increasing sense of urgency we hear from clients who want to get more value from their IT systems. More value in two dimensions – greater value from the information they manage and greater efficiency of the systems themselves.
They have surely obtained value from the investments they’ve made in managing information to execute business processes. But they don’t feel as if they have a consistent view of all their information and enough visibility into the current state and changing conditions of their organization and the markets they serve. They believe that they can better use computing systems to analyze their information to discover hidden insights. Insights that can help them optimize the way their business operates, to optimize the way they interact with their customers and to find new opportunities that they couldn’t see before.
With greater analysis of existing information, they could better serve their citizens or patients, or gain competitive advantage and sell more products and services. This is propelling businesses around the world to not just continue to invest in analytic-based solutions but to increase their investment.
But how does an organization increase such investment at a time when most budgets are at best flat? And when the majority of those budgets go to maintaining existing systems with the capacity needed to support business as usual growth?
That is where the value of greater efficiency comes in. And why IBM is accelerating delivery of systems that are optimized for specific application workloads. Systems that are the right size and balance of finely tuned resources and easily expanded as needs of the business dictate. A new generation of software, servers and storage technology has opened the way for much greater efficiency. Freeing clients to shift investment from maintaining to excelling.
IBM Systems z clients have known for years that running multiple workloads on a single system, each running in its own virtual image, maximizes system utilization and delivers the lowest cost of computing per application user. Innovations such as POWER7 processors, eX5 systems and DB2 pureScale have opened the door to using this “virtual scale-out” approach to dramatically increase the efficiency of Unix and x86-Linux computing environments.
At today’s Smarter Systems for a Smarter Planet event at the Almaden Research Center, IBM client AfriSam and business partner Synopsis shared how they are optimizing IT to improve business results.
AfriSam is the #1 building supply business in South Africa. They play an active role in building the core infrastructure such as airports, roads and harbors. AfriSam’s CIO shared how they recently moved their SAP environment from an Oracle Database running on HP Servers to an optimized IBM Power and DB2 system in one weekend, and have been able to reduce storage space by approximately 35 percent. This has translated into significant cost savings.
Latin American-based business partner Synopsis recently worked with Banco de Credito del Peru to move its banking application, Credipago over to an IBM optimized system in just a matter of days. The banking system is now running IBM DB2 software on Power System that is performing transactions 30 percent more efficiently and had reduced ongoing software costs. The bank is able to shift investment to analyzing information to gain new insights regarding trends in customer services to better serve their clients.
These are just two of the many stories I have heard recently from clients and partners that all echo the same theme. Around the world and in all industries the top priorities are driving down cost though more efficient systems, and accelerating growth by investing in analytic systems to uncover new insights. And that in a nutshell is what we mean by Smarter Systems for a Smarter Planet.
Bernie Spang is the director of product strategy in IBM’s Software Group.
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Adam Christensen in
As many have noted over the past year, transparency in government should mean more than just turning cameras on in an internal briefing or dumping raw data sets on the public. If one merely has access to raw government data – and I include complex legislative text in this category – chances are they are no more informed than they were before gaining access. Individuals – or entities – need to help make sense of that data in ways citizens can understand. (Likewise, availability of raw open data is critical to ensure accuracy of resulting analysis)
In light of that, I wanted to share a new public beta project from the IBM Research team responsible for the ManyEyes Visualization services. The new service, called ManyBills, is aimed at making it easier to explore and understand the legislative process and specific bills, both of which are often too complex for most citizens grasp fully, by offering an interactive visualization of the bill.
From the new ManyBills blog:
Today we are officially launching the public beta of Many Bills, a web-based visualization of US Congressional legislation. Many Bills is a tool that provides a peek into the internals of Federal bills, making it easier to understand and navigate these dense texts. Its interface offers users an overview of this complex dataset while still allowing for full access to the original text.
As you can see from the example above of the new Health Care Bill the output is embeddable on any web page.
I’m still tinkering with it – the tool itself takes a bit to get used to and the produce embeddable visualizations that “fit” the page. But I love the interactivity of the tool. What’s your verdict?
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
Concentrated photovoltaics unit at IBM Research
The notion that science can produce rivers in the desert was once preposterous–but it’s no longer a crazy idea. A collaboration between IBM researchers and scientists at Saudi Arabia’s national research organization gives promise of using one of the most plentiful resources in the kingdom, sunlight, to produce vast quantities of one of the least plentiful resources, drinkable water.
IBM and the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology have been working together for two years on a handful of scientific research projects, and today they announced that they’re combining two of them in hopes of being able to produce large amounts of water at more affordable prices. The plan is to combine new solar power technology with new water filtering technology to produce a breakthrough in solar-powered sea water desalination.
Saudi Arabia is already the leading producer of desalinated water in the world. Leaders at KACST want to not only bring down the cost of producing water for their own use but to develop an industry around the technology. “We want to create a cluster of companies in the kingdom, and take this technology and market it around the world,” says Dr. Turki Al Saud, vice president for research institutes, KACST. At some point, he says, the cost of desalination may be reduced to a point where its even economically feasible to produce water for agricultural purposes.
Today’s plants produce water for up to $1.50 per cubic meter. The goal here is to bring the price down significantly enough to radically change the water supply situation worldwide. An estimated 1.2 billion people in 40 countries do not have access to safe water. “We can conceivably create a river of fresh water in countries that don’t have rivers–water for the masses at reasonable costs,” says Dr. Chandrasekhar (Spike) Narayan, who leads the Science and Technology Organization at IBM’s Almaden Research Center.
Two advances in science are at the core of today’s announcement. One of them emerged from nanotechnology, which IBM pioneered starting in the early 1980s. Modern desalination plants use the process of reverse osmosis to remove salt and other harmful chemicals from sea water. But chlorine breaks down the membranes that are used for filtration and, over time, the membranes are fouled by unwanted organic and biological molecules and particles. Researchers from IBM and KACST developed chlorine-resistant and fouling-resistant polymers that increase the permeability of the membranes without sacrificing selectivity.
The second key scientific advance comes in photovoltaics–a promising but prohibitively expensive method for converting the sun’s energy into electricity. Working together, IBM and KACST are developing a solar concentrator system by adapting IBM’s microprocessor cooling technology.That breakthrough combined others is aimed at bringing down the cost of photovoltaics for producing solar energy.
Saudi Arabia plans on build a plant using the new technology in the city of Al Khafji, which has a population of 100,000. The plant has a capacity of 30,000 cubic meters of water per day. In a second phase, the kingdom plans on building plants with 10 times as much capacity, capable of serving a city of 1 million people. The ultimate goal is to produce all of the country’s drinking water using solar energy.
Researchers from IBM and KACST have been working closely together at the Almaden lab and in Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom has has the longest-running solar-energy generation plant in the world–built 30 years ago in collaboration with the US Department of Energy. Al Saud says he’s surprised at how quickly the scientists were able to produce results. For IBM’s Narayan, a key lesson was how important it is to have scientists working side by side, rather than just remotely. “Having people move back and forth is the single most important part of these big endeavors,” he says.
