Lori Steele, General Manager, IBM Global Business Process Services

By Lori Steele 

This week, C-suite attendees representing all aspects of technology-fueled commerce will be convening at the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Nashville. Among the participants will be L’Oréal USA, with whom IBM is working on a three-year project for procurement services supported by an advanced cloud analytics solution to help transform the way L’Oréal USA buys from its large network of North American suppliers.

Over the years, L’Oréal USA has rapidly grown through both acquisitions and organically through its existing brands. With the new market advancement, the company’s ecosystem of suppliers and vendors has grown exponentially. In order to continue to realize more savings from procurement, L’Oréal USA needed its procurement workforce compliant with its spending processes to attain the best buying advantage.

L’Oréal is the first client to purchase IBM global procurement business process and technology services that include a new compliance analytics tool from IBM Research, integrated with strong spending analytics capabilities from the IBM SmartCloud procurement management software. The new smarter commerce solutions will enable L’Oréal USA to bring beauty products to consumers more quickly and efficiently.

The payoff to sourcing critical business processes like procurement is innovation. According to the new IBM Center for Applied Insights study, “Why partnering strategies matter,” which involves more than 1,300 business and IT sourcing decision makers worldwide, organizations like L’Oréal USA that source broadly to drive innovation, are outperforming on a host of financial measures, including revenue (2x) and gross profit (5x) growth.

In other words, the formula for success is based on metrics that are tied to business outcomes, transformational scope and integrated governance.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, Big Data analytics, IBM SmartCloud, IBM Smarter Commerce, IBM Smarter Commerce Summit, IBM Smarter Planet, IBM Smarter Supply Chain, innovation, supply chain

Steve Hamm, IBM Writer

By Steve Hamm

Earlier this month, IBM opened the Nairobi IBM Innovation Center, the 41^st center of its kind worldwide and the first in East Africa. This Innovation Center is a prime example of how IBM is helping to accelerate growth in Africa from the ground up with an ecosystem of highly skilled partners. IBM is working to support the growing network of entrepreneurs, academics, developers, and students by providing technology, business resources and a hub where they can come together to work with technology and business experts from around the world

But the opening of the NairobiIBMInnovationCenter is just the beginning of IBM’s work in the emerging ecosystem of tech and business in Africa.

To keep the conversation going and hear from expert voices, we will be hosting a Smarter Friday Facebook Chat this Friday, May 17^th, from noon to 5 p.m. East Africa Time (4 a.m. – noon Eastern Standard Time).

The session, focused on East Africa’s growing technology industry and ecosystem, will be hosted by me and Julian Kyula, CEO of Nairobi-based mobile startup MoDe and IBM’s Global Entrepreneur of the Year.

We would love your perspective on emerging technology markets in East Africa, and IBM welcomes your participation in the chat at any point throughout the day. Here is how you can participate:

1. Login to Facebook.

2. “Like” the People for a Smarter Planet Facebook page.

3. Check out the page this Friday, May 17th, during the hours mentioned above, and respond to the questions posed by our chat hosts! Respond and discuss by writing in the comments section of their posts.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, Big Data analytics, IBM Research, IBM Research Africa, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, Nairobi

Takreem El-Tohamy, GM, IBM Middle East and Africa

By Takreem El-Tohamy

There’s a wonderful word in Swahili that I think expresses one of the imperatives for the future of Africa. The word is “harambee.” It means pulling together, collaborating and supporting each other. I believe that one of the key factors in the ability of African countries to create sustainable and equitable economic growth will be the emergence of innovation ecosystems. Harambee perfectly captures an essential element of such ecosystems—the ability of institutions and individuals to pull together and build a mutually supportive environment.

Innovation ecosystems are complex organisms that are difficult to create yet tremendously powerful when they work. Think Silicon Valley. They require a melding of all of the capabilities of governments, businesses, financiers, universities, and individuals. Together, these organizations and individuals provide the web of support that makes it easier for startups to launch and grow quickly, and for established companies to innovate more aggressively. With that kind of support, African entrepreneurs and businesses will find it easier to produce new products and services, or even create whole new industries. You can think of an innovation ecosystem as a collective intelligence—harnessed for the good of society.

IBM is committed to helping Africa build successful innovation ecosystems. The latest sign of this willingness is our new IBM Innovation Center in Nairobi, Kenya. It’s a place where people from established companies, universities and startups can tap IBM technology and expertise to help them create solutions to the country’s business and societal challenges. We’re dedicated to helping Kenya fulfill its Vision 2030, which provides a strategy aimed at helping large numbers of Kenyans emerge into the middle class. Here’s a video about the center..

Click here to view the embedded video.

Our company has been doing business in Africa since 1921, when we helped out with the South African census. Today, we are expanding rapidly. We have offices in more than 20 African countries, including South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Morocco and my native Egypt. The company has helped deliver everything from online banking and dependable mobile phone services to technologies for improving city services and government transparency.

In 2012, IBM established its first research laboratory in Africa—in Nairobi. It’s one of only one dozen such labs worldwide. Here’s a video about the impact we believe the Nairobi lab will have across Africa.

Click here to view the embedded video.

My IBM colleagues and I understand that expanding in Africa comes with a unique set of challenges. Our company must aid in building the capacities of Africa’s people and institutions—including knowledge, technology infrastructure, business sophistication and governance. These are the underpinnings of innovation ecosystems.

What’s the key role for IBM in Africa? To help feed the momentum. As a strategic partner with governments, universities, established businesses and startups, IBM can provide a wealth of technology know-how and problem-solving expertise that helps kick start initiatives and accelerate the speed of change.

Africa is coming into its own. The spirit of harambee is helping to drive progress. And IBM is dedicated to helping African countries, companies and individuals achieve their aspirations.

——————-

Here’s an IBM Blue Paper about what it takes to build innovation ecosystems in Africa.

Technorati Tags: africa, IBM

James Kobielus, Senior Program Director, Big Data Evangelist, IBM

By James Kobielus

Big Data is a bit like our solar system. It’s a brilliant system of information and analysis that emerges from the inchoate gas, dust, rocks and crystals known as “data.” Cloud computing is the galaxy wherein the stars, rocks, and particles exist and interact.

To play this analogy out, data scientists would be the astronomers. They’re the ones who explore the spinning, interconnected, system, much of which consists of scattered matter that we lump together under the term “unstructured.”

But what exactly is a data scientist? Simply put, the data scientist is among the most important developer in Big Data. The discipline includes statistical analysts, data miners, predictive modelers, computational linguists, and other professionals whose job is to find deep insights in large, complex data sets. You can’t unlock the full value of Big Data in your business if you don’t bring together your best and brightest data scientists and give them the tools they need to do their job with maximum productivity.

While you don’t need a Ph.D. in statistics to be a data scientist, you do need curiosity, intellectual agility, statistical fluency, research stamina, scientific rigor and a skeptical nature. You must also be articulate, because no one will accept the validity of the patterns you surface if you can’t explain clearly how you built your model, what variables and data you used, or what the results truly mean in the context either of some business problem or scientific endeavor.

Though some in the industry are concerned about a shortage of business-oriented data scientists, research shows the opposite. Smart people are flocking to the data-scientist profession in greater numbers to advance their careers and to be leaders in solving complex global issues. And academia is responding with new coursework and programs designed to train and educate the next generation of technorati.

For example, IBM’s data scientists are using Big Data analytics to help manage precious water resources in South Africa, Florida, Indiana, and many more places. Eoin Lane is a Smarter Water architect who’s working on finding other ways that data and technology can solve water problems around the world.

Another IBM scientist, Michael Haydock, Chief Scientist, IBM Global Business Services, is helping retail brands forecast sales trends up to 4 times more accurately using 22 years of historical data. IBM researchers at the IBM Customer Experience Lab have launched a prototype technology called the Virtual Closet, which uses data to customize recommendations for customers based on items they’ve recently purchased or shown interest in.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, Big Data analytics, cloud computing, data scientists, IBM Smarter Planet, research, smarter analytics, Smarter Cloud

Steve Hamm, IBM Writer

By Steve Hamm

When Brenda Dietrich joined IBM with a newly-minted PhD in operations research 30 years ago, she ran into a buzz saw of ignorance about the role that math could play in business. She offered her  expertise to an IBM manufacturing group in Poughkeepsie, New York, but was rebuffed. The only way they could use her math skills, they told her mockingly, was in helping to balance their checkbooks. “We’ve come a long way in the recognition of the value of math and analytics,” says Dietrich, CTO of IBM’s Business Analytics division.

Today, math and data analytics are seen as essential elements for businesses and other organizations when it comes to understanding how the world works, predicting the future and making better decisions. In this world of Big Data, the Internet of Things and social networks, organizations use math to help improve everything from operations and finances to their understanding of customers, employees and the interactions of physical and social systems. As data about all manner of things becomes more readily available and has computers become ever more powerful, we are at last able to deal with complexity and uncertainty, and, as IBM Watson’s victory on the TV quiz show Jeopardy showed, we can create machines that think.

With all of this progress in mind, IBM Research on May 1 threw a party celebrating the 50th anniversary of its math department–which is now called Business Analytics and Mathematics Sciences. Here’s a video with insights from attendees about the past, present and future of math.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Rather than attempt to give a full report of what was said during panel discussions featuring past and current IBM math scientists, I’m going to bullet a series of comments and anecdotes that made me think:

Ralph Gomory, the second leader of the math department and later director of IBM Research: What we’re living through today is on the scale of the Industrial Revolution–only things are happening much faster. But, as with that earlier revolution, it’s still difficult to predict the future. “I won’t predict anything because the future of science and technology is totally unpredictable and utterly transforming.”

Sam Winograd, who led the math department in 1994, when IBM had its near-death experience: The company’s turnaround CEO, Lou Gerstner, visited IBM Research a couple of days after he started on the job. Walking the hallways,  he came upon a scientist, David Johnson, who had an IBM customer visiting him in his office. Gerstner stopped and talked to the two men. Later, in a meeting with IBM Research managers, Gerstner told him that this was the first time he had met one of IBM’s customers–and he was impressed that it was in the lab. (Many people expected Gerstner to slash the research workforce, but, instead, he recognized research as the crown jewel of the company and built it up.)

Richard Toupin, a former math department head: “One of my favorite mathematicians, Henry Poincare, said mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things. It’s a very efficient definition.”

Alan Hoffman, another former math department leader: Most people have no idea how difficult it is for a mathematician to prove theorems. “You really don’t know what it’s like until you have done it. You isolate yourself mentally and beat yourself up. Other people don’t understand it or appreciate it.”

Bill Pulleyblank, a former math department director who is now a lecturer at the US Military Academy at West Point: In his early days in IBM Research, then-research director Jim McGroddy used to bring in executives from other industrial research laboratories. One of them, from Xerox PARC in Silicon Valley, said, “Strategy is who you hire and tactics is how they get the job done. So I always focused on hiring the very brightest people. We had to be flexible about what we pursued because things are always changing.”

Finally, a warning from Brenda Dietrich: “One of the downsides of making math and analytics so easily consumable is that people can also abuse them. You can have really bad results that are made to look really pretty on the screen. Some people slap the name ‘analytics’ on it and declare victory.”

So math is out of the societal dungeon. It’s recognized as being relevant like never before. A new generation of university students is studying math together with business and computer science with the goal of becoming  data scientists. Perhaps the profession will emerge as one of the hot careers of our era, and the next generation of math grads won’t have to face the kind of derision that Dietrich did when she introduced data analytics to one corner of the world of business.

—-

For an excellent introduction to the increasing role of math in business and society, check out Steve Baker’s book and blog, The Numerati.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, IBM, Math

Andreas Heinrich, Team Leader, IBM Research, Almaden

By Andreas Heinrich

It wasn’t my idea to make the world’s smallest movie, but I’m really glad we did. I hope that the two-minute video animation, A Boy and his Atom, which was made by painstakingly moving individual atoms on a microscopic surface to create simple images of a boy and his world, will inspire young people everywhere to study science and to seek careers in science and technology. Working with artists and animators, my team at the Almaden lab put 10,000 atoms in place in a 10-day work marathon.

Here’s the Atom movie, which was made public today:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s a Web site loaded with interesting background info on the movie, including how it was made. And here’s the IBM Research blog, where scientists explain how the microscope works.

We have already used our atom-moving techniques to produce scientific advances that could have far-reaching effects. Future storage systems based on atomic-scale memory, for instance, would be capable of storing massive amounts of Big Data. Being able to capture insights from such a vast pool of data sources in real time would transform many aspects of business, industry, government and society.

Here’s a video about combining technologies to build products from the atoms up.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Let me tell you a story that helps explain why I’m so passionate about this movie project. When Susanne Baumann, a research associate on my  team,  was a little girl growing up in Switzerland, she read an explanation of atoms in a science book. Susanne was shocked by what she read. She raced to her mother and demand to know how atoms could be in the air and in metal and in her. How could they all be made of the same thing? That was the beginning of her intense interest in science that ultimately led her to become a scientist.

One of the things in the book that excited Susanne was a photograph of the IBM logo made with 35 individual atoms. The image had been produced in 1989 by Don Eigler, one of the pioneers of nanotechnology, who at that time ran the atomic science program at the Almaden lab–as I do now.

Don was the first person ever to move a single atom. He did it using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), a device for visualizing and manipulating atoms which had been invented by two IBM Research scientists, Heinrich Rohrer and Gerd Binnig, in the early 1980s. The two later received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work. Don’s work was a huge breakthrough. He demonstrated that scientists would be able to create new molecules by building them from the atom up.

When that image of the IBM logo was published, it made a big splash. It garnered massive media coverage, and I like to think that it inspired many young people to study science–as it did Susanne Baumann.

So, today we have the movie, A Boy and His Atom. While our atom-moving feat might not compare in import to Don Eigler’s achievement 24 years ago, I hope the ha movie provides the same kind of inspirational impact that his IBM logo did.

I have already impressed my own kids, who are seven and 10 years old.  They know that daddy makes his living moving atoms, but when I made a printout of one of the images from the animation and took it home to them, they were wowed. They took the printout to school to show their friends. They made me promise to present the movie to their classmates when it was done.

I’m going to do a lot of presenting in the coming months, starting with an event at Disney’s Epcot Center next week. The movie and presentation will be broadcast live to classrooms all over Florida. Ultimately, we hope that the movie will be used in schools all around the world to pique students’ interest. We’re planning other activities aimed at helping the general public appreciate the incredible wonders of science.

The goal is to blow people’s minds.

I myself live in a state of perpetual mind-blownness. I grew up in Germany during the Cold War–near the border with East Germany. Back then, the world seemed to be stuck in concrete. Nothing would change. But, inspired by a brilliant physics teacher, I studied science and ultimately got a PhD. in physics and found my way to the Almaden Lab, where the possibilities seem to be endless. Every day, I work on projects that excite and amaze me. As experimental scientists, my team isn’t expected to produce results that will be transformed into products next year. We are free to go where the science takes us. The way I see things, the atoms talk to me when I see how they respond to our experiments. They tell me where to go next.

That’s the big kick for scientists: We have the freedom to explore the world and discover how it works–so, ultimately, we can make it work better. I hope you enjoy the movie and that some of you decide after seeing it to become scientists, too.

——

If you’d like to see how the STM works, view this video of Susanne explaining things:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: A Boy and His Atom, IBM, STM

Dr. Anna Topol, CTO, Energy and Utilities, IBM

IBM today christened a new generation of technology innovators, naming 66 new Distinguished Engineers from across the company. The DE rank recognizes people for their outstanding technical accomplishments, as well as their potential for breaking new ground in key areas such as cloud and mobile computing, Big Data analytics, social business, and many more.

This year’s class includes Dr. Anna Topol, IBM’s Chief Technology Officer for the Energy and Utilities sector. A native of Poland and mother of two young boys, Topol holds a doctorate in physics from the State University of New York Albany College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering and has earned nearly two dozen patents. She joined IBM in 2001. The Smarter Planet editorial team recently sat down with Topol for an inside chat with one of the company’s newest DE’s.

Smarter Planet: Where do you see the biggest potential for breakthroughs in your current area of specialization?

Anna Topol: There is a lot of innovation happening in the energy and utility sector. What has been learned from other industries such as telecommunications and retail, where the use of data analytics has had transformational benefits, is now being applied to help us be smarter about how we generate, consume and conserve energy. Right now, there is a focus on automation and the use of smart meters, devices and sensors. For energy consumers, this translates into a decrease in change-related outages through increased efficiency and reduced mean time to repairs.

SP: How can utility companies benefit from Big Data?

AT: For many utilities, maintenance is performed because it’s scheduled, not because something is defective. The savings come from a new understanding of when not to do the work in the first place. Now we have digitally based instruments, sensor networks and simulation devices, which can provide more data and insights. The analytics-driven information can help a company decide the best time to fix or replace a power transformer, for example, based on real-time information instead of an outdated maintenance schedule. Smarter utility companies are using their data to increase equipment utilization, reduce maintenance expenses and defer capital expenditures. This cost consciousness is particularly important for industries like energy and utilities which have an aging infrastructure.

Dr. Anna Topol

SP: Did you always want to be an engineer?

AT: I always liked math and physics and loved astronomy. My parents instilled a love of learning early on. My mother was a physical therapist and my father was in the Polish navy and later taught navigation and ship construction. I moved to the United States when I was 18 years old, and I studied physics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. After graduating, I worked briefly for an IT company in Boston and realized I needed to learn more. I earned my masters and doctorate at SUNY-Albany. The professors there cultivated my interest in nanoscience and in industry research. I began my IBM career at IBM Research, working on 3D integrated circuit technology, and then moved into client-facing roles.

SP: What advice would you give young women who might want to follow in your footsteps?

AT: Always ask questions. If you don’t know something, ask. Sometimes, we’re reluctant to ask because we feel embarrassed that we don’t know enough, but that’s the very time we should be asking. In college, I found professors were incredibly generous with their knowledge. Ask your professors about their research; ask if you can shadow them in the lab. Experience is a better teacher than the textbook. Finally, be persistent. Expect to fail, but learn from your failures.

SP: What do you look for when you are hiring?

AT: Two things that go in different directions. First, you have to be a good team member. The smartest and best brains never create in a vacuum. I listen closely to see how eager people are to collaborate. Second is having a vision. Sure, you can be an engineer, follow orders and do a good job. But the only thing that moves us forward is vision. Where do you want to take our company, our clients, our industry, our world? Are you a follower or are you capable of independent thinking and making a difference? I’m looking for people who want to be a force for progress.

SP: Where do you get your best ideas?

AT: I get my best ideas by talking to people who have different backgrounds than me. I like to gather information from various sources. I also like to hear from people of different ages – older and younger generations. I think it’s very important to get those different perspectives, so you are looking at a problem from many different angles, not just your own. It’s what I call diversity of thought.

SP: What does being named Distinguished Engineer mean to you?

AT: It’s very humbling. It makes me thankful for the people I have met and the help they have given me along the way. Recognition is important. It has a direct influence on staying passionate about your work.

SP: What do you enjoy doing when you’re not working?

AT: I like playing volleyball. On Sundays, I go to church and pray for a good week. On Wednesdays, I play volleyball for recreation. Sometimes, that also helps me work out frustrations by banging the ball. But mostly, time with my family, my two boys, ages 5 and 6, are the wings to my day. They are my guiding angels. They wake up in the morning and they are eager to meet the day. I love seeing how the world looks through their eyes.

SP: What music do you enjoy?

AT: I play the piano and being from Poland, Chopin of course is my favorite. I like harmony – with a good portion of discord. I listen to smooth jazz and other music, but classical is my first choice.

Technorati Tags: IBM Distinguished Engineer, IBM Research, IBM Smarter Energy, IBM Smarter Planet, Smarter Energy, smarter utilities

Dr. Gardiner Tucker, Director of Research (1963-67)

By Gardiner Tucker

I said about IBM’s research organization, when I joined the Watson lab at Columbia University in 1952, that it provided a wonderful degree of academic freedom, even though it wasn’t technically academic. That was the same spirit in which we started the Fellows program when I became director in 1963.

IBM Research had by the 1960s established itself at the forefront of a number of technical disciplines that we judged had the potential to lead to new hardware and software, as well as entire new fields of information systems. Recognizing our people for leading these breakthroughs was, at the time, through promotion to team leader or department manager.

What we needed was a way to encourage and reward individuals in a way that let them continue creative research, unencumbered by administrative duties. We also wanted to cultivate a way to encourage individual “gadflies” or “catalysts,” who could stimulate ideas in others, and help colleagues overcome bottlenecks.

This is why we decided to start the IBM Fellow program. We chose the name “fellow” by analogy with how universities recognized outstanding scholars.

Phyllis Baxendale and F.E. Firth studying the behavior of language and the organization of information from the point of view of machine manipulation.

One Research colleague who inspired me, and exemplified who a Fellow should be, was never actually named a Fellow. Phyllis Baxendale, who I knew from managing the research team in San Jose in the early 1960s, was programming a computer to do automatic abstracting, indexing and retrieval of documents. Her machine did this by extracting patterns of word usage from a set of documents, and comparing them with patterns from broader literature. This was pioneering work; an early harbinger, perhaps, of Watson?

Nathaniel Rochester is one of my favorite examples of a Fellow. Nat was already well known for designing the IBM 701 (the first general purpose, mass produced computer) and the first symbolic assembler. His CONCEPTOR project in 1955 attempted to simulate the brain’s neural network on an IBM 704 to more-efficiently detect patterns in a stream of data. Though it was not successful, we consulted John von Neumann about the architecture’s possibilities. He confirmed that it would have succeeded on a machine capable of simulating vastly more neurons than the 1,000 maximum on the 704.

Incidentally, at an annual meeting of the IBM board of advisors, I described the CONCEPTOR as part of my Research review. A shareholder reacted with “we’re in the business of business machines, not brain machines!” While the project was eventually dropped, it was this ability to think ahead of his time that earned Nat status as a Fellow in 1967.

There were outstanding individuals in many areas of Research. I picked these two because, while other industrial laboratories were also pursuing issues in device technologies and new electronics, IBM was unique in its equal emphasis on organization, programming and application methodologies – that is to say, on the revolution in information processing.

I am delighted to see that the Fellow program encompasses the entire company, and is still such an important part of IBM. When you hear the term “IBM Fellow,” think of a person who embodies a place with pioneering vision in an ever expanding field.

Note: Dr. Gardiner Tucker served as principal director of defense research and engineering in the U.S. Department of Defense, was named assistant secretary of defense in 1969, and assistant secretary general of NATO for defense support in 1973.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, CONCEPTOR, IBM 701, IBM Fellow, IBM Fellows Program, IBM Research, IBM Smarter Planet, ibmfellows, innovation

Miles Nosler, Student, Texas State University

By Miles Nosler

Over the last few years, whenever I saw an IBM Smarter Planet commercial on television I wondered what was behind things like Smarter Transportation? Smarter Cities? Smarter Commerce?

Since then I’ve come to understand what the Smarter Planet concept is about – tackling Big issues with smarter, interconnected technologies to improve the way we live and work. But, it didn’t truly sink in until I started crunching some Big Data with an IBM mainframe. Let me explain. 

If someone told me I would take the top spot among 4,600 very smart students competing in IBM’s Master the Mainframe contest, I wouldn’t have believed it. But that’s exactly what I did, and now I have in-demand technical skills on my resume that are landing me job interviews. 

Miles Nosler with IBM ‘Master the Mainframe’ Award.

I first heard about the contest in 2011 at Texas State University where I’ve been taking evening classes to complete my Computer Science degree while working full time as a software engineer.

The contest rules specified that no previous mainframe experience was necessary, so I signed up and actually did better than I anticipated, earning an honorable mention in the competition. I was immediately hooked on the raw computing power of the mainframe and its ability to crunch massive amounts of Big Data.

The contest is open to high school and college students across North America (and in dozens of countries worldwide) and is run in three parts with each designed to get progressively harder.

The first part introduces students to the mainframe and gets them comfortable accessing it remotely. The second introduces advanced commands and system setup techniques, and the third part has students applying these skills to solve a real world business problem.

When IBM announced the 2012 contest, I jumped at the chance to compete so I could add more mainframe experience to my resume. I worked hard to be one of the first 2,500 students to get a 100 percent score on part one, and advance to the second part where I was one of the first 60 contestants to get a perfect score. 

The third and final part was the toughest and most exciting. I had to apply my new skills in a real world scenario where a bank migrates Big Data to a new mainframe while keeping its doors and Web site open to customers.

What impressed me most on the final part was the mainframe’s ability to effortlessly crunch this data and get it where it needed to be inside the business. That way, the bank could offer more personalized products and services based on what customers were telling them. Aha! Smarter Banking!

It had taken me weeks to solve this challenge, and I earned the top spot among all of the competing students to get it 100 percent right.

As the first place winner, I won cool prizes including a tablet computer and an all-expense paid trip to IBM Poughkeepsie where they make mainframes.

I posted my freshly-minted resume on IBM’s System z job board and immediately caught the attention of two potential employers looking for candidates with mainframe and Big Data skills. I’ve had two successful interviews so far and expect job offers will soon follow.

The experience I gained competing in IBM’s Master the Mainframe contest provided me with marketable IT skills in a hot job market. I can even tell an employer what Smarter Banking means.

I encourage all high school and college students to participate in next year’s contest. No experience necessary. Check out the official Facebook page for updates.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, IBM Master the Mainframe, IBM Smarter Financing, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, Texas State University, Watson

Juerg von Kaenel, Senior Research Manager, IBM Research, Australia

By Juerg von Kaenel

Only with sustained investment in innovation can countries improve the most fundamental quality-of-life indicators for their citizens. For complex and vital disciplines like disaster management, this requires comprehensive collaboration across community, government, industry and academia and on a global scale. By focusing on common social goals – such as reducing and mitigating the impact of natural and man-made disasters – best practices and collective technical knowledge can be used to help improve community resilience and potentially save lives.

The newly-announced teaming of IBM, the University of Melbourne, and the National ICT Australia (NICTA) research centre, to develop and implement the Australia Disaster Management Platform (ADMP) will enable collaboration between innovators in the critical fields of disaster planning, response and recovery. The ADMP promises to remove some of the major historical obstacles to innovation in this increasingly critical field.

Today’s decision support systems typically lack interoperability or common communications standards. So when disaster strikes, each response team or recovery unit ends up acting as an isolated silo, unable to access potentially relevant data held by their counterparts. To improve speed and efficacy, innovators must first overcome these significant inhibitors to change.

The ADMP will use an OpenStack-based cloud platform to provide a “system of systems” approach, which will allow a wide spectrum of information streams to come together into a simulation and optimisation environment. It will provide predictions on outcomes to be brought together and put into the context of the decision-makers for them to garner information and take informed action during an emergency. With the deployment of the ADMP, emergency services personnel will gain access to integrated situational intelligence that applies real-time analytics to all geospatial and temporal information available from the affected area. Doing so will make for faster, evidence-based, decisions.

In the initial stages, a pilot program will use buildings and infrastructural Big Data in selected urbanMelbourneareas to develop proofs-of-concept that are focussed on delivering decision support that facilitates speedy and efficient evacuation during emergency situations.

To develop the ADMP, IBM, the Universityof Melbourneand NICTA have committed to pooling our collective and unparalleled experience in creating and deploying such a platform, bringing to bear Big Data and analytics capabilities within a highly responsive technical solution. For IBM, not only do we bring these capabilities, but we also bring world-leading experience in, among other areas, data optimisation and architectural expertise through our Smarter Cities deployments throughout the world.

By pooling technical and strategic resources, all three organisations aim to not only improve the baseline quality of disaster response and recovery, but also pave the way for future technological and practical innovations in the area. Collaboration between community, government, industry and academia often has its challenges, but it is an essential ingredient to fostering innovations that are successful in delivering what economists call “the common good” to nations as a whole.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, Big Data analytics, disaster management, disaster recovery, geospatial, IBM Smarter Planet, NICTA, OpenStack, OpenStack Foundation, real-time analytics