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

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

Lisa Seacat DeLuca, Software Engineer, Advanced Cloud Solutions; IBM Master Inventor

By Chris Nay

FYpacW4XW
ZYVW4Vpac
FFpacD3TW
ZYVWMVT
FYTW4XC
YFpacW4XW
pacFpacV5TW

Notice a pattern in these codes? Don’t feel bad if you don’t. They’re from 1994’s “Pac Man 2: The New Adventures.” The kids playing the game in the mid-1990s knew that they unlocked hidden levels, but probably didn’t notice a pattern either. But 12 year old Lisa DeLuca did. To the point she could correctly predict, and enter the next code without playing the game.

“Figuring out these codes made me think: I want to be around this kind of thing [when I grow up],” Lisa said.

What that “thing” turned into almost 20 years later is programming and patenting at IBM. Today, Lisa is a two-time Master Inventor with more than 300 patents filed, working on next-gen cloud applications for IBM’s Advanced Cloud Solutions.

Seven years in the making

Lisa had yet to file a patent when she joined IBM’s Austin lab in 2005 to develop Java applications (this after two summer internships with the company; one in Rochester, MN and another in Raleigh, NC. The old cliché “I’ve Been Moved” even applies to students!). While some of her fellow interns tried, the whole process seemed intimidating. And at a giant company, where do you start?

Lisa’s
Patent Prowess

315 patents filed

102 patent plateaus

79 patents issued

“When I moved to Austin, a group of Extreme Blue alumni met a couple times a month to brainstorm about patents – from ideas to patent, to figuring out how to patent something. When I discovered that I just needed to fill out a three-question form to pitch an idea to IBM’s patent review board, I thought ‘I can at least do that.’ So, I submitted an idea,” Lisa said.

Her idea for “output styling in an IDE console” went over so well that the review board accepted it after her first in-person pitch. So put patent number 8,302,070 on the resume, right? Not so fast. Putting the “patented” stamp on a console that looked like a browser window, so that developers could apply some HTML-like stylings such as different colors and fonts to their code, would have to wait, and wait, and wait some more.

After the positive review in August of 2005, the board officially accepted it in July, 2006 (when #8,302,070 became officially protected). If that seemed to take a while, the US Patent and Trademark Office didn’t issue the patent until 2012! Their usual turnaround is a mere four years.

“Looking back, I was actually lucky. For the board to accept a first ever invention idea pitch is not that common. Knowing what I know now, I made a lot of mistakes in how I wrote it up.  The best way to learn, however, is to jump in head first,” Lisa said.

Patience and planning pays off 314 more times

Just like those old Pac Man codes, Lisa started to figure out how to pattern her work and interests into patents. Here are a few things she’s learned over the last few years and hundreds of patent board pitches.

• Do your homework. Find out if something else has parts of y

  Advancing the Cloud

  Lisa is on a team looking at new ways for businesses to use the cloud. Their Cloud First Factory, built on top of OpenStack, lets users develop their own solutions in the Cloud.

  Cloud meet mobile

  The team also started building mobile cloud apps for their development and test environments. The apps utilize command-line interfaces so that users can download private keys to their mobile device and manage their cloud instances.
  “We’re now working on how to visualize big data that’s stored in the cloud – that can be shown and analyzed over mobile,” Lisa said.

  our idea, or if it’s completely taken. Then, you can use these other ideas to defend your new idea and become a subject matter expert.  A good inventor does this prior art search.  A great inventor modifies their invention based on what they find to make their original idea even stronger.

• Form brainstorming groups with colleagues. A diverse perspective on a challenge can often spur new ways to solve a broader problem.

“I had gotten to know several colleagues over patent brainstorming conference calls well enough to invite them to my wedding. These were people I had not met in person – and they all came!” Lisa said.

• Don’t take it personally. Disconnect yourself from your idea when you’re defending it. Review boards are looking for ideas that may be valuable to the company; a rejection is not an indictment on you.

• Join the experts. Sit in on your company’s patent review board meetings as an evaluator. Get to know what they are looking for in patent write ups and defense pitches. Doing this will help you better understand the process.

• Be patient, but don’t wait. Be patient with individual filings, but try to have as many ideas in the different phases of review so you don’t watch the clock.

Lisa, now based on the East Coast, is the first woman to reach IBM’s 100^th patent plateau – a point system that rewards patent filings and issuances. And at 30 years old, maybe the youngest. “I made reaching the 100^th plateau a goal. But when it happened and the balloons and confetti didn’t fall from the ceiling, I thought ‘well, I’ll just keep thinking of new patent ideas,’ but without a specific number of filings or plateaus in mind.”

“Ok, it would be nice to reach 200.”

Technorati Tags: cloudcomputing, invention, mobile, OpenStack Foundation, patents

Andy Stanford-Clark, IBM Master Inventor

Andy Stanford-Clark, an IBM Master Inventor who lives in the United Kingdom, jokes that his goal was “world domination” in 1999 when he and Arlen Nipper of Eurotech invented a protocol aimed at greatly improving machine-to-machine communications. This was at the time when another British technology pioneer, Kevin Ashton, coined the term “Internet of Things” to describe how the Internet could be connected to the physical world via a vast network of sensors. Stanford-Clark believed that his protocol, now called MQ Telemetry Transport, or MQTT for short, would enable organizations to quickly and affordably gather, integrate and make use of all of that sensor data. It would be an essential underlying technology for the Internet of Things.

Fast forward to today. OASIS, one of the leading technology standards bodies governing the evolution of the Internet, has just announced that it will accept MQTT as an industry standard protocol. This move paves the way for the technology to be used widely for applications ranging from power distribution and public safety to retailing, smart phones and auto communication systems. MQTT now has the potential to have the same kind of impact on the world as HTTP, which is a key part of every Internet address for computers and Web sites. Proponents of the Internet of Things believe there could be up to 50 billion sensors hooked up by the year 2020–turning the promise of Big Data into a reality. “The vision of billions and trillions of connected devices can now come true,” says Stanford-Clark. “The implications are huge. We can help solve the energy crisis and improve agriculture, transportation and healthcare. It will make getting things done easier, cheaper and more efficient.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

For IBM, the OASIS development is significant because MQTT is an essential ingredient in the company’s Smarter Planet vision. IBM believes that with the combination of instrumentation (sensors), interconnectivity (networks) and intelligence (analytics), it’s possible for people to understand how the world works much better and to make better decisions–which will improve people’s lives, the performance of governments and businesses and the sustainability of human life on Earth. MQTT is a key enabler of interconnectivity. It makes it possible, potentially, for every device on the network to communicate and share information with every other device.

Until now, companies that provide the technology for sensor networks have either used HTTP, which is quuite inefficient, or they use proprietary technology, which makes it difficult for data from different sources of data to be integrated with one another. MQTT makes it possible to move data around super-efficiently, which is essential when you have millions or billions of sensors hooked up to the network. It also side-steps the Tower of Babel problem caused by the use of proprietary technologies.

For Stanford-Clark, the OASIS announcement is a big step in a long journey. He and Nipper invented MQTT to help oil and gas distribution companies monitor their pipelines effectively and efficiently. But, quickly, they saw that it could do much more. Stanford-Clark led an internal effort to get the protocol included in a range of IBM products. His mission was helped greatly when the company adopted the Smarter Planet strategy in 2008. But it wasn’t until 2009 that MQTT started to be seen by people outside IBM as a transformational technology. After Stanford-Clark spoke about it at an open source software conference in the UK, Roger Light, a researcher at Nottingham University who attended the conference, went home and wrote a piece of open source software, called Mosquitto, that made it easier for organizations and individuals to use MQTT on a wide variety of applications. Two years later, the Eclipse Foundation, an open source software organization, adopted MQTT as a core element in its framework for machine-to-machine applications. Now comes the OASIS endorsement.

Innovative companies are already finding important uses for the protocol. Facebook, for instance, uses it as the basis for its Facebook Messenger application, making it possible for people to reliably send instant messages and conduct online chats with one friend or several. The protocol is especially useful when people are communicating via smart phones–where connectivity can be an issue.

Stanford-Clark has found many personal uses for his MQTT baby as well. Shortly after inventing the protocol, he began using it in his home automation projects. He lives in a rambling stone house built in 1561 on Britain’s Isle of Wight, and he uses homebrewed technology to manage his family’s energy use–everything from turning lights off and on to having his bathroom heater come on automatically at just the right time. His latest project using MQTT is automating the radiator valves so he doesn’t overheat some rooms and underheat others. He uses heat sensors in the rooms to send feedback to a control system, which opens and closes radiator values just the right amount for each room.

He also uses MQTT  in a system he invented for managing his journey to work at IBM’s Hursley software lab, on the mainland. Each trip involves a car, a ferry, a bus and a train. He tracks the schedules and on-time performance of the public transport links in his journey and adjusts his departure accordingly.

Looking back, Stanford-Clark is immensely proud at how far MQTT has come, and excited at its potential. “It seemed like a crazy goal at the time, but now it’s snowballing,” he says. “I feel now that I’ve made a real difference in the world.”

Technorati Tags: Big Data, IBM, internet of things

Matthias Kaiserswerth, Director, IBM Research, Zurich

By Matthias Kaiserswerth

Steve Jobs famously lured John Sculley from a soda pop company to Apple in 1983 by saying, “Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?” In today’s business environment, the comparable challenge to a young engineer or computer scientist would be: “Do you want to create the next mobile app that makes your friends look like zombies or do you want to help transform the world of computing?”

That, in fact, is the challenge that we’re issuing today. IBM and ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, have assembled what some call a dream team of scientists to create a next-generation computing system capable of handling the ultimate big data challenge. Our project, called DOME, is a system for handling the deluge of data that will be created by the Square Kilometre Array, a radio telescope made up of more than half a million individual antennas that are to be scattered across southern Africa and Australia. When the SKA is completed in 2024, it is expected to process 14 exabytes of raw data per day. The data collected by the SKA in a single day would take nearly two million years to play back on an iPod.

We’re in the process of recruiting more than a half-dozen PhD.-level students to help staff the project–and we’re staging a virtual job fair to engage prospective employees. If you’re interested and qualified, visit the job fair Web site on March 26 at 5 p.m. Central European Time (Noon US Eastern Time). Only top students with huge ambitions should apply.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What’s so special about DOME and SKA? Because the telescope is to be made from so many individual antennas, the antennas are to be so widely scattered, and such a large volume of data is being gathered, a novel computing system must be developed to manage the process of gathering, storing and analyzing data from end to end. The system must have computing power that is many times that of today’s fastest computers. It must take up much less space in data centers and use much less electrical power than today’s most efficient systems. And the system will have to learn and adapt as it interacts with data.

IBM has a vision of the future of computing that we call the era of cognitive systems. We believe that this new era of computing will be as distinct from the current era, that of programmable computers, as this one was from the one that preceded it, the tabulating era. Increasingly, because of the emergence of big data, we will need computers that can learn and adapt–thinking machines rather than machines that wait passively for human commands. The SKA is not only the ultimate big data challenge; it also lights the path towards cognitive computing. Most of the fundamental scientific and engineering advances that will be required to fulfill the promise of cognitive computing will also be required to handle the huge demands posed by the SKA. Ultimately, these advances will transform business, government and our personal lives, helping us make better decisions, which, in turn, will make the world work better.

Breakthroughs targeted by the DOME team range data storage and networking to supercomputing and data analytics. We’re even creating a computer program that will help the designers choose the optimal technologies and architectures for DOME. Think of it as an intelligent design system.

There are plenty of projects for bright young computer scientists to work on these days, but it is hard to imagine other ones with the potential of rewriting the rules of computing, like DOME does. So, if you want to change the world, please look at what we’re doing.

——

For more information about the SKA and DOME, read this white paper.

Technorati Tags: ASTRON, DOME, IBM, SKA, Square Kilometre Array

Mahmoud Naghshineh, Vice President, Services Research, IBM Research

By Mahmoud Naghshineh

I recently helped my 22-year-old son, who is vegan, pick out a vegetable juicer. He told me a bit about what he was looking for, including the fact that the machine should ingest leafy greens like kale effectively and it should not run so hot that it would diminish the nutritional value of raw vegetables. I searched crowd-sourcing product review Web sites and came back with a recommendation. His reaction: “That’s a good one. Everybody’s talking about it.”

He had reached the same conclusion that I had via my research by soaking up information and opinions from his own social network.

This experience brings home to me one of the salient truths in this age of the digital consumer: Social networks provide tremendous value not just for the consumer but for the creators of products and services who are determined to engage with people as individuals—rather than by catering to traditional market segments. With the right tools, a company can understand my son’s tastes nearly as well as he does.

These new customer-interpreting capabilities are roiling the world of business—challenging any company that deals with consumers, including retailers, packaged goods companies, insurers, banks, travel companies and on and on. At IBM, we’re creating an IBM Customer Experience Lab to bring together researchers, new technologies and consultants with industry-specific expertise to work with clients to develop solutions that have the potential to transform not just individual companies but entire industries.

The age of the digital consumer is emerging because of a confluence of technology trends. Smartphones combined with cloud services and social networks make it easy for people to learn about products and services that appeal to them, evaluate their choices based on features and prices and recommendations of friends, and, as soon as they’re ready, complete a purchase. Because so much information is available to people at their fingertips, consumers rule. Companies that want their business must bend over backwards to please them.

But the same technologies that give customers so much power also make it easier for sellers of products and services to reach and cater to them. They can use mobile, cloud and social technologies to engage with customers in ways that benefit buyers and sellers alike. Yet the essential technology tool for companies in the age of the digital consumer is data analytics. By gathering and analyzing huge amounts of information about individuals—everything from social networking information to transaction and customer service records—companies can understand their needs better and communicate better with them.

At IBM Research, we’re developing a futuristic technology concept we call the Virtual Closet. We envision a set of technologies, some of them already under development, that will make it possible for companies to target individual customers with pinpoint accuracy. Virtual Closet will gather information about your interests and tastes from a wide variety of sources. With your permission, the technology will pluck data concerning in-store and online purchases; your posts on blogs, Facebook and Twitter; and the pictures and videos you publish on Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube. The more people share with trusted companies, the more complete a picture those companies can assemble of their interests—using machine learning techniques to constantly refine their personal taste profiles. Then, using those insights, companies can offer individuals products and experiences that are nearly guaranteed to please them.

In another IBM Research project, we have developed technology that makes it possible to get a fairly accurate picture of an individual’s personality using as few as 200 Twitter tweets. Analyzing how people express themselves, we’re able to identify specific personality traits, such as openness to experience and conscientiousness, and create profiles that enable companies to predict the most effective approaches for marketing to individuals.

In a third project, our scientists have created software that observes the Web sites and cloud services that consumers use habitually, and infers from those choices the communications media and methods that individuals will find most appealing. Using these tools, companies will be able to truly speak the customer’s language.

It’s fun to think about the changes that these new technologies will bring. In the future, I can imagine that my kids will no longer bother to outsource their shopping research to me.  In the age of the digital customer, many of the things they want or need will “find” them—rather than the other way around.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Mahmoud Naghshineh

Yet for Africa to fulfill it’s potential and emerge among the world’s economic tigers, social and business leaders agree that much more innovation must happen there. The continent’s cities, universities, entrepreneurs and commercial R&D organizations can become engines of innovation producing new products and services that are tailored for the African experience.  And,  in order to make this transition, African institutions and businesses–plus multinational corporations –must work together to create innovation ecosystems that foster this kind of creativity.

At IBM’s Smarter Planet Leadership Forum today in Nairobi, Kenya, CEO Ginni Rometty said IBM hopes to work collaboratively with the people and institutions in Africa: “We want to be seen as a citizen of the countries, essential to the government, companies and people.”  Rometty said IBM’s decision to locate an IBM Research laboratory on the continent–beginning with an office in Nairobi–sends the strong signal about the company’s commitment to Africa.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The message is clear: Rometty wants IBM to play an active role in building innovation ecosystems in Africa.

California’s Silicon Valley is the prototype innovation ecosystem. It benefitted from the combination of good universities, entrepreneurial companies, government incentives and robust supplies of venture capital. Many of other places have tried to copy Silicon Valley’s formula—some quite successfully, among them Bangalore, India, and Singapore.

Kenya is among the countries in Africa that have the potential of creating a vibrant innovation ecosystem. Students and entrepreneurs dream of tapping science and technology to solve social and business problems. Universities aim to expand their research and teaching programs in science, math and technology. Business leaders are creating startup incubators to encourage entrepreneurship—places like iHub, FabLab Nairobi and NaiLab

The government is playing a vital role, too, by making bold moves aimed at establishing Kenya as an information technology hub for East Africa. The government recently broke ground for Konzo Techno City, a new municipality being built from scratch south of Nairobi to bring research universities, corporations and government agencies together to support job creation, research collaboration and economic development. Another key move was the launch by the Kenya ICT Board of an incubation program for high-tech startups—including seed capital funding. “If we can build the skills and innovate, it will change the entire continent,” said Bitange Ndemo, permanent secretary of Kenya’s ministry of information and science.

But there’s an important role for foreign companies and academic institutions to play, as well—as partners with African institutions in making progress. IBM Research’s new research laboratory in Nairobi is the first basic scientific research lab to be established in Africa by a foreign multinational firm. We have allied with Catholic University of Eastern Africa to locate the lab on its Nairobi campus.The goal of the lab is to produce innovations within Africa and also bring in great ideas from IBM’s other 11 research labs around the world. “We want to create technology solutions optimized for Africa that can be exported to the rest of the developing world,” John Kelly, senior vice president and director of IBM Research said earlier this week.

While the first lab office is in Nairobi, IBM plans on expanding elsewhere around the continent and also performing collaborative research with a number of universities. Already, the company is engaging with the University of Nairobi and Strathmore University in collaborative programs where scientists from IBM will work with university faculty members on projects of mutual interest.

In another sign that Kenya is beginning to offer an attractive academic environment, Columbia University, one of the leading academic institutions in the United States, has set up Columbia Global Centre/Africa as a venue for research aimed at helping African nations reach their UN Millennium Development Goals.

We believe that foreign firms and institutions won’t succeed if they try to build islands of expertise. They must work with local universities on collaborative research and to improve the quality of degree programs. Sure, if this happens it will mean that IBM Research will have to compete vigorously to recruit and retain the most skilled and ambitious young people. But so be it. “This is a long term investment,” said Kelly. “We’re here to help build the skills and, hopefully, we’ll get our fair share of the most talented graduates.”

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Technorati Tags: africa, Ginni Rometty, IBM Research

Colin Parris, GM IBM Power Systems

By Colin Parris

Westside Produce, a harvester and distributor of fresh melons in California’s Central Valley, probably isn’t the kind of company that comes to mind when you think about cutting-edge computing technologies. Yet this outfit, with just a few hundred employees, uses sophisticated technology to predict how many melons will be ready for harvest on any given day and to trace the movement of its produce—down to the case level—all the way from the field to grocery shelves.

Westside Produce is emblematic of a major shift that’s coming—a new era of computing that will deliver the power of big data analytics to organizations of all sizes and to all sorts of people within them.

You remember Watson, the IBM computer that beat two former grand-champions at the TV quiz show Jeopardy. That kind of data-crunching power is coming to the masses.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The combination of massive amounts of information and the tools to make sense of it has huge implications for businesses and society. Today, computers are everywhere—thanks, in large part, to the revolution in communications that has brought us all manner of smart phones and digital tablets. Now, data analytics is on its way to becoming pervasive, as well.

Big Data isn’t the sole province of big companies. Organizations of all sizes are challenged to make sense of huge amounts of data from mobile devices, video cameras, sensors and social networks. A medium-sized fashion retailer in South Africa needs access to big data insights just as much as a giant rail freight hauler based in the United States.

What will make pervasive analytics possible? Two things: a better way of designing computers combined with a new way of delivering insights to people wherever they may be.

First, a change is coming in the way engineers think about computer design. It’s called data-centric computing. Up until now, most computers have been engineered with the idea that the microprocessor is at the center of things. All of the data is shipped to a central processing unit. But in the world of big data, moving oceans of data around costs a lot of money and burns up a lot of energy. We think it will be better, in many situations, to do some of the data processing closer to where the information is stored.

At the same time, the way we use computer memory will change. Memory chips, where data is cached temporarily during the computation process, should be more tightly integrated with the processors. In that way, the data won’t have to be moved as much and there won’t be much delay in fetching information that’s needed quickly.

Watson, which is a jazzed-up version of one of IBM’s commercial server models, provides a peek at how the data-centric computers of the future will be designed. On Jeopardy, the machine was able to search a vast database containing millions of pages of information and come up with answers to questions in about three seconds. That’s partly because large-capacity memory chips were positioned right next to the processors within the individual server computers that made up the Watson system.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Today, most computers are not engineered to be data centric. But as the big data phenomenon takes root, we believe this will become the standard approach to computer design. When that happens, data-centric computing will become more affordable to businesses of all sizes. (In fact, in a step along the path, IBM today launched a new generation of servers that makes high-performance analytics more affordable for small companies like Westside Produce.)

The second crucial element for making data analytics pervasive is the ability to deliver information and insights wherever people need it. We believe that the method of choice for doing so will be cloud computing—the practice of using a network of remote servers on the Internet to store, manage and process data, rather than using a nearby server. The benefits of cloud computing are being recognized by more organizations every day because it makes data analytics and other capabilities easy to buy and use.

One last thing: making things easy to use will be critical in the new era of computing. Today, many computers are too difficult to set up and to use. For data analytics to reach the masses, engineers will have rethink their assumptions and begin designing for people who are not computer professionals or experts at analytics.

There’s much to be done by the computer industry, but I’m confident that before too long, analytics will be at everybody’s fingertips. Individuals and organizations will have the insights they need, when they need them. What’s happening is profoundly important. We’re on a journey from the information age to the insight age.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, mobile

Samuel Blum, James Wynne and Rangaswamy Srinivasan

Today, interdisciplinary collaboration is one of the pillars of IBM’s  approach to advancing science and technology. And, in the coming years, as scientific fields collide with increasing frequency, the ability of scientists to build bridges between their domains will likely be one of the core competencies for research organizations–whether corporate, governmental or academic.

The three IBM Research scientists showed how it’s done. For their efforts, James Wynne, the physicist; Rangaswamy Srinivasan, the chemist; and Samuel Blum, the materials scientist, will be honored at the White House today when President Obama presents the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. (Unfortunately, Blum died a few weeks ago. Srinivasan is no longer at IBM.)  This is just the most recent of many honors the three men have received over the years, but for Wynne the greatest satisfaction lies closer to home. “The best thing for me is that I invented something that corrected my own son’s eyesight,” he says.

The three men weren’t even thinking about eye surgery when they they began the work that led to their invention. They were simply looking for new things made possible by lasers. Scientists elsewhere had developed a new device, the excimer laser, which IBM Research had just acquired. Srinivasan and a co-worker discovered they could etch plastics (i.e. polymers) with this laser. Polymers share certain chemical features with skin and other human and animal tissue. Srinivasan and Wynn speculated about using the device on human tissue where something medical and surgical could be done with it. Wynne was aware that when we get  paper cuts on our fingers–thin and precise incisions–they would  heal without forming scar tissue. Perhaps they could use a laser in the same way, making a precise cut without causing collateral damage. “It was a wild guess, but it worked,” he says.

Their wild idea became a reality a few weeks later. While they felt comfortable trying out lasers on their hair and fingernails, none of them could muster the courage to zap their own skin. The breakthrough came when Srinivasan brought the carcass of his family’s Thanksgiving turkey into the lab on November 27, 1981. There, he etched precise patterns in the cartilage.

After the three IBMers refined their techniques and applied for a patent a New York opthamologist, Stephen Trokel, learned of their work and realized how important the technology could be for eye surgery. The cornea could be reshaped with a laser–improving vision for countless people with nearsightedness, farsightedness and astigmatism. In the summer of 1983, Trokel did exploratory research on the idea with Srinivasan and IBMer Bodil Braren, and, late in 1983, they published a paper on the procedure in a major ophthalmology journal. This paper awakened the ophthalmology community to the potential of their new approach to laser refractive surgery. After  many years of further research and clinical trials, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a commercial laser refractive surgery system in 1995. Since then, more than 25 million people worldwide  have benefited from LASIK and PRK, many of them achieving “eagle-eye” vision–better than 20/20 vision acuity.

Wynne has gone on to play a number of roles at IBM Research. Today, his “day job” includes running an outreach program for getting school kids interested in science and math. But, even though he’s almost 70 years old, he believes he has one more major invention in him. His goal is to develop a concept for using lasers to remove necrotic skin lesions, such as burn eschar, without harming viable skin adjacent and underneath. He calls the technology a “smart scalpel.” He’s looking for a medical organization to collaborate with him on the project–another example of where cross-disciplinary research could lead to a major breakthrough that could help millions of people. “That’s my passion,” Wynne says, “to prove that lasers could produce another paradigm shift in medicine.”

Technorati Tags: IBM, LASIK, National Medal of Technology and Innovation