Joyce Phillips, CEO Global Wealth and Group Managing Director, Marketing, Innovation and Digital, ANZ Banking Group

By Joyce Phillips

It used to be that next generation technology to make humans smarter, faster and at the top of their game was the stuff of cinema and science fiction.

Here at ANZ, we are exploring a groundbreaking solution that holds this very same promise – a cognitive assistant, if you will, that can empower our regional bank advisors to better serve our two million wealth management clients.

To understand why and what we’re doing to foster this innovation, it’s important to start with the perspective of the customer.

Imagine yourself entering a regional bank branch. You’ve arranged an appointment with the branch’s financial advisor, to discuss the life you want for you and your loved ones upon your retirement, and the solutions you need to achieve it.

Two of the key questions you and your advisor need to address are: what types of insurance, retirement and banking solutions do you have now, and do they cover you in a way that will safeguard your assets and yield a secure, well-funded retirement.

The fact is, many customers don’t know the answer to that question.  

We do our best to choose the vehicles that can grow assets, protect them and prepare us for retirement. But amidst market fluctuations, changing needs, and a host of new financial solutions and strategies being brought to market every day, it’s hard for customers to gauge whether their trajectory is safe and sound – and in turn, ask the right questions of our advisors.

But what if financial advisors had access to everything they need to know about a customer’s portfolio, with a click of a button – informed by an instant, 360 degree view of what’s right and what needs to be fixed, to usher that customer into the retirement they deserve?

This is where technology comes in; but not just any technology.  

The natural resource that can fuel a smarter, faster customer experience is Big Data, or the vast amount of electronically generated and stored information – ranging from account information to market research – that can piece together that 360 degree view for the financial advisor.

ANZ is collaborating with IBM to give our advisors that ability to harness information and make smarter, faster financial recommendations – enabling a customer experience that is simple, safe and steeped in data-informed insights.

The technology that will get us there: Watson, a cognitive computing system that is tailor-made for the customer experience, based on its ability to grasp the subtle context of questions posed in human language, search through a universe of Big Data to find the exact answers its users need, and deliver fast, evidence-based recommendations that can fuel a financial advisor’s advice to clients.

And that is how we’ll empower our advisors to be smarter and faster: by leveraging a groundbreaking innovation that can think like a human, and serve as a dedicated assistant, researcher and guidepost for ANZ’s top-flight team of advisors.

Technorati Tags: ANZ, Big Data, Big Data analytics, Financial Services, ibm watson, innovation, smarter analytics, smarter banking, Watson

Manoj Saxena, General Manager, IBM Watson Solutions

By Manoj Saxena

Social and technological shifts are driving rapid change, altering ways in which individuals interact with one another, learn, and attend to their personal and business needs. These shifts offer the potential to strengthen the relationships between companies and their customers—enabling more individual and directed communication and allowing organizations to cater to individual needs. Yet, for many, today’s online customer experiences lack personalization, timeliness and trust.

But what if companies could offer their customers the kind of personalized and knowledgeable assistance when they’re online or on the phone that people have come to expect from top-flight customer service delivered in person? We believe that a new generation of cognitive systems will do just that. They will provide individuals with intelligent personal digital assistants that interact with them, answer their questions, and help them make complex purchasing decisions or solve problems they’re having with products like cell phones, computers and consumer electronics devices.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A first step in this journey happens this week, when IBM introduces the Watson Engagement Advisor. The technology underlying this service is based on IBM Watson, the computer that beat former grand-champions on the TV quiz show Jeopardy!. Our research and development staff has made Watson 75 percent smaller, 25 percent faster, and have been working hard to improve Watson’s ability to answer consumer-oriented questions.  For the first time, with the engagement advisor, we’re bringing Watson to the masses.

Consumers will be able to experience this new level of personalized service through the brands they already have relationships with—their banks and investment advisors, their phone service providers, insurance companies, favorite stores and other trusted organizations. For instance, a bank might offer Watson directly to customers on Web sites and mobile devices to help give them insights regarding retirement and various types of savings instruments like 401K accounts. An individual may begin a dialogue with Watson on their smartphone, but continue later from where they left off on their PC or tablet. Alternatively, a telecommunications firm could equip their call center agents with Watson to assist customers in troubleshooting a problem with a product, service, or billing issue.

(Check out images of the IBM Watson Client Engagement Advisor)

These amazing new capabilities are the next steps on the journey to the era of cognitive systems. We at IBM foresee a dramatic improvement coming in the way people interact with organizations and the role computers will play. The cognitive systems of the future will provide deep reservoirs of knowledge and sharp insights combined with an understanding of needs of the individuals they’re serving. The result will be transformational—helping people and organizations interact, learn, grow and make better decisions.

Since shortly after Watson’s debut on Jeopardy! two years ago, IBM has been improving the technology and finding new uses for it. Our early efforts focused on particular fields, such as health care, where cognitive capabilities can help physicians and patients make more personalized decisions about treatment and care. Now, with the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, we’re widening the scope that the technology addresses. It’s gratifying and exciting to see how rapidly this technology is developing. And, as far as I’m concerned, this is just the start. This next era of computing is going to touch all of our lives in positive ways we can’t yet imagine.

Technorati Tags: Big Data analytics, business analytics, cognitive systems, IBM Congnitive Computing, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, Jeopardy, smarter analytics

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

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

David McQueeney, Vice President, Technical Strategy and Worldwide Operations, IBM

By David McQueeney

Five years ago, IBM launched its Smarter Planet initiative, describing the era in which we currently live and operate in as the “Era of Smart,” one marked by forward-thinking leaders in business, government and society capitalizing on smarter systems to achieve economic growth, operational efficiency and sustainable development.

Since 2008, we have moved beyond the world of programmable systems to our first steps in cognitive systems – systems that exploit large data sources and can “learn.” Our Watson system may highlight this new way of operating best. For the first time, a computer has the ability to consult a broad range of human language resources, learn from historical training data, and answer surprisingly complex questions. We are forced to rethink how computers can work with humans on complex tasks, by showing the world a system that is able to respond based on what it ‘knows’ –  facts and information and training – rather than simply what words match in a simple search.

(Third in a series in support of Big Data Week.)

The Era of Smart helps to drive economic growth and today IBM brought that message to Congress in a hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Science Committee’s Research and Technology subcommittees.

As Big Data and analytics continue to touch every single industry – from energy and healthcare to transportation and banking – it’s critical that the public and private sectors work together to ensure we are leveraging these new technologies to transform society and support economic competitiveness.

Data created from the beginning of time up until 2003 is comparable to the amount of data that will be created in just two days during 2013. In fact, it is estimated that by 2015, 2 million IT jobs will be created in the U.S. to help tackle the slew of data and transform it into actionable information. As the world continues to generate more and more structured and unstructured data, the need for skilled workers who can apply analytics to Big Data will continue to grow exponentially.

At the hearing, I stressed the importance of creating a new workforce, which includes support for skills development, as well as increased research in system design and software development.

Here at IBM, we’ve witnessed firsthand the power and necessity behind this new imperative for skills development and training. The IBM Academic Initiative, a program designed to supply institutions with essential training software and hardware, has added 6,000 universities and 30,000 faculty members to its program in just the past seven years. We now have in place more than 300 academic partnerships with some of the nation’s leading institutions.

Last month, IBM announced a partnership with the City of Baton Rouge and LouisianaStateUniversity. Over the next 10 years, we will work with LSU academics to develop a physical center and curriculum that will train computer science students in the application of analytics. The result is a projected 800 new jobs created in the Baton Rouge area to supply the demand for this smarter workforce.

And just today, IBM announced a new academic partnership with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to offer a graduate degree program beginning in the 2013 Fall semester. The new Master of Science in Business Analytics program is designed to develop data application and analytic skills to the future workforce.

Yet, more can – and should – be done. IBM supports legislation that will drive an agenda around skills and research, like the Department of Energy’s High-End Computing Revitalization Act of 2004. The legislation would improve high-end computing and research, as well as strengthen government and industry partnerships. We also support the reauthorization of the Carl D. Perkins Act and the Federal Work Study Program, to help students master the Big Data and analytic skills needed to compete in the global marketplace.

A stronger and smarter workforce equipped with advanced computing skills will have the tools to seize the future. With data now at all of our fingertips, we have the ability to create a planet that is the best it can be, and together with our government partners, we can continue to build a smarter planet.

___________________________________

Other stories in this series:

• Big Data Takes Flight in Aviation, by Thomas J. Wholey
• Rensselaer’s New Analytics Degree to Help Organizations Better Tackle Big Data, by T. Ravichandran

Technorati Tags: Big Data analytics, IBM Research, IBM Smarter Planet, information technology, innovation, IT skills, research, skills, smarter analytics, U.S. House of Representatives

Terry F. Yosie, President and CEO of the World Environment Center

By Terry F. Yosie

Environmental issues are big, thorny problems. Scarcities in water, food and raw materials are too complex for any single company or non-governmental organization to solve on its own.  In order to make a difference, it’s necessary to collaborate with like-minded partners to achieve shared goals.

Collaboration is a normal feature of customer-supplier relationships, government-business partnerships and initiatives with universities and other partners. It’s also typical for organizations looking for new business models that can sustain profitability while addressing societal needs, natural resource management, product and service innovation, and differentiation of brand value, to name a few.  Collaboration can spur organizations to redefine their business purpose by utilizing society as another kind of R&D lab for innovation. 

Coca-Cola’s Global Water Strategy is a good example. Water is clearly essential to the company’s business – for its beverages and also for growing the agricultural products they need. The company instituted a global program to promote water resource sustainability. It set global strategic direction on water, established policy and requirements, and formed and managed key partnerships with organizations such as the WWF and USAID.

Another example is IBM’s work with cities in emerging economies such as Africa. It requires years of building on-the-ground relationships and capabilities while turning projects into partnerships that generate positive economic, environmental and social results. IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge – the company’s single largest philanthropic initiative — deploys teams of employees to work with cities around the world to deliver detailed recommendations addressing key urban issues identified by local elected officials and other stakeholders. A recent report, “A Vision for Smarter Growth: an IBM Smarter Cities Report on Accra, Ghana” highlights how this rapidly emerging West African city should turn to technology to transform key city systems such as transportation and energy.

Many companies are still finding their footing as they try to build global collaboration to match their global business strategies. This requires a “system-level” understanding of societal and environmental changes that can transform global economy and society. At the World Environment Center, we’re seeing more companies beginning to recognize how issues such as population growth, urbanization, food security and natural resource management may affect their business and impact return on investment.

Such decisions rarely occur in a vacuum. For example, investment decisions to upgrade power generation should take into account interconnected energy and water use in building design and maintenance. Only a “system-level” understanding of goals will enable companies to develop more innovative approaches to understanding both customer and societal needs.

For collaboration to succeed on a larger scale, we need global networks of companies, national agencies, NGOs and foundations, such as those created to eradicate malaria. Organizations can jointly develop licensing standards and transparency practices. They can work towards specific goals, performance metrics, and accountable behaviors to make a difference — from individual projects, to Big Bang transformational initiatives.

Collaboration is key to developing solutions to the mounting global challenges of current and future generations.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, Earth Day, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, Public Health, Smarter Planet, sustainability

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

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

John Kelly, Senior Vice President and Director, IBM Research

By John Kelly

A few weeks ago, I shared a dinner table in Johannesburg with Adrian Tiplady, one of the managers of Square Kilometre Array South Africa, which is managing the country’s involvement in the Square Kilometre Array astronomy project. The SKA is one of the most ambitious science efforts ever launched. The goal of the 10 countries involved is to decipher radio waves from deep space in order to solve the riddles of the universe and the nature of matter. Yet something Adrian told me totally blew my mind: he said the computing challenges posed by the SKA are just as great as those related to astronomy.

It’s gratifying when scientists from other domains come together to push computing and computer science forward. And it’s even more gratifying when organizations like Tiplady’s form partnerships with IBM to bring cutting-edge technologies to bear on the most demanding tasks ever dreamed up by humans. Today, SKA South Africa announced that it has joined IBM and ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, in a multi-year public-private partnership funded primarily by the Dutch government aimed at developing an information technology system for harvesting insights from the SKA’s data.

The SKA’s more than 500,000 antennas scattered across southern Africa and Australia will produce a torrent of data that’s equivalent to 10 times the daily global Internet traffic. Yet today’s state-of-the-art computer technologies simply aren’t up to the task of gathering, processing and making sense of so much information in real time. So I believe that SKA represents the ultimate big data challenge, and that the technology we develop for handing its data will provide a foundation for the next era of computing, which we at IBM call the era of cognitive systems.

Click here to view the embedded video.

IBM has placed multiple bets on the SKA. We’re working with ASTRON and South Africa on the DOME project, the effort we launched with ASTRON last year to develop technologies that we believe will be crucial to managing the SKA’s data. ASTRON is already using an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer to process the data produced by LOFAR, a precursor to the SKA radio telescope. Meanwhile, in Australia and New Zealand, IBM has provided supercomputers for use by university researchers who are analyzing data from the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope in the Australian outback—another precursor to the SKA. Working with those scientists, a team of IBM software programmers has created a prototype system for collecting and searching the large amounts of data collected by the SKA.

Bradley Frank, Prof. Erwin de Blok and Moses Mogotsi doing SKA research at the University of Capetown. Photo credit: Katherine Traut

Far beyond the SKA, I believe that advances we and our partners make will be useful in a wide range of computing applications—everything from core scientific research to analysis of business data across a range of industries, including health care, banking and telecommunications.

Remember Watson, the IBM computer that beat two past-champions at the TV quiz show Jeopardy two years ago? The work we’re doing for the SKA will enable computer scientists to develop cognitive computing system that will help us penetrate the incredible complexity of data that is sensory, noisy and vast. Like Watson, it will learn and reason—helping human experts to see the world more clearly and make better decisions. The SKA work truly is one of the first major forays into a new era of computing.

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Read the white paper, The Square Kilometre Array: The Ultimate Big Data Challenge.

On March 26 at 17:00 Central European Time, the IBM Diversity Recruiting team invites professors, scientists and university students to participate in a virtual recruiting event for several open positions on the DOME project.

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