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

By Chris Nay

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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

Jeffrey Nichols, IBM Research Staff Member

By Richard Silberman, Writer/Researcher, IBM Communications

Jeffrey Nichols is putting a new twist on Twitter that could change the way businesses use social media to identify, engage and market to customers.

“What we actually see from Twitter is just the tip of the information iceberg,” said Nichols, who manages the social media and crowd research team at IBM Research in Almaden, Calif. “Below every tweet there’s a lot more information that people have that they’re not sharing.”

Determined to extract hidden information from social media, Nichols is developing strategies to ask questions directly of targeted strangers over Twitter. The crux of Nichols work is to move from the ubiquitous reactive approach to social media, where marketers follow and respond to what people are saying, to a proactive model where they can reach out to individuals to collect specific information.

“The number one thing we’re trying to do is to get beyond social sentiment, which is basically an aggregation of whether the crowd feels positive or negative about something,” Nichols said. “Direct engagement with individuals over Twitter allows us to understand people and their opinions a lot better than we can with a coarse measurement like sentiment.”

Soliciting information from strangers over Twitter

Nichols, who studies human-computer interaction in the User Systems and Experience Research (USER) group at IBM Research, has led several experiments that validate the viability of engaging individuals over Twitter.

Two years ago, Nichols launched TSA Tracker, which collected and displayed wait times at airport security checkpoints. Nichols and his team identified people who were at airports, based on their Twitter status updates, and asked them to share their estimated wait.

“We got a much higher response rate than we expected — above 40 percent — which suggested that this is pretty fertile area to explore,” Nichols said.

Nichols’ next study, being presented at a social computing conference this week, not only measured response rates, but also analyzed the quality of the information respondents provided. In this two-part study, Nichols sent questions via Twitter to individuals who own a particular tablet computer — and also queried people who visited Los Angeles food trucks. He then compared the Twitter replies to reviews on reputable online sites to see how closely they align.

“Once again we got a response rate around 40 percent, which shows that people seem pretty happy to respond to questions over social media,” Nichols said. “The most exciting outcome, however, is that over 70 percent of the responses were really high quality answers, and in many cases people gave us more information than we asked for.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Modeling personalities based on Twitter text

Targeting the right people on Twitter is, of course, essential to getting high response rates and good data. To that end, Nichols and his team are currently exploring ways to analyze personality traits based on the text in social media messages. By modeling and understanding personality types, it will be possible to reach out to the right individuals, in the right way, at the right time, to elicit the best response possible.

“If you just send a person a message out of the blue and it doesn’t offer any value to them, then that’s spam and they’re not going to respond to that,” said Nichols, who is developing analytics to infer who will likely respond to unsolicited questions on a particular topic.

“If we choose to reach out to someone, we want to know there’s a very high probablilty that they’re going to react positively,” Nichols said. “Response rates of 40 percent are great, but wouldn’t it be awesome if we could get that up to 80 percent?”

New tools for Enterprise Marketing Management

Nichols’ fascination with crowds has its roots in the massively multiplayer games he once played. His interest in harnessing massive social communication and using Twitter in new ways evolved from there.

In one of his first social media experiments, Nichols and a team member used only the status updates posted to Twitter to generate summaries of sporting events comparable to those created by professional journalists. Encouraged by the results, Nichols has been on a steady path of innovation ever since.

“Going forward we hope to take what we’ve done so far, make it more business-relevant and bring it to market,” Nichols said. He is currently working to incorporate some of his techniques into IBM’s Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) solution to support a very focused, individualized and interactive approach to marketing.

“I think our approach to using Twitter will become a routine part of doing business in the next couple of years,” Nichols said. “It’s not only going to enable companies to hone valuable relationships with individuals, but also to reach beyond and expand their established customer base.”

Technorati Tags: Enterprise Marketing Management, human-computer interaction, Jeffrey Nichols, twitter

Uyi Stewart, Chief Scientist, IBM Research-Africa

By Richard Silberman, Writer/Researcher, IBM Communications

When Osamuyimen (Uyi) Stewart left his native Nigeria 23 years ago to attend graduate school at Cambridge University, computer science was still just a concept in Africa. Although Stewart had learned some programming languages in college, he had never actually used a computer to develop an application.

This year, Stewart will return to a very different Africa, moving his family to Nairobi, Kenya to serve as chief scientist at IBM Research-Africa, IBM’s first research lab on the continent. In his new role, which he officially started in August working from the T.J. Watson Research Center in New York, Stewart spearheads innovation for a vast emerging market that is rapidly growing and embracing new technologies.

For Stewart, who previously worked at the IBM Services Innovation Lab and was responsible for technical strategy and program management across eight global labs, his return to Africa is filled with meaning and emotion. Whereas a quarter century ago using an actual computer was just a dream, today Stewart leads development of advanced systems to help solve some of Africa’s most pressing challenges.

Furthermore, one of the mandates of the lab is to nurture IT skills and provide opportunities for young Africans, helping lay the groundwork for Africa to become a global IT leader.

“There is a massive wind of change going on in Africa right now,” Stewart said. “This is my chance to give back and make a difference.”

A lab to leapfrog the competition

Today IBM has locations in more than 20 African countries. IBM Research-Africa is the latest sign of Africa’s importance as a market and potential as a seedbed of innovation. The lab is not only IBM’s first in Africa, but one of the first research facilities for any major IT company on the continent.

“This lab gives us a foothold to develop local solutions to Africa’s challenges in an African way and truly leapfrog the competition,” Stewart said. Solving challenges in an “African way” means understanding and working with African governments; appreciating the nuances of African cultures; and, above all, delivering solutions on a mobile platform.

“Many people don’t have PCs in Africa. They have mobile phones — and only a fraction of those are smart phones,” Stewart said. “How do you innovate and deliver solutions with such infrastructural constraints? That’s the challenge we face and I am so excited about it!”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Eager to innovate on a mobile platform

IBM chose Kenya for this lab because the country is eager to support innovation and has a strong information and communication technology (ICT) policy and history of mobile technology innovation. Nairobi is a key hub for IBM’s business coverage of East African countries.

Kenya is home to the revolutionary M-Pesa mobile payment system, which is used widely across East Africa. Stewart hopes to build upon this foundation of innovation to provide solutions for a host of Africa’s challenges, including water shortages and traffic congestion.

One of Stewart’s first solutions as chief scientist exemplifies his concept of a uniquely African problem and solution. The e-government solution provides crucial information, via mobile phones, about obtaining a Kenyan national ID. The solution also empowers citizens to report corruption in the ID application process.

For Stewart, the opportunity to lead innovation of this nature is a pinnacle of his career. “Everything comes together in this role as chief scientist,” Stewart said. “My focus has always been the interface between human and computer, and now Africa provides a living laboratory to do this work.”

Keeping talent on the continent

Leaving Africa to study or find work in the United States or Europe, as Stewart did years ago, has often been the norm for bright young Africans. IBM Research-Africa is committed to help reverse this exodus of talent through initiatives like its Resident Science Program and collaboration with local universities, government agencies and companies.

“We want to train Africans, help them innovate and keep them here,” Stewart said. “I’m already getting unsolicited emails from Africans in the diaspora who want to come back and be a part of this lab.”

To illustrate the significance of this one new research lab on a huge, complex continent, Stewart cites a southern African word, Ubuntu, which means, “All for one and one for all.”

“As an African, I know that we have 54 countries, but there is truly a shared feeling across the continent of each country being part of a greater whole,” Stewart said. “With IBM Research-Africa, I’m able to return home and be an agent for change. My goodness, I am living out the true African spirit!”

______________________________________

Read more about IBM’s commitment to Africa.

Related links:

http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2013/01/technology-in-africa-extracting-insights-from-big-data.html

http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2013/02/technology-in-africa-building-innovation-ecosystems.html

Technorati Tags: africa, Big Data, IBM Research Africa, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, mobile computing, Osamuyimen Stewart, smart phones, Uyi Stewart

Dr. Lubomyr Romankiw, IBM Fellow in Electrochemical Technology, Micromagnetics and Microfabrication

By Richard Silberman, Writer/Researcher, IBM Communications

Without Lubomyr Romankiw, building a smarter planet would be much more difficult, if not impossible. Personal computers, smart phones, digital cameras and DVRs may have taken much longer to become a reality. ATMs, the Internet, Blue Gene and cloud computing might still be far off fantasies.

The world as we know and enjoy it today – with its ubiquitous computers and data-storing devices – is almost unimaginable without the magnetic thin-film disk storage technology and the read-and-write magnetic head that Dr. Romankiw and Dr. David A. Thompson invented at IBM 40 years ago.

The thin-film magnetic recording head is the tiny component that reads and writes data in virtually every disk-based storage device made since 1979. Before Dr. Romankiw’s inventions of thin-film heads and the processing technology to fabricate them, data storage for even the most cutting-edge computers was cumbersome, slow and expensive.

Dr. Romankiw’s innovations dramatically increased storage density and speed, shrunk disk size, reduced costs — and enabled the modern digital information age. To this day, Dr. Romankiw’s basic patents on structure and process are used in virtually every disk drive made.

For his groundbreaking inventions, Dr. Romankiw, an IBM Fellow, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in May, joining the ranks of Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright brothers. A huge honor, he acknowledges, but for Dr. Romankiw, there’s no looking back and resting on laurels — only looking forward.

At 81, as he celebrates 50 years with IBM this month, Dr. Romankiw still comes to work daily, full of ideas and enthusiasm, often working through the night into the next morning.

“I have no intention of slowing down as long as my mind works and I am able to come up with good ideas“, Dr. Romankiw said. “When I come across a new problem, I can’t help but think, ‘How are we going to solve that?’”

Click here to view the embedded video.

A quantum leap in computer design

When Dr. Romankiw joined IBM in 1962, the state-of-the-art in computing was the IBM 305 RAMAC — the first commercial computer with a hard disk drive. It contained 50 disks that were 24 inches each in diameter; the recording heads were made by manually winding thin copper wire around ferrite cores; and the entire system filled a small room.

IBM and other companies were eager to replace this technology with something smaller, cheaper, faster and easily manufactured. While most researchers trying to build magnetic heads tried to extend the vacuum technology being developed at the time to create silicon semiconductors, Dr. Romankiw had his own ideas about how to improve magnetic storage — and IBM let him run with it.

Breaking with convention, Dr. Romankiw believed that electroplating — the technique of coating the surface of a conducting material with a thin film of metal — held the key to shrinking magnetic heads and revolutionizing disk storage. Amidst much skepticism, he invented electroplating processes, unique plating tools and materials that yielded the necessary magnetic properties to create a tiny, powerful read/write head.

“I was not a trained electrochemist so I didn’t know that many of these things that I was doing were not supposed to work,” Dr. Romankiw said. “So I had the advantage of not being overburdened by knowledge!”

Dr. Romankiw began work on his thin-film technology in the late 1960s and patented his breakthrough device – the integrated magnetoresistive read and inductive write head – in 1975. The new head incorporated the work of his colleague Dr. David Thompson, who was also inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in May.

The first commercial thin-film head appeared in 1979 in the IBM 3380 disk storage device, which was a fraction of the size of the IBM 305 RAMAC. The revolutionary new head, with its ability to store and retrieve massive amounts of data at lightning speed, was quickly adopted across the computing industry.

68 patents, 150 inventions, 200 scientific papers…and counting

The beauty of Dr. Romankiw’s thin-film head is that it enables a huge increase in the amount of data that can be stored on magnetic disks, even as the size of those disks is rapidly shrinking. By making data storage compact and affordable, Dr. Romankiw’s tiny recording head ushered in a steady miniaturization of magnetic storage devices that continues to this day.

Through years of incremental advances, today’s disks are now 2.5 inches in diameter and contain up to one million times more information than the 24 inch disk of decades ago. Data storage density has soared from 10 megabytes per square inch of disk surface when IBM introduced the thin-film head to a whopping 400 gigabyes per square inch today. The cost of data storage has dropped from about $500,000 per gigabyte in 1979 to less than 25 cents today.

While solid state technology has replaced disk drives in many small devices, such as phones and cameras, the thin-film head is still essential to most desktops and laptops as well as large computers. Without the thin-film head, data-intensive endeavors from genetic engineering to space exploration to high-speed stock trading would be virtually impossible.

No matter who the manufacturer is, all heads used in computers today still use the same basic design and fabrication processes developed by Dr. Romankiw and his colleagues at IBM.

“If people ask me how they can identify my work when they use their computer, I have a very simple answer,” Dr. Romankiw said. “The minute you hit the key once and get a picture on your screen, seven patents that went into building the thin-film head are already working for you. The same goes every time you hit a key to write something.”

Dr. Romankiw has 68 patents to his name, about 150 published inventions, more than 200 scientific papers and close to 400 oral presentations. He has received many honors over the years including the prestigious Perkin Medal and, most recently, the University of Alberta Distinguished Alumni Award.

Yet you’ll never find him dwelling on his accomplishments.

“Whatever I invented in the past is the past. It’s over,” Dr. Romankiw said. “Yes, I’m proud of what I did, but I don’t blast my horn about it. I’ve done it and it works. I’m glad that everybody has use for it and I’m working now on something else.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Video by University of Alberta

Fleeing the Soviets, helping the scouts, changing the world

Dr. Romankiw started inventing around age 11 as a boy in Ukraine, where he would collect machine gun shells off the ground and use the gunpowder to make small straw “rockets” that he’d fly around his house.

In 1944, when he was 13 years old, Dr. Romankiw and his family fled Ukraine to escape the Soviets, first moving to Austria, then West Germany and finally settling in Edmonton, Alberta, where he finished high school and studied chemical engineering at the University of Alberta. He went on to get his Ph.D. at MIT and then took a job at IBM, where he has worked ever since.

Besides inventing, Dr. Romankiw’s other passion is the Ukrainian Scouts, where he has served as chief scout for the organization since being elected in 1997. Dr. Romankiw was a scout as a boy and today he helps raise funds, donates money and takes scouts from Ukraine to jamborees around the world.

“Some of these kids have now grown and are becoming capable leaders in local and provincial government and they’re already making a difference,” Dr. Romankiw said. “So that’s my contribution to making Ukraine, my country of birth, more democratic and more like the rest of the world.”

Whether inventing, or nurturing scouts, Dr. Romankiw has devoted his life to improving lives. His latest focus, at age 81, is no less ambitious than the work he did over 40 years ago.

In fact, today Dr. Romankiw is extending many of the same electroplating innovations from his thin-film magnetic head breakthrough to create better solar panels. He is also developing a way to put inductors directly on top of computer chips in order to regulate and supply power separately to different parts of the chip and use less energy.

“We’re going to need many ways to create new energy in the years ahead to meet the world’s exploding use of technology as populations grow, which is why these two projects are my passions right now,” Dr. Romankiw said.

Given all his accomplishments and accolades during a long and brilliant career, one can’t help but ask, “Why not retire?”

“I like the challenges,” Dr. Romankiw said. “Some people spend days on end doing jigsaw puzzles. To me, what I do is jigsaw puzzles. I am happy when I accomplish something and get it to work. Give me more challenges!”

Technorati Tags: data storage, electroplating, IBM 305 Ramac, IBM 3380, IBM Fellow, Lubomyr Romankiw, National Inventors Hall of Fame, Thin film head, Ukrainian Scouts, University of Alberta

Robert Waymouth, Ph.D., Professor of Chemistry, Stanford University

By Richard Silberman, Writer/Researcher, IBM Communications

Robert Waymouth, Ph.D., maintains the sense of awe that he’s had since his earliest days as a chemist, savoring those “marvelous moments where it just takes your breath away, you can’t believe something worked like that.”

Waymouth, a professor of chemistry at Stanford University, had one such moment in 2004 when he and his grad students discovered a new way to make molecules using organic catalysts. That breakthrough, followed by years of research with colleague Jim Hedrick at IBM Research in Almaden, Calif., has yielded a process to make environmentally sustainable plastics that could lead to smarter recycling methods, a drastic reduction in plastics pollution and even a safer, more efficient way to administer drugs.

Waymouth and Hedrick’s work represents a major advance in green chemistry (also known as sustainable chemistry), which uses substances and processes designed to reduce or eliminate negative environmental impacts. For their pioneering work, they were recently awarded the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Presidential Green Chemistry Award.

“The plastics we use today are truly modern marvels, but the way we’ve produced and disposed of them for the past 50 years is not sustainable,” Waymouth said. “We need to change the way we think about and synthesize the materials we use everyday so we create them in a sustainable way.”

Breakthrough could revolutionize plastic bottle recycling

Waymouth and Hedrick teamed up in 1997 as part of an industry-university partnership between IBM and Stanford, funded by the National Science Foundation. They initially collaborated to make metal-free plastics to coat microelectronics, but their focus quickly grew in scope.

Traditionally, plastics are created using metal catalysts — however, some heavy metals get left in the plastic, contaminating it and impeding recyclability. Waymouth and Hedrick invented a whole new family of organic catalysts to create plastics that have no metals in them at all.

By removing hazardous metals from plastic production, they’ve opened the door to safer end-products that are biodegradable and biocompatible. Because these new materials break down into harmless small molecules, it’s safe to dispose of them in a landfill or use them in the human body.

“This new research provides a strategy for designing materials that can be made in a sustainable way, so after we use them they can be readily recovered, reused and recycled again and again,” Waymouth said.

Redesign is crucial because today’s plastics were developed and commercialized with little thought to their ultimate environmental fate. Recycling has improved, but is more difficult than most people realize. The material commonly used to make water bottles — polyethylene terephthalate (PET) — is generally recycled one time and then the second generation plastic is discarded in a landfill.

Conceivably, Waymouth and Hedrick’s breakthrough will one day make it easier to recycle the 13 billion plastic bottles disposed of globally each year.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“We want to be awesome”

Waymouth and Hedrick have published 80 papers and share ten patents on the design of organic catalysts for polymer chemistry. Meanwhile, as they continue an active research agenda to develop the science of sustainable materials, they’re also focused on demonstrating that their processes and materials are both economically and environmentally sustainable.

“The petrochemical industry has been so successful and it’s so well established that to compete with existing technologies with new approaches you need to be awesome, and that’s what we’re after: We want to be awesome,” Waymouth said.

In the near term, the most likely and practical application of this science will be in biomedicine. For instance, researchers recently designed a polymer that can be used to fight superbugs and drug-resistant bacteria in humans.

In addition, Waymouth’s research offers great promise in the area of drug delivery, where one of the biggest challenges is getting a drug into specific cells. Many cancer drugs, for example, are so potent that they attack cancerous and healthy cells alike.

“The small, biodegradable molecules we’ve developed can transport drugs through cell membranes, straight into the cells or regions they’re targeted for,” Waymouth said.

Transforming how chemistry is practiced and perceived

As exciting as the prospects in plastics and medicine are, for Waymouth they’re steps on the road to an even grander goal.

“My greatest objective is to change the way people think about chemistry and science. So while I’d be delighted if some of our science turned into a practical product, it’s this transformational power of an idea that inspires me,” Waymouth said.

“Fifty years from now I hope people will say that what we’re doing today changed the way polymer chemistry is practiced,” he said. “That’s what drives me.”

Technorati Tags: green chemistry, Hedrick, organic catalyst, PET, plastic bottles, plastics, polyethylene terephthalate, polymers, recycling, water bottles, Waymouth

Yuchun Lee, Vice President and General Manager, IBM Enterprise Marketing Management Group

By Richard Silberman, Writer/Researcher, IBM Communications

Yuchun Lee knows about taking risks — and about winning. For seven years following college at MIT he was a member of the infamous MIT blackjack team, spending weekends in Las Vegas counting cards (it’s legal) and winning bundles.

During that same period, Lee and two partners started Unica Corp., a pioneer in marketing and analytics software. They bootstrapped the business (with no outside capital), built it into an industry leader and sold it to IBM in 2010 for about $500 million.

Today, as vice president of IBM’s Enterprise Marketing Management group, Lee has a lot to say about risk as he helps Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) worldwide understand the enormous gamble they’re taking if they fail to adapt — and fast — to the new age of marketing.

“The world is changing and the job of CMO is evolving in a very dramatic way,” Lee said. To succeed today, CMOs require a new way of thinking about marketing and a new model of customer engagement.

“Marketing is fast becoming less about selling than it is about servicing your client,” Lee said. “In fact, if you are successfully marketing today you ought to feel like a service.”

Helping CMOs navigate a new era

Lee is leading IBM’s efforts to reshape marketing by offering an enterprise marketing management (EMM) suite of solutions that lets companies better understand their customers and then deliver the relevant offers and personalized service they demand.

The EMM suite provides a system of engagement that collects and analyzes customer data from all customer interactions and integrates it into applications that execute highly-targeted marketing across online, social and mobile channels. When fully instrumented, a company can deliver a single, unified experience to each consumer.

“Any company that expects to survive in the future will need a system of engagement,” Lee said. “Marketing in this way is going to be a cornerstone of smarter commerce.”

In implementing an integrated system of engagement, Lee offers two pieces of advice that every CMO should take to heart.

“The number one requirement for a successful marketing transformation is that the CMO had better be talking to the CIO and both parties must be closely aligned to make this work,” Lee said.

“Secondly, you don’t need to buy the kitchen sink and do the whole transformation at once,” Lee said. “However, it’s essential to build a solution from a single provider and not take a piecemeal approach.”

“If you do it right, each phase will actually pay for itself,” Lee said.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Marketing transformation brings big returns

Enterprises that adopt a system of engagement can expect a sizable return, according to Lee. “We have hundreds of customers in highly competitive markets that are able to produce three to 10 times return based on systematically addressing the issues involved,” Lee said.

Considering this, Lee wonders why so many CMOs continue to drag their feet on marketing transformation.

“Frankly, by not moving forward quickly, a CMO is leaving money on the table and doing his company a disservice,” Lee said.

Lessons from blackjack, applied to business

The MIT blackjack team that Lee played on is the subject of both a book (Bringing Down the House) and, in broad strokes, a movie (21). But while Lee’s card-counting adventures make for great storytelling, the experience also served him well in practical terms.

“I learned to recognize and understand luck, skill, trends and adversity on a gut level,” Lee said. This insight proved invaluable as Lee built Unica from nothing and ran the company for nearly 20 years, surviving four recessions.

Lee sold Unica to IBM and joined the company because he saw the need for a major player to redefine the role of CMO, address key issues such as lack of standards, and establish best practices and new technologies.

“What IBM is doing right now for the CMO is basically what IBM did 20 years ago to help shape the job of CIO,” Lee said. “The amount of resources IBM is pouring into this space is just incredible.”

Yuchun Lee is a frequent contributor to the IBM Smarter Commerce blog and also posts to the IBM Smarter Planet blog.

Technorati Tags: Chief Marketing Officer, CMO, enterprise marketing, MIT blackjack team, system of engagement, unica, yuchun lee

David Bartlett, Vice President, Industry Solutions, Smarter Buildings, IBM Software Group

By Richard Silberman, Writer/Researcher, IBM Communications

Every time you walk into a building, think about this: it’s alive and kicking and wants to be fed.

It’s not just some static structure standing there. As Dave Bartlett, vice president of smarter buildings at IBM, sees it, a building is remarkably analogous to a living organism.

The heating and cooling system is also the building’s respiratory system, bringing in fresh air and removing carbon dioxide. It consumes enormous amounts of energy and water along with producing the associated waste.

The musculoskeletal system provides form, support, stability and movement to the building. Sensors, computer monitoring and other instrumentation make up the building’s nervous system.

And, just like in the human body, all these systems are interconnected and affect one another.

Bartlett developed his “physiology of buildings” concept to help illustrate how buildings work and how they should be managed to optimize operations and maximize energy efficiency. In other words, how to make them healthy.

“Today we have the ability to get a constant stream of data from our physical infrastructure and run analytics to derive deeper insight into how to better manage our buildings,” Bartlett said. The key is to monitor and manage buildings from a system of systems perspective, rather than view each piece of equipment independently.

“If we can think of buildings and listen to them holistically, we open up a whole new way of understanding buildings that will allow us to heal them of their wild energy and water wasting ways,” Bartlett said.

Leading the drive for smarter buildings

Bartlett is known in industry circles as the “Building Whisperer” because of his ability to listen to buildings and tame them of their excesses. On that front, the world has much work to do.

Buildings consume over 40 percent of the world’s energy and emit more carbon dioxide into the environment than cars. By 2025, buildings will be the largest energy consumers on earth. Today, in large cities, buildings are already the largest energy consumers and producers of greenhouse gases.

Bartlett evangelizes far and wide about the urgent need for more sustainable, energy-efficient buildings and IBM’s unique capabilities to help achieve this.

“IBM is doing something in the building space that hasn’t been done before,” Bartlett said. “We’re listening to all the data that’s coming from buildings  - not just from the heat and air conditioning units, but from all the systems across all the buildings a company manages.” This can include lighting systems, security systems, utilities interfaces and even city command centers.

IBM’s TRIRIGA smarter building solution integrates with all building systems, regardless of manufacturer to provide a real-time view of a building’s energy use and overall operation. It also supports holistic management of the building environment.

According to Bartlett, smarter buildings can save as much as 40 percent on energy costs, 50 percent on water, and up to 30 percent on building maintenance. “Understanding what’s happening in a building in real-time means you can tell when something needs to be fixed before it breaks,” he said.

Click here to view the embedded video.

An optimist on a mission

Bartlett’s on a self-proclaimed mission to change the way we think about and manage buildings and bring them front and center into the conversation about smarter cities and a healthier planet.

“The way we waste energy and water today is crazy,” Bartlett said. “Why is it that when you go to the movie theater, you have to take a sweater, warm socks and a scarf? Why do office buildings have the lights and air conditioning on when no one is in them — or the sprinklers turn on even when it’s about to rain outside? It doesn’t have to be that way.”

Bartlett’s vision for the future goes well beyond instrumentation of individual structures to include a much broader, systematic approach to designing and managing our entire building environment. He advocates strategies to integrate buildings into their surroundings that may radically reduce energy use and improve the quality of our lives.

“Imagine contiguous corridors of green that traverse up the sides of buildings and across roofs, not only providing better water absorption, oxygen and insulation, but also an ecosystem for butterflies, birds and small mammals that will begin to blur the harsh lines that we’ve drawn between cities and countrysides,” Bartlett said.

“Maybe that seems too optimistic, but that’s my vision of the world and I think we can achieve it sooner rather than later,” Bartlett said. “We have the technology and there’s an awareness of the need for sustainable solutions that I’m confident will stir decision-makers to action.”

Technorati Tags: Dave Bartlett, green buildings, smarter physical infrastructure, Tririga

Ruhong Zhou, Ph.D., conducts groundbreaking avian flu research on IBM Blue Gene

The next time an avian flu scare strikes — as it did in 2004 and likely will again — the world may be better prepared thanks to the work of Ruhong Zhou, research staff scientist and manager of the Soft Matter Theory and Simulation Group at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

Zhou and his team have been using an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer to anticipate genetic changes in the H5N1 influenza virus (commonly known as avian or bird flu) that might pose a serious threat to human health. Although H5N1 rarely infects the human population, when it does it has an extremely high mortality rate.

In a recent breakthrough, Zhou was able to computationally identify the single mutation in H5N1 that, should it occur, would debilitate antibodies in our immune system from fighting off this deadly flu. Armed with this information, pharmaceutical companies could design a vaccine that would compensate for this mutation and allow people to develop the necessary antibodies to combat H5N1 if they contract it.

“By isolating and anticipating this mutation, we can be proactive in creating a vaccine before the next avian flu outbreak strikes — potentially saving lives and even helping prevent a global pandemic,” Zhou said.

Taking the guesswork out of vaccine design

Influenza can undergo various mutations over a short time period, so trying to predict exactly how a flu strain will mutate next is the first step in vaccine development. It is too costly and time-intensive, however, to do this type of upfront research by trial and error in a traditional lab setting, so Zhou uses computer simulations to do his work.

Blue Gene provides the computational power to rapidly and efficiently simulate mutations at the atomic level so scientists can now predict a mutation with great accuracy and take much of the guesswork out of vaccine design.

Zhou simulated over 100 single and double mutations of H5N1’s hemagglutinin (HA) protein on Blue Gene in order to pinpoint the single, antibody-suppressing mutation he sought. Using all of Blue Gene’s 8,000 processors, it took two days to model each mutation. By comparison, it would take 8,000 days — or 22 years — to run each model on a laptop or desktop computer with a dual CPU.

“We could have never done our research without Blue Gene,” said Zhou, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia University, where he currently teaches graduate level courses. “High performance computing of this sort is enabling a new era of breakthroughs in life science and holds great promise for advances in personalized medicine as well.”

Avian flu is an ongoing threat and has the potential to erupt into a pandemic someday. Zhou's work will help the world be better prepared and potentially save lives.

A proactive approach to preventing pandemics

For Zhou, who recently published his findings in Biophysical Journal, this breakthrough is particularly meaningful because of the real promise it holds for public health.

“As scientists, we often do some basic research just for our own curiosity — and achieving the results is gratification enough,” Zhou said. “But this is not just for our own interest; this is something very, very important to human society.”

Along with his avian flu research, Zhou has been using Blue Gene for the past six years to model genetic variations and predict mutations in other influenza strains, including swine flu (H1N1) and Hong Kong flu (H3N2). Zhou hopes the ability to anticipate mutations will prompt the medical community to start preparing preemptive vaccines well ahead of flu outbreaks, rather than responding after the fact (and after lives have been lost), which is the usual practice.

“We need to move from a reactive model of vaccine development to a proactive one,” Zhou said. “Our ability to accurately predict what mutations will happen next should give pharmaceutical companies the confidence to invest in vaccine production early enough to mount a strong defense against a virus and prevent a pandemic.”

Partnerships with government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and with pharmaceutical companies that want to use Zhou’s research to guide vaccine design are essential to realizing the full potential of Zhou’s work.

“With the right funding model and partnerships we can continue to explore influenza strains as well as other infectious diseases, such as HIV,” Zhou said. “I firmly believe that together we can develop better vaccines that will have a profound impact on society’s health and well-being.”

Technorati Tags: avian flu, biomedicine, blue gene, H5N1, influenza, life sciences, pandemic, Ruhong Zhou, vaccine

Basit Chaudhry, M.D., Ph.D., believes IBM Watson holds the key to better healthcare delivery

As a medical student in a large public hospital in New York City, Basit Chaudhry, M.D., first experienced one of the most vexing problems facing doctors today: How do you discover and deal with all the information that’s required to provide optimal care?

“So much of what doctors do today is about trying to figure out how to collect and aggregate all the necessary medical data,” Dr. Chaudhry said. “As I went further along in my training and practice it became more and more apparent to me that if we don’t solve this problem, it’s going to be difficult to build a better, more humane healthcare system.”

Motivated to make a difference, Dr. Chaudhry went on to get his Ph.D. in health services research and informatics and focus on applying technology to solve the medical data challenge. Today, as a medical scientist at IBM Research, Dr. Chaudhry is developing solutions to help clinicians manage and analyze the overwhelming amount of medical data and new knowledge available to them — and ultimately change the very foundation of how healthcare is delivered.

Managing the medical data deluge

One of the most promising initiatives Dr. Chaudhry is part of involves applying IBM Watson technology to support the cognitive activities involved in clinical care. Watson, a revolutionary computing system that can analyze the meaning and context of human language, is most famous for defeating two champions from the quiz show Jeopardy! last year.

“The main thing Watson does for medicine is that it allows us to better organize what we know about medicine and put it at the fingertips of the people who need to access it,” said Dr. Chaudhry, a clinical advisor to the Watson team. With new clinical research and medical information now estimated to double every five years, a tool to help clinicians find the data they require is crucial.

Using the same DeepQA technology that won Jeopardy!, Watson can pore through the equivalent of 200 million pages of medical data and formulate a response to clinicians’ queries in less than three seconds — helping them make more informed diagnosis and treatment decisions more quickly than ever before.

“Watson will allow medical professionals to focus more on their clinical activities and spend less time looking for information and sorting through paperwork,” Dr. Chaudhry said. “That’s going to mean better care and better patient outcomes.”

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Video — Perspectives on Watson: Healthcare

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thought leaders share their perspectives on how Watson could impact the way doctors diagnose and treat patients.

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Better care for chronic illness

One area where Watson may prove most valuable is in caring for patients with chronic diseases, such as diabetes and cancer, where a more proactive, team-based model of care is required than for patients with acute conditions.

“Taking care of chronically ill patients gets very complicated because it involves multiple healthcare professionals and often multiple organizations over a prolonged time frame — potentially decades,” Dr. Chaudhry said. “A lot of knowledge coordination and information integration is required.”

Watson has the potential to facilitate chronic disease management by better organizing the data and new knowledge clincians need to take proactive steps to improve prognoses and prolong life. According to Dr. Chaudhry, this may one day include integrating data from sensors that will indicate whether a patient is sticking to his or her medication schedule — a vital matter when it comes to chronic care.

Smarter health vs. smarter healthcare

Dr. Chaudhry’s long-range goal is not just to fix the current healthcare system, but to help realize a new model for healthcare altogether.

“I think smarter healthcare must be more focused on health rather than disease,” Dr. Chaudhry said. “Through the use of innovation I hope we can develop a different kind of health system — and I mean health, not just healthcare — that will be focused more on wellness and less on treating illness after the fact.”

According to Dr. Chaudhry, greater instrumentation is needed across society to provide data on the full range of factors that impact public health, so societies can make smarter decisions to ensure the health of their citizens.

“Watson could be the central nervous system of a much larger, instrumented architecture that integrates and analyzes this public health data to help yield a healthier population,” Dr. Chaudhry said.

For a flickr slide show about the use of Watson in healthcare, click here.

Technorati Tags: Basit Chaudhry, chronic illness

Sarah Slaughter, director of the Built Environment Coalition

For all those companies that are unsure about how to adopt sustainable business practices and concerned about the long-term management implications, Sarah Slaughter, Ph.D., a leading authority on business sustainability, can provide some reassuring perspective:

Sustainability is also an opportunity — and potentially a huge one.

When implemented properly — by building partnerships and taking a systems approach to solving problems — sustainability can create new markets and provide a business with opportunities for new products, services, innovation and revenue streams.

“Sustainability is about doing good and being a good citizen at one level — and that’s immensely valuable to a business,” Dr. Slaughter said. “But along with that is this wonderful opportunity for real financial growth, which can make sustainability much more than just a matter of compliance for a company.”

Sustainability and the importance of partnerships

To realize lasting success with sustainability, collaboration with a range of stakeholders is essential, according to Dr. Slaughter, the founder and executive director of the Built Environment Coalition, a nonprofit organization devoted to improving sustainability and disaster resiliency for communities.

“Almost every sustainability issue affects multiple parties and involves multiple points of intersection from business, government, various organizations and the community,” said Dr. Slaughter, who also teaches at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and ran the school’s Sustainability Initiative for several years.

“By bringing together a varied group of people with a range of interests, expertise, responsibilities and capabilities, you can arrive at a rich mix of solutions that no one party would be able to implement on its own,” she said.

Just how important, exactly, does Dr. Slaughter consider partnering for sustainability?

“If a company decides to go it alone and says, ‘We’re just going to do this our own way,’ — I, personally, wouldn’t invest in that company,” Dr. Slaughter said. “No long-range sustainability initiative should be conceived of alone.”

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Video: Sarah Slaughter, Finding Financial Opportunities of Sustainability

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sarah Slaughter, Ph.D., a leading expert on business sustainability, talks about why CFOs must pursue a robust sustainability strategy that not only fulfills compliance requirements but may also open the door to new products, services and market opportunities.

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A broad-based effort pays off big

To illustrate the positive impact of partnerships, Dr. Slaughter provides the example of a water treatment plant that wanted to cut costs and improve the quality of the water it provided.

The simplest, quick fix, go-it-alone solution would have been to refine its internal processes and use of chemicals to treat its water.

But instead, the utility looked beyond itself to clean up the water coming into the plant in the first place, so it would require less treatment. The facility partnered with nature conservation organizations, hiking groups, student sports leagues and others throughout the region.

“Each party made a contribution that ultimately yielded a cleaner watershed and not only solved the utility’s problem, but protected the health and well-being of the broader community,” Dr. Slaughter said. By partnering, the utility has reduced its treatment costs; customers get healthier water (less chemicals added); and the surrounding communities enjoy a cleaner environment.

Communities hold the key

Dr. Slaughter considers collaboration at the community level as the next big thing in sustainability and a key to deep and lasting sustainability solutions.

“We’ve seen a lot of action on sustainability at the top levels, from the federal government and major multinationals — and at the individual level, where people take responsibility to turn off lights and walk to work, for instance,” Dr. Slaughter said. “Now the focus is on the community, where people are eager to take responsibility to improve the places where they live and work.”

Business leaders need to leverage this community enthusiasm to help develop, implement and assess sustainability solutions.

“One of the wonderful things about working with the community is that often people have great ideas about what they can do right now to really address a lot of these sustainability issues,” Dr. Slaughter said.

Technorati Tags: Built Environment Coalition, Sarah Slaughter, sustainability