Ronen believes that this line of thinking could lead to important breakthroughs that will help us improve everything from transportation systems in cities to environmental protection regimes.  “I’m dreaming of an ultimate game theory engine–a miracle engine that helps us make better decisions,” he says.

He is one of six scientists who recently received the prestigious Godel Prize, which is awarded each year  by the Association for Computing Machinery for academic papers what contribute significantly to scholarship concerning algorithms and computing theory. The ACM cited Ronen and his co-author, Noam Nisan, along with the authors of two other papers, for laying the foundation for growth in algorithmic game theory.

Ronen and Nisan authored the first version of their paper  in 1999, and have developed their theory since then. They coined the term “algorithmic mechanism design” to describe a new way of taking on problems in systems that include self-interested participants.

They explored the fact that glitches arise when people attempt to apply conventional computer science thinking to complex systems like the Internet, utility grids and urban transportation systems. Typically, when people design computing algorithms, they seek to optimize the systems they’re addressing to be as efficient and effective as possible based on their design goals. So far, so good. But problems emerge when they approach systems operating in the world as if they’re going to behave like computing systems, which follow the rules that are written for them. Every social, business or economic system includes individuals and organizations that have their own self-interests in mind when they interact with the system. ” Instead of simply acting as instructed,” Ronen says, “such entities are likely to take advantage of quirks in the solution and utilize them on their own behalf. And That kind of behavior can undermine the solution.”

Consider a transportation scenario. A city with severe automobile traffic problems decides to design a congestion pricing system to change the behavior of individual drivers and reduce traffic jams. The city leaders set up a new tolling system in an effort to discourage truckers and non-commuters from driving on major highways during rush hours. But, as a result, drivers in large numbers leave the major arteries to avoid tolls–bringing traffic on city streets to a standstill.

The theory of algorithmic mechanism design aims to provide mathematical tools for coping with such situations.

Here’s how it works: Game theory aims to evaluate situations in which participants act strategically and create mathematical models that help designers produce solutions that address the diverse interests of the parties involved. When designers combine game theory with computer science, Ronen says, they are better able to write algorithms that take those variables into account. At the same time, machine learning, a branch of computer science, has the potential to make game theory models produce more accurate predictions of what will happen in real-world situations.  Machine learning makes it possible for computing systems to become smarter as they encounter additional data.

Ronen cautions that it will take a lot of time and effort to meld computer science and game theory in this way. But he’s hopeful. “You have to work in many small steps, but the potential is huge,” he says.

Technorati Tags: Amir Ronen, Associating for Computing Machinery, IBM

Dimitri Kanevsky demonstrates an Internet-based system for capturing real-time transcripts of teleconferences.

Kanevsky, a member of the speech and language algorithms department at IBM Research, has invented a long string of hearing- and speech-related  technologies. They include  a system for helping people improve the effectiveness of lip-reading, a method that enables deaf people to converse on the telephone and an Internet-based system for capturing real-time transcripts of phone conferences. “I like to solve challenging problems, and I get a thrill from creating novel math concepts and making discoveries,” he says.

Today, Kanevsky will get another kind of thrill–when he’s honored with a Champion of Change award at the White House. The award recognizes individuals who make a positive impact on science, technology, engineering and math for people with disabilities.  Here’s a livestream video link for the event.

While Kanevsky has a long record of achievements as an inventor, including 152 US patents, it’s clear from talking to him that some of his most important inventions may come in the future.

One area where his work could have a significant impact is in turning IBM’s Watson computer into a conversationalist. The brainy computer, which gained fame last year by beating two past-grand-champions on the TV quiz show Jeopardy!, translates text into speech, but, so far, doesn’t understand speech. Potential users of the technology say they would like to be able to converse with the machine in their work settings.  Physicians, for instance, envision using IBM Watson as a well-informed adviser when they’re examining and talking to patients.

Kanevsky can help out. He and colleagues at IBM Research have contributed notable improvements to the Baum-Welch algorithm, which is used to make up for shortages of training data in speech-recognition systems. These days, they’re developing new methods for producing more accurate results in situations where people speak with heavy accents or use jargon, or where there’s a lot of background noise.  These so-called discriminative algorithms could make possible real-time speech recognition systems that are fully automated and extremely accurate.

Watson is a first step in the emergence of a new era in information technology–which IBM calls the Era of Cognitive Systems. Big shifts are coming in chips, systems, data and programming. Kanevsky believes that these developments offer the promise of major breakthroughs in accessibility technologies–but only if those who architect them take people with disabilities into account from the start. “If this is done in the right way, it will have a tremendous impact on all people with disabilities,” he says.

One of Kanevsky’s earlier inventions, Artificial Passenger, is a system for keeping sleepy drivers awake by telling them stories and jokes, asking questions, and suggesting that the driver take a rest break if it detects that she or he is sleepy. Kanevsky came up with the idea after keeping his wife, Galina, awake by talking to her on a late night drive.

Watson’s a whole lot smarter than Artificial Passenger. For example, Watson can digest the universe of published information about a particular topic and then answer open-ended questions about it. So adding conversational capability to Watson would take speech recognition to a whole new level. Systems can be created that understand both speech and meaning. That’s a worthy challenge for an ambitious serial inventor.

Technorati Tags: Champion of Change, Dimitri Kanevsky, IBM, Watson, white house

By Clay Luthy, Global Distributed Energy Resource Leader, Energy & Utilities Industry, IBM

With gas prices hovering at $4.15 per gallon where I live, the talk of electric vehicles (EVs) has increased with vigor. More of my neighbors and friends are toying with the idea of making the switch – much of their reluctance though stems from the fear of inconvenience – will I find a charging station as easily as a gas pump, how will this impact my energy bill, how far can I go on a single charge? These consumer concerns are driving new innovations – uniting forward thinking players to perfect and deploy a smarter EV driving experience.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As a resident of Washington DC, I don’t have to look very far without noticing the well-established bike sharing program that is currently in place.  Locals are biking to and from the subway station and to work while tourists are cruising along to increase the number of monuments and museums they can see in a day.

This approach to urban commuting is now applied to electric vehicles. For example, in Paris, Autolib launched an EV sharing program with great success. According to initial reports, 250 vehicles hit the road on the first day, 2000 are expected this summer and 3,000 are planned within the next two years. Like bike sharing, I can see why this mode has taken off in a city with over two million citizens and highly dense roads – a strategy that I believe, should be replicated in cities around the world.

New business models are being deployed to support privately owned electric vehicles as well. In Israel, Better Place is set to go live on a deployment of networked charging stations. Their innovative business model helps reduce the cost as users pay for electric vehicles much like they do a cell phone – they receive a discounted price on the vehicle and battery in exchange for subscribing to a service to recharge. Innovative business models are often what is needed to bring new technology to the mainstream.

Innovation is also driving the way we create fuel for electric vehicles. Already we are seeing renewable energy becoming cost competitive with traditional energy sources due to improved manufacturing processes and technological breakthrough. Within the next 5 years, we can expect to see the levelized cost (a common cost metric) of electricity generated from roof mounted solar to be the same as, or potentially even less than, your retail electricity price. This, to me, is exciting news for both our environment as well as for our transportation system.

It’s a known fact that electric vehicles can help increase the use of renewable energy. If EVs can communicate with the grid, they can charge based on the availability of renewable energy resources, such as sun and wind. This will help overcome the variability and relative unpredictability of renewable energy (the sun doesn’t always shine when it’s supposed to!) —a challenge that needs to be addressed if renewable energy will scale.

It’s also why the recently announced project with Honda and PG&E is so important – it allows vehicles and the grid to directly communicate with each other. Layer in IBM’s cloud based optimization and automatically, the vehicles become intelligent —now with the ability to charge in accordance with grid conditions.

IBM, Honda, and PG&E Enable Smarter Charging for Electric Vehicles

However, innovative business models and electricity from renewable sources will be less impactful if we are not successful at making the experience of recharging your electric vehicle as easy as pumping gas. This means that we must ensure open access to charge posts for all users regardless of who owns or operates them. Innovation is likewise occurring on this front — Data standards are under development to ensure charge posts communicate in a common way Think of it this way, what happens when you go from one city or state to another and need to recharge your vehicle?

You may be the realm of another service provider and much like cell phones in the old days, if proper systems aren’t place, you may not be able to recharge outside of your network.

In Europe, IBM and a consortium of partners are building a demonstration system that allows for seamless interoperability. As an example, a participant could drive from Barcelona to Rome, charge their vehicle and be accurately billed for the electricity even though the network of charge posts in the two cities are owned and operated by two separate entities.

Similarly, the IBM team in Slovakia is working with ZSE on a project that is designed to make charging across territories more convenient for consumer. Using e-mobility technology, this study will help interconnect the Slovakian capital city, Bratislava and Vienna with a “green highway” of public charging stations.

IBM and ZSE Create Virtual Green Highway for Electric Vehicles

It’s innovations like these that keep me both optimistic and fascinated by the future of the electric vehicle. With fuel prices rising higher and higher, the decision to switch to EVs is getting more attention but is till by no means an easy one, especially considering that Americans on average purchase a new car every five years. So, we all want to ensure we’re making the right decision.

The industry, local and national governments, auto-manufactures and utilities are making significant in-roads – the rest is up to us.

Today marks the last day of #EVweek. Thank you for participating in all of the various online activities. If have more opinions, we’d like to hear them. Continue the conversation today on IBM’s People for A Smarter Planet (P4SP) for #SmarterFriday, a daylong chat about EVs.

Technorati Tags: Clay Luthy, EDISON, EKZ, electric vehicles, energy, EV, EVweek, Honda, IBM, PG&E, smart grid, Smart Grids, Smarter Cities, Smarter Energy, Smarter Planet, Smarter Transportation, sustainability, traffic, transportation, ZSE

By Jonathan Marshall, Chief, External Communications
Pacific Gas and Electric Company

Electric vehicle (EV) owners and electric utilities may soon enjoy a much closer and more fulfilling relationship than traditional car owners have with gas stations, thanks to a new pilot project announced today by IBM, Honda Motors, and Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E). This collaboration aims to demonstrate the ability to optimize the charge schedule for each customer’s EV battery so that the needs of customers and the electric grid are satisfied on an ongoing basis. That’s still a stretch for most utilities.

When the typical power engineer hears “electric vehicle,” he or she usually thinks: “challenge.” A plug-in vehicle can draw as much power as three homes in the more temperate parts of California. An enthusiastic bunch of early adopters could potentially overload local circuits if they all charge up at the same time in the same neighborhood.

But PG&E is thinking instead, “opportunity.” For one thing, we have a growing number of clean electric vehicles in our own fleet, from Chevy Volts to a new class of extended-range pickup trucks from Via Motors. And we know that widespread adoption of EVs throughout California will help the state meet its ambitious clean-air goals.

For another, we believe there’s great potential for using the latest “smart grid” technology to facilitate vehicle charging at night, when demand is low. By making use of underutilized generation and grid resources at off-peak times, EVs can help utilities make more efficient use of their assets and spread costs over a wider load without overtaxing the system.

PG&E demonstrated last year, in the first utility test of smart charging, that it could control vehicle charging through its SmartMeter™ infrastructure. But in a competitive marketplace, many customers may want to put control of their charging in other hands—such as the vehicle manufacturer or another trusted vendor. The whole process may someday be controlled by a third-party app on your smart phone.

The IBM-Honda-PG&E pilot takes an important step in that direction. The basic concept is to marry Honda’s knowledge of the status of its EVs and PG&E’s knowledge of the status of its grid with IBM’s “cloud” computing power to make charging smarter, simpler, and more efficient.

“We want to encourage third parties to innovate,” said Ulric Kwan, PG&E’s project manager. “What we haven’t yet demonstrated is whether you can develop a ‘brain’ in the cloud that meets our needs and those of our customers. Each customer has a different set of needs. The cloud has to figure this out and provide the proper charging levels to each EV, adapting to changing customer requirements and grid needs.”

This new pilot will demonstrate exactly that. IBM will take data from several Honda Fit EVs, via cellular uplink, and analyze it together with sample data from PG&E on the status of its electric distribution network to help optimize the charging schedule for each car. (Honda plans to begin selling the Fit EV to California customers this summer).

PG&E, meanwhile, still has plans—awaiting approval by the California Public Utilities Commission—to recruit up to 100 EV owners to test more advanced communications between the utility and EV battery chargers via SmartMeters™. This proposed pilot would bring us one step closer to the holy grail of using EV batteries as a form of distributed energy storage for capturing and making good use of fluctuating supplies of renewable energy.

For all of these projects, the overriding goal is the same: to ensure safe, reliable, and affordable service to our customers. Fortunately, PG&E has some very smart partners to help us make that happen.

Join PG&E and IBM for the #EVWeek Twitter Chat on April 12, from noon to 1pm ET @smarterplanet. For more information, visit: http://storify.com/smarterplanet/p4spchat-electric-vehicle-adoption

Technorati Tags: electric vehicles, energy, EVs, EVweek, IBM, PG&E, Smart Grids, Smarter Energy, Smarter Planet, Smarter Transportation, traffic, transportation

Credit: NASA

Just over 50 years ago, on February 20, US astronaut John Glenn blasted into space in his tiny Friendship 7 capsule. His three quick trips around the Earth made him the first American to orbit the planet.

A team of more than 70 IBMers headed by Arthur Cohen as manager of the IBM Space Computing Center in Washington, D.C., had developed the computing systems to manage the launch, orbit and reentry for NASA’s Mercury program. IBM systems manager Saul Gass watched the launch from a grandstand at Cape Canaveral . “Think about the time, 1962. This had never been done before” says Gass, who is professor emeritus at the University of Maryland. ” There was a man in the loop whose life depended on our calculations. It was a demonstration of real-time computing.”

Beginning in the mid-1940s and continuing after the Glenn flight, IBM’s scientists and engineers have contributed substantially to astronomy and manned space exploration, but, today, they’re entering an exciting new phase of  discovery.  IBM scientists in Zurich, Switzerland, and the Netherlands are working with the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) to develop a massively powerful computing system for harvesting a huge quantity of data gathered by the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope.

The project demonstrates once again the belief that major advances in human achievement and knowledge come through a combination of big bets and bold scientific inquiry.

The telescope, targeted for completion in 2024, will map more than one billion galaxies, with the ultimate goal of exploring the origins of the universe. “These events are the latest in a very long chain of efforts by mankind over hundreds of years to get a better understanding of the universe,” says Martin Schmatz, IBM’s technical lead on the project. “We’re venturing beyond the ability of people to travel in space.”

When President John F. Kennedy in 1961 announced America’s goal of sending a man to the moon within a decade, the technology did not exist to get the job done. But Kennedy trusted that if America’s scientists were given adequate resources and a compelling goal, they could deliver the moon shot. The same is true of the consortium of 20 nations, including European countries and the United States, which are behind the SKA project. They plan on inventing their way to the edge of the visible universe.

The team from IBM and ASTRON is determined to produce advances in chip and computer systems design that will make it possible to handle immense amounts of information–an exabyte of data every day–in real time.  (That’s 1,073,741,824 gigabytes!) Their project, called DOME, will investigate emerging technologies that might ultimately be used in the SKA computing systems. They’ll discover how to transport the data from a giant cluster of radio antennae to a central location, how to filter and store the data, and how to do all of the processing in an energy efficient way. In addition, they’ll develop a system for making all the components work together most efficiently and effectively.

One of their biggest challenges is devising a suitable microprocessor architecture. Right now, according to  Schmatz, the scientists are exploring the idea of packing thousands of low-frequency (and low-power-consuming) processors in a small space and using liquid cooling micro channels to carry away the heat.

While the joint project is focused on SKA, the partners see tremendous potential to use their advances to solve a wide range of so-called Big Data problems. The domains include health care, traffic and natural resources discovery–all of which call for analyzing a tremendous amount of data in real time. The two organizations are setting up the ASTRON & IBM Center for Exascale Technology, based in Drenthe, the Netherlands. Their goal: to boldly explore the far reaches  not just of space but of data.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

by Marcela Adan, IBM Redbooks Project Leader – ITSO

I live in Rochester, Minnesota also known as Med City because it is home to the world famous Mayo Clinic and other research institutions, biotech organizations, and companies that build high-tech medical instruments. Over 10 years ago, I was assigned to a life sciences project, working with an IBM team of software developers and scientists and a client team, all of them scientists, with either PhD degrees or MDs. It was a very different project from my previous assignment. I spent most of my career in IBM as a Systems Engineer, IT Specialist, and IT Architect helping business clients to size, set up, manage, and run their IT infrastructures.

This time, the client was in a very different business: human life. Maybe that is the reason why the lessons learned in this project hit me so hard. As humans, we all can relate to the importance of events that affect our quality of life.

I remember my first meeting with the team; what an aha! moment it was!

…First, understanding the customer’s problem. The researchers told us that they thought they could make break-through discoveries if they were able to query and analyze all the data they had in a variety of data sources and locations.

Then, they explained why they had arrived at this chaotic data situation: the scientific problem and requirements were very difficult to explain to the IT people. It was easier and faster for the scientists to learn and write Perl scripts in support of their research work than explaining the problem to the IT guys and hope for their help. The IT department seemed to be always consumed by the traditional applications.

This project had a huge impact on some of the software developers in the team. A few of them went back to school to pursue degrees in bioinformatics. They are now using their computer science, biology, and medicine skills in life sciences projects that most likely will affect all our lives.

This is only Part I of my story, next week I will explain more in depth the aspect of integrated expertise. On April 11 at a special launch event, IBM will unveil a new family of “expert integrated systems” built on the patterns of expertise I first became aware of over 10 years ago.

Marcela Adan is a consultant currently assigned to expert systems projects in the IBM International Technical Support Organization (ITSO). During her 33 years in the IT industry, Marcela has held several positions in development, consulting, technical support, skills transfer, and product management. She writes extensively and teaches classes around the world. You can reach Marcela at adan@us.ibm.com and follow her on Twitter @marcela_adan.

Technorati Tags: itso, systems

The Butterfly has long been in the permanent collection of the design department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and will be featured in an exhibition, Born out of Necessity, that’s running from today until January 28, 2013. The show contrasts designs like the Butterfly, which were created out of immediate necessity to address a problem, and designs that anticipate a problem that may be coming years in the future.

Credit: Jason Evan

A number of the items in the exhibition are examples of Critical Design–where designers focus on the possible consequences of new technologies and new policies. Paola Antonelli, the show’s curator, explains that the Critical Design process does not immediately lead to useful objects. Instead, it produces concepts and artifacts that show the promise of new developments or warn of their potential negative side-effects. The MOMA exhibition features Foragers, a project by designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, which explores the idea of future humans, short of food, outsourcing their digestive tracts to machines so they can consume barely edible things. (See photo on left.) “It’s important to show the predictive and conceptual aspects of design. It’s useful to policy makers, politicians and corporations,” says Antonelli.

Which got me thinking: How might IBM Watson-type technologies help people anticipate problems in the future so we can plan and design for them?

Watson, of course, is the computer that beat two past champions at the TV quiz show Jeopardy! just over a year ago. David Ferrucci, the lead researcher for Watson, talks about the ability of Watson-like technologies in the future making it possible for decision-makers and even normal citizens to tap into simulations of their world and try out what-if scenarios on intelligent machines. What happens to traffic around New York City if another transit tunnel is built under the Hudson River? What would happen to population growth if contraception was made less readily available to large swaths of the population? What if global warming causes sea levels to rise four feet by the end of the century?

In a world where we could anticipate the effects of new policies or new technologies on our complex systems of systems, we could make better decisions.

These days, IBM is creating versions of Watson for specific industries, starting with healthcare, financial services and retailing. But here’s a fanciful thought: Maybe we should create a version for designers, such as Dunne and Raby, and other people who think like them–visionaries and problem solvers in the realms of urban living, transportation and transformational technologies. It’s another way to think about intelligent design.

Technorati Tags: Born ouf of Necessity, Critical Design, IBM, ibm watson, Museum of Modern Art, Paola Antonelli

Quantum computing has been a Holy Grail for researchers ever since Nobel Prize physicist Richard Feynman in 1981 challenged the scientific community to build computers based on quantum mechanics. For decades, the pursuit remained firmly in the  theoretical realm. But now scientists and entrepreneurs believe they’re on the cusp of building systems that will take computing to a whole new level. “The work we’re doing shows it’s no longer just a brute force physics experiment. It’s time to start creating systems based on this science,” says IBM scientist Matthias Steffen, part of a team at IBM Research that’s focused on developing quantum computing to a point where it can be applied to real-world problems.

Here’s Steffen explaining the latest breakthroughs:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The IBM team will present the results of some of its latest experiments at the annual American Physical Society conference in Boston this week. Using a variety of techniques in the lab, they established three new records for retaining the integrity of electrical charges in quantum bits, or qubits. The point is not to make a big deal of the records, though. Rather, it’s to make the point that scientists will soon be integrating small quantum devices together into larger ones capable of performing certain types of mathematical calculations much faster than what’s possible of conventional computing systems.

These advances have huge implications for the field of data encryption because quantum computers can, theoretically, factor large numbers like those used to make sensitive data undecipherable to prying eyes. They could impact other domains of computing in ways not yet foreseeable. One target: helping people to understand the complex systems of systems that underlie everything from the human body to cities to the global financial industry.

Here’s the one-minute lecture on how quantum computing works: A classical computer makes use of bits, where each bit represents either a one or a zero. A quantum computer, in contrast, makes use of qubits,  A single qubit can represent a one, a zero, or both at once–which is called superposition. As a result, the use of qubits in computing makes it possible to process exponentially larger quantities of data than is possible with the the same number of conventional bits. One of the great challenges for scientists seeking to harness the power of quantum computing is controlling or removing quantum decoherence–the creation of errors in calculations caused by interference from factors such as heat and electronic waves. To deal with this problem, scientists have been experimenting for years to discover ways of reducing the number of errors and of lengthening the time periods when the electrical charges in the qubits are stable.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Which brings us to the present and the IBM Research advances. Building on top of discoveries by scientists at Yale University and elsewhere, the team has used superconducting electronics (and very low temperatures, nearing absolute zero) to extend the amount of time that qubits retain their quantum states up to 100 microseconds–which is long enough to suppress error rates and to  perform trustworthy calculations. “We’re ushering in a new era where it’s not just about the physics. You have to couple the qubits together. How do you program them? How do you put them on a chip?” says Steffen.

A tremendous amount of hard thinking still has to be done. But Steffen and Mark Ketchen, another team member, hope that recent advances will inspire governments, universities and corporations to increase funding for quantum computing research–and convince more scientists to enter the field. Ketchen predicts that it may take another 15 to 20 years to produce practical machines. Still, the team operates with a sense of urgency. “Things are happening fast. They’re coming from weird directions. You have to be open minded and you have to be nimble,” he says.

Here’s Ketchen explaining how the team performs its experiments at the lab:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Like Ketchen says, things are happening fast and they’re coming from surprising directions. Whole new ideas could very well surface at this week’s ASP conference. That’s what it means to be at the bleeding edge of science.

———–

Read the technical papers here and here.

————

By the way, the team at IBM Research has plenty of company when it comes to excitement about the potential of quantum computing. A few weeks ago, when the A Smarter Planet blog polled readers to see what they think the next IBM Research grand challenge should be, quantum computing was the top pick.

———

Extra credit viewing:

David DiVincenzo, who was then an IBM researcher, talks at MIT in 2006 about the origins and directions of quantum computing.

Technorati Tags: American Physical Society, Quantum computing

Ever since the dawn of the nanotechnology era, IBM scientists have been pushing atoms around in an effort to discover the possibilities of doing big things in the smallest of physical spaces.

It all started in 1981, when two IBM researchers, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, made nanotechnology possible by inventing the scanning tunneling microscope. The STM enabled scientists to visualize the world all the way down to its molecules and atoms. For their work, the two won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. Four years later, IBM researcher Don Eigler used the STM to move individual atoms, writing the initials I-B-M in atoms to demonstrate the capability.

Today, scientists at IBM Research-Almaden in San Jose, Calif., took nano manipulation to a new level. They revealed that they have discovered the fewest atoms that can be used to store one bit of magnetic information reliably. The answer: 12 atoms. To illustrate their discovery, they spelled out IBM’s long-time motto, “THINK,” in binary form using iron atoms oriented in columns and rows.

Their discovery points to data storage technologies that would be 100 times denser than today’s hard disk drives and 1000 times denser than today’s solid state memory chips. “It could revolutionize the way that computing uses memory and storage,” says Andreas Heinrich, the physics researcher who headed up the project.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Heinrich has been working on understanding the magnetic properties of atoms on surfaces for a decade. The research team’s technique combines the principles of quantum mechanics with traditional magnetics.

He believes their discoveries will help enable the advance of so-called quantum computing, which is different from traditional computers based on transistors. Quantum computing replaces transistors with nano-scale devices that can be used to represent data and perform operations on the data at the same time. Essentially, clusters of atoms are talking to themselves. It’s one of the means by which scientists hope to deal with the limitations of today’s semiconductors. Chip designers are bumping up against the laws of physics as they shrink transistors and other components on chips to nano-scale dimensions.

“People will look back ten years from now and say this was a game-changer,” predicts Heinrich.

Technorati Tags: Andreas Heinrich, IBM, nanotechnology

You will never need a password again
Click here to view the video and vote for this as the coolest IBM 5 in 5 prediction by clicking the “Like” button below the video.

Mind reading is no longer science fiction
Click here to view the video and vote for this as the coolest IBM 5 in 5 prediction by clicking the “Like” button below the video.

The digital divide will cease to exist
Click here to view the video and vote for this as the coolest IBM 5 in 5 prediction by clicking the “Like” button  below the video.

Junk mail will become priority mail
Click here to view the video and vote for this as the coolest IBM 5 in 5 prediction by clicking the “Like” button below the video.

Technorati Tags: IBM, The Next 5 in 5