The future is now: Your next meeting with IBM researchers at Almaden

Thanks to a beautifully designed, state-of-the-art telepresence room, recently built at IBM Research - Almaden, you will soon be able to meet face-to-face and in real time with researchers and other IBMers. Construction is nearing the final stages and crews are hard at work to complete the most modern collaborative space in the building. We'll literally see you soon!

Congratulations to IBM's newest ACM Fellows

Each year, around 40 world leaders in science and technology are part of an elite group that are selected to be named ACM Fellows. The distinction of ACM Fellow comes to those achieving accomplishments that are driving the innovations necessary to sustain competitiveness in the digital age. ACM Fellows are born out of the world's leading universities, corporations and research labs. The ACM Fellows serve as distinguished colleagues to whom the ACM and its members look for guidance and leadership as the world of information technology evolves.

IBM has held steady in ACM Fellow appointments and this year is no exception. Of the 41 ACM Fellows named for 2010, two IBM researchers achieved this distinction: David Ungar and Shumin Zhai.

David Ungar, selected for his contributions to the design and implementation of object-oriented programming languages, reports in to the Programming Models and Tools Research group at IBM Research - T.J. Watson in NY. David is credited for work on "Tuning Fork," a performance analysis and visualization tool and "Renaissance" - in pursuit of a breakthrough in productivity and performance for massively parallel, tightly-coupled systems such as manycore CPUs. Adding to his list of achievements, David led a group that invented technology that made Java practical and co-designed a programming language that demonstrated how to simplify object-orientation while increasing expressive power. Think JavaScript; it was at the very least the inspiration for the person who designed it.

Having come a long way from repairing stereos and TVs and maintaining and analog computer, David is an expert recognized by peers far beyond IBM.


Shumin Zhai, an IBM Research - Almaden dynamo, was honored for his contributions to human-computer interface research and innovation. Side note: Zhai was a university professor at age 23.

Zhai explains, "I grew up during China's culture revolution, so no one had a job in today's sense. In 1977 - at age 16 - I was among the one percent lucky national university entrance examinees, the first such group after the 10 year culture revolution, to enter universities." He goes on, "By the time I finished my master's degree and started teaching, I was still not much older than the university students I taught. So when I walked into my first lecture I was visibly startled by the students who all customarily raised then burst into laughter. But by the end of the semester, they elected me "the best lecturer" among a teaching staff of well over 100."

Now, as an IBMer, Zhai has several accolades under his belt. We have Zhai to thank for helping invent the ScrollPoint mouse and other input devices of IBM PCs and Thinkpads. He pioneered the touch screen gesture keyboard input method (smartphone, anybody?) with the ShapeWriter project. He's now advancing that research by discovering and refining models and empirical laws of user action on computer screens which quantitatively predict users' performance in pointing, crossing, steering, and stroke gesturing.

Ungar and Zhai join a list of several accomplished IBMers named ACM Fellow over the last 15+ years.

Spotted: IBM artifacts at the Computer History Museum "Revolution" Exhibit

Guests gather at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, where over 1,000 devices representing 2,000 years of computing will be unveiled mid-January as part of the new "Revolution" exhibit. The preview event gave insiders a sneak peek at the "boulevard of computing history" including everything from an ancient abacus and slide rule to the first Pong arcade game. IBM technologies are abundantly represented in the 25,000 sq. ft. exhibit.

You can learn more about "Revolution" here: http://www.computerhistory.org/exhibits/revolution/

No 3-D glasses required

Gone are the days where information is static and unmoving. When we want information, we want it dynamic, colorful and contributed by real people, up to the minute. We are constantly collecting and analyzing data sent over the internet by millions of people every second of the day. The world's innovators realize a need to harness and visualize data so that it tells a compelling story, and well... captures our attention.

At IBM Research - Almaden, we thought there'd be no better way to do just that than to buy a 10-foot globe, drop it into our lobby and put all of our Research information on it for everyone to see.


The OmniGlobe is a digital spherical display, 60 inches in diameter, sitting in the front lobby, currently displaying accurate depictions of the Earth and planets in space in high quality, interactive animations. Using a touch screen podium, viewers can select images or sequences, which include climate, NASA sea currents, population density, marine impact, the earth 300 million years ago, sea ice & snow, and more.

And the OmniGlobe has an exciting future ahead - a team of IBM researchers at Almaden is working to display dynamic, real-time data (not just canned, static demos) of IBM Research related projects. This will require a complete re-writing of the software that comes with the globe. IBM researcher Matt Davis has been working on this for several months, while teammates, including Julia Grace and Barbara Jones, are also leading efforts on transforming the globe, one of these better known as "Cerulean" - a smarter shade of blue. Julia explains, "Certainly not every dataset is geospatial and can be shown on a globe; so for projects that might benefit from a spherical display, our team will build a framework that will allow Almaden researchers from all the functions to easily put their data on the globe, including high quality, interactive, dynamic animations and visualizations."

The research team will also take on the challenge of redesigning the touch screen interface - not only in terms of how it looks, but answering a few vital questions: What will the user experience be like? How will techies and non-techies alike to be able to walk up to the globe, immediately understand what it is showing, and be able to interact with it?

Learn more about IBM's interest in 3-D data visualization from Julia Grace, presenting at Web 2.0 NY 2010:

Spotted: Big Sur Half Marathon

IBM Research math science staff member, Jim Hafner, Big Sur Half Marathon finisher, in mid-70 degree weather in Monterey, CA on Sunday, November 14. Jim jammed through 13.1 miles in an amazing time of 1:55:49. Great job!

Meet Andreas Heinrich, 'everyday physicist'

Check out this cool profile article the Morgan Hill Times did on Almaden researcher Andreas Heinrich. Did you think the physicist behind some of nanotechnology's greatest breakthroughs got turned down for a job twice and has wine-making parties at home with friends? Find out more about Heinrich's affinity for skiing and "The Big Bang Theory" as well as what his kids think about science.

Morgan Hill Times: Just your everyday physicist

Also, check out the scientific breakthrough Andreas and his team achieved earlier this year:

Spotted: Sunny stroll at Almaden

Lunch time walkers at Almaden take in a beautiful November day.

Behind the scenes with UCLA's 2010 Alumna of the Year

On Friday, November 5th, IBM Fellow and Vice President Josephine Cheng was honored as UCLA's 2010 Alumna of the Year by the Dean of Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, Dr. Vijay Dhir. You can read about Josephine's technical accomplishments that led her to this prestigious award on the IBM Research news blog.

Here, however, we share an exclusive interview with the honorary IBMer and lifelong Bruin.

How old were you when you decided you wanted to pursue math and science as a career?
My junior year in college, about 20 years old

Who influenced you to do so?
I fell in love with my first programming class. The computer science professors and my classmates were influential to my decision.

What's one of your favorite movies?
Star Wars

What's your favorite vacation spot?
Egypt

What does "building a smarter planet" mean to you?
"Building a Smarter Planet" reflects the world that we are living in (instrumented, interconnected and intelligent), and how our work is making a difference in creating a better life in the Smarter Planet.

What do you love about working at IBM?
I love to work with all the smart and friendly IBMers!

Community: IBM's Corporate Philanthropy Award from the SV/SJ Business Journal

The following is a guest blog post from Silicon Valley IBMer Michelle McIntyre, Media and Blogger Relations.

I was one of a handful of lucky IBMers who attended the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal annual corporate philanthropy awards on November 4 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The journal ranks the organizations by cash contributions to Silicon Valley organizations in the most recent fiscal year.

According to the journal, giving rose in the Silicon Valley 3 percent in 2009. This bucks the trend. Nationally, giving to charity went down 3.6 percent.

Great news:

IBM rose in the Silicon Valley philanthropic giving ranks this year to 15, up from 18 the previous year. IBM and its employees gave $766,822 to Silicon Valley charities and a whopping $185 million company wide in 2009. IBMers in the Silicon Valley gave a generous 32,264 hours of their time during this same period.

Senior Location Executive and VP of WebSphere Foundation Development, Richard Baird, accepted the award on behalf of Big Blue. After receiving the award Baird commented, "Making a better local community makes a better global community."

Forty-five non-profits including United Way, Giving Tree, Junior Achievement, several science and math organizations, Second Harvest Food bank, Innvision, teacher intern organization IISME, and the 49ers Foundation exhibited at the volunteer match showcase that was open before and after the ceremony.

Leaders of several organizations including United Way, Giving Tree and IISME told me that they appreciate the help of IBM employees and have an excellent relationship with our company.

Also Congratulations Tom Zimmerman for receiving a Community Impact award from the same business journal for his work with Cupertino schools, San Jose State and Hispanic University where he helped them win a $900,000 grant. The full list of award recipients is in the Nov. 6 issue of the business journal.

Congratulations to all who gave so generously last year, making us all proud to be West Coast IBMers.

Pictured above

Top (L to R): Michelle McIntyre, Blogger, Media Relations, Jennifer Hernandez, Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs, Alexa MacDonald, Manager, Human Resources, Ed Ng, Director, STG Product Development Executive Customer Advocate, Laura Clayton-McDonnell, Vice President, Public Sector, West IMT

Bottom (L to R): Joanna Garrido Guerrero, IBM Software Group, Information Management, Ursula Richter, Tivoli Storage Manager Client Development, Richard Baird, Vice President, WebSphere Foundation Development, Silicon Valley Site Location Executive, Ann Hosein, Integration CFO, Storwize, Storage Division

The science behind social media

Experts from academia, industry and IBM discuss ways to "harness the buzz of the crowd"

The organizers behind Almadens' NPUC conference this year have an approach to computing that differs from the traditional research being done at the lab; rather than focusing on atom spin times and exploring nanoscale storage possibilities, Michelle Zhou, Eser Kandogan, Jalal Mahmud and their team at Almaden are studying artificial intelligence, online gaming, pervasive computing, and this year, data visualization, social networks and crowdsourcing.

During the 18th annual New Paradigms in Using Computers conference, experts from academia and industry, including Jan Bosch, VP of Innovation at Intuit, Ed Chi, principle scientist, PARC, subject matter experts from Stanford University, USC and UC Berkeley, and the founders of K9 Ventures and CrowdFlower, gathered to discuss everything from the business of crowdsourcing to effective microblogging analysis. In between the 10 speaker sessions spread throughout the day, demos and interactive displays lined the hallway, including Nokia Internet Pulse, which visualizes current discussion around a particular topic on Twitter. Jofish Kaye of Nokia Research Center described how the visualization defines positive words such as "love," and colors them. A view of the tool in action shows a map of all positive and negative words as well as the frequency; and, a tweet of his own at the end of the day summarized his visit to Almaden: "I like IBM Almeden [sic]. There's lots of old guys with beards around who look like they invented the spacebar or something. #npuc."

More demos focused on making work smarter and harnessing massive amounts of data on the web included Jan Pieper’s “Work Profiles,” a system designed to make enterprise collaboration easier and more effective by bridging personal email to shared collaborative tools and shared social tools. Laura Granka of Google presented an election forecasting model with online search traffic designed to help make sense of significant deviations between national and state search volume. A “SocialTelescope,” IBM’s Creek Watch iPhone app and automation via global crowdsourcing were also showcased during the poster session. Another IBM Research – Almaden project featured at the event focused on finding family and friends following the Haiti Earthquake in January 2010.

An animated Jure Leskovec of Stanford University kicked off the speaker sessions with "The Information of Networks" followed by Yan Liu's (USC) "Effective Microblogging Analysis with Less Supervision." A panel featuring experts on crowdsourcing followed. Sid Viswanathan, a panelist who just received his B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2006 already earned the title of co-founder of CardMunch, a mobile business card transcription service that solves the business card problem by leveraging the power of crowd labor. His insights, along with those of James Everingham, founder and CTO of Pixazza, opened up a nice forum for crowdsourcing discussions along the panel and with the audience.

Heard at NPUC 2010

(via Twitter): "I like IBM Almeden [sic]. There's lots of old guys with beards around who look like they invented the spacebar or something. #npuc."
"Yeah, this place is the real deal. This is where they moved atoms and stuff like that."

"some really interesting talks at #NPUC , especially enjoyed Jure's presentation on the mutations of phrases http://bit.ly/tnQwA"

"Hearing @edchi at #npuc got me to use #MrTaggy to research angiogram - it uses iodide, may be allergic. Called dr, extra prep ordered. #fb"

Meet IBMer George Rhoten, seismograph tinkerer

For IBMer George Rhoten, programming was an easy A in high school. By that time, he’d already taken home the grand prize at the Santa Clara County Science Fair for his first seismograph and had aspirations to make hover cars, “like the kind you see in Star Wars.” After taking a Pascal programming class in high school and deciding computer programming was in fact what he wanted to work on, Rhoten joined Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and left with a BS in computer science and a minor in theater.

Rhoten has been at IBM for 10 years now and is currently a Tivoli software engineer; however, his salary “helps fund his non-IBM projects for therapeutic tinkering.” Today, those include a homemade seismograph, a sensor used to control the tilt of a 3D object (his kitchen oven), and… making display cases. “I was severely disappointed by the quality and shape of the display cases that were out there,” Rhoten said. “The first one I made was to display my rock collection. The last one was for my wife’s Star Wars action figures.”

Rhoten’s first seismograph consisted of cardboard, wood, paper clips, rubber bands, washers, pencil, paper, tape, glue and a few other things found around the house. It recorded the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989. “That eventually turned into a science fair project, which won me $150, first place at the Santa Clara County Science Fair, and grand prize in my division (middle school at the time),” laments Rhoten. “Considering that I only had to pay $1 for the soft pencil for the seismograph, I thought it was a pretty good return on investment.”

Up next for Rhoten is a more sensitive seismometer with less noise, elimination of misreads of the sensor, and maybe more analysis tools including conversion to USGS format, automatic tweets to the world, and completely automated result publishing. He also plans to release the source code at some point.

Rhoten finds it hard to explain the complexity of his IBM job, simply described as “working with records keeping software for businesses.” Previously at IBM, he worked on International Components for Unicode – software that is part of the iPhone OS, Android, AIX, DB2, bank software, and lots of other non-Microsoft software. His take on IBM’s Smarter Planet campaign? “Big solutions for big business and big government in a big world.”

“It’s perfectly reasonable to let your mind wander to solve your problems. Just don’t let it wander while operating heavy machinery."

Sidenote: Rhoten's favorite joke

What did the Greek cat say when it entered a bar? μ μ μ
(The Greek letter μ is pronounced mu)

You can read more about George’s seismometer here: http://www.centralnexus.com/seismograph/

Josephine Cheng: "We do a lot for society and I'm proud of it"

Josephine Cheng, IBM Fellow & Vice President, IBM Research - Almaden, visited Prague earlier this year. During her one day visit organized by Jan Kleindienst, Head of the Prague Research Lab, Josephine met with selected clients, academicians and authorities in the field of medicine and medical research.

One of the main goals of her visit was to identify opportunities how the Almaden, known among other accomplishments for its medical research, and Prague research team focused on voice recognition, conversational NLU technologies, and advanced user interfaces could work more closely together in the future.

Despite her busy schedule, Josephine found time to meet with reporters from Ekonom, Czech leading business weekly, and talked to them about the IBM’s research and a life of an “IT scientist." Below is a selection of Q&A from the article.

How important is the Czech research centre in the context of the worldwide IBM research?
It is very important. I would say it is one of the most important ones in the respective field, voice recognition technologies.

Could you describe your research activities in Prague?
We focus on the research in the field of human-machine dialogue modeling. But it is not easy to teach computers to understand and especially to engage in a natural conversation, even today after more than 50 years of research. The local group has contributed by cooperating on a number of patents.

What outcomes do you have?
For example those, who drive Honda or Toyota higher class models, have direct experience with voice control developed in the Prague lab. We also work on programs for language teaching or using computers for automatic real-time interpreting from one language into another.

You hold 28 patents, mainly related to software. What is your opinion of patents? Could it be they decelerate the development, when used by large companies against competition?
They are helpful, they protect us. It is not true that they decelerate the progress. IBM has donated hundreds of patents to the open-source community. We also support small companies to cross-licensing. And I have never heard of IBM using software patents as a weapon against competitors.

Scientists are said to be weirdos, the same goes for IT people. Does it mean that IT researchers are double weird?
This is the first time I have heard it, I think we are very much like anybody else. We do a lot for the society and I am proud of it. We – researchers - transform the world every day and we have contributed to developing things everybody uses. I have worked on databases and now they are used everywhere: in all companies, banks, airlines, but also hotels and restaurants. Ten years ago, I helped to develop first mobile applications and now I can see a lot of progress. Many things that we have invented make people’s lives easier and that is what I love about IT.

Back to scientists: does your research centre have exercise rooms, relax sofas and other unusual instruments?
Almaden is a quite an unusual place, surrounded by hills and trees. We have a gym, but many people just exercise outside, go cycling or taking part at Almaden Olympic Games organized every year. We have regular camping nights for employees and their families in the nearby forests. Wider public can benefit from educational programs on science and technology. We aim to promote science and bring it closer to people’s attention.

Is the promotion of science helpful?
I think so. Besides these camps, we also organize engineers´ weeks, when our employees visit schools, give lectures on research and development and motivate students. It is necessary, because many students, especially in poor regions have no idea what researchers do. They believe that scientists are there to repair a TV set or a car. They do not have a clue, who a software engineer is. Therefore we try to educate them, raise the awareness of elementary things. After this educational week program, some of them may focus on development. Some children even send me letters describing what they have learnt. I really believe such programs are beneficial.

Spotted: Silicon Valley Marathon

Here's IBM Research Senior Contracts Professional Steven (Russ) Williams, just after crossing the finish line at the Silicon Valley Marathon on October 31 - still smiling after speeding through 26.2 miles in just 3 hours and 36 minutes. Go Russ!

Halloween Haunts at Almaden

Every year, the event team at Almaden hosts a spectacularly spooky haunted house. Employees bring their kids, usually decked out in costumes, who listen to a short story in the "library" before checking out the rest of the rooms in the house - as they wind through the maze, they see everything from a headless horseman to a zombie baby. As the tour ends, they 'walk the plank' on a haunted pirate ship... with, of course, a real live pirate. Yo-ho!