Each year, IBM selects a new field of Master Inventors as one way of recognizing IBMers who have mastered the patent process, provided broad mentoring, added value to IBM's portfolio, and demonstrated sustained innovation leadership and service. Once selected, a Master Inventor is expected to apply his or her mastery of patent knowledge by actively serving as a:
*leader in the invention community
*mentor to a broad community of inventors
*resource to Intellectual Property Legal office
This year, IBM Research has named forty-one Master Inventors from its global community of researchers, including five from IBM Research - Almaden. Bin He, Research Scientist in Computer Science, Guy Lohman, Mgr., Disruptive Information Management Architectures also in Almaden's Computer Science Department and Ho-Cheol Kim, Research Scientist, Materials Science, shared some thoughts about their motivations, their inspirations, and their hopes to encourage others to invent.
Why do you think other IBMers should pursue their inventions to fruition? How do you hope to inspire them?
GL: Having visited the Smithsonian Museum as a kid, I saw all these miniature prototypes submitted by inventors. I made it one of my personal goals to someday have a patent. Little did I realize then that working at IBM would make it relatively easy to have many of them! Getting patents seems to me like a natural extension of research, much as papers in the refereed literature and products. It's a way of letting the world know what you have done, part of your resume, and also benefits the company.
BH: I believe for every difficulty we encounter in the project and development, there is an opportunity for inventions. It is critical to observe those difficulties and think deeper.
HCK: As you never know which one turns out good (well....like a box of chocolates). Keep thinking.
What's been one of the most memorable moments of your IBM career?
GL: Probably being elected to the IBM Academy of Technology, a very great honor and opportunity to join the top 300 technologists in IBM. Also, receiving a Corporate Award for my invention and development of the SQL query optimizer for DB2 on Linux, UNIX, and Windows. Both earned me a trip to CTRE, which were great treats for my wife, as well as myself.
BH: I am very excited when my research effort and projects are eventually taken by IBM service and product divisions.
HCK: Being a master inventor!
What are some unexpected or interesting jobs you've had outside of IBM?
GL: Right out of high school, before my freshman year in college, I landed a job in the mailroom of Service Bureau Corp., then a subsidiary of IBM, in downtown San Jose. Shortly afterwards, they asked me if I'd like to operate computers on the graveyard shift (zzzzz!), and I said, "Of course!" I started feeding punched cards to an IBM 1620, but the next summer graduated to the new IBM 360s. We ran large batch jobs that were testing the S/360 operating system to support a "massive" workload of 40 (!!) concurrent terminals, using one 360/40 to simulate 40 users -- wow! We could tell when things got in an infinite loop by watching the pattern of blinking lights on the console, then would walk through the loop by pushing a "single-instruction step" button and writing down the instruction address shown in the lights. I learned a LOT!
Before coming to IBM, I worked for 5+ years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena during the years of the Voyager spacecraft's fly-bys of the outer planets, and shortly after the Viking spacecraft landed on Mars. I was working on lowering the costs of photovoltaics (without much success), but it was so exciting to witness first-hand the development of spacecraft and the amazing science that Voyager enabled. I still remember the electric atmosphere at JPL the day that an image analyst discovered volcanoes on Io, the innermost of the Galilean moons of Jupiter. One respected astrophysicist told me that that discovery would force science to "rewrite the textbooks about the solar system"!
BH: When I was in Peking University, I was a columnist for several famous computer magazines in China. In graduate school, I once took a detective role - I used my knowledge in computer science to help my friend to find a bad guy who tries to ruin my friend's fame with online identity fraud. Now, I am a volunteer for SOAR foundation, a nonprofit organization to provide scholarships to those impoverished children in rural areas across China.
As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? What or who drove you to where you are now?
GL: I knew I wanted to be a scientist, and dreamed of being an astronaut, so getting that job at JPL in a way fulfilled my childhood dream of working for NASA. My father was my inspiration, as he was an electrical engineer at a small start-up called "IBM." He constantly challenged me and encouraged my curiosity about how things ticked and my love for the structure and elegance of mathematics.
BH: When I was a kid, I was crazy about writing all kinds of strange but fun computer programs. After I joined graduate school, I realized that research is more interesting and influential, and that is why I joined IBM Research.
HCK: I wanted to be a scientist. Curiosity was the driving force.
What are some of your hobbies?
GL: I love photography, skiing, bicycling, home improvement, and gardening. I belong to a wine co-op that buys grapes on the open market and does all the rest to make red wine (white wine needs more specialized cooling equipment), which we store in the basement of our chief winemaker's business on The Alameda .
BH: I enjoy reading books and articles, writing blogs and poems.
HCK: Hiking, Reading, Bird Watching (with my daughter), Golf
Jeff Kreulen, Senior Manager, Services Science was also awarded a Corporate Technical Achievement Award for his work on the Business Insights Workbench (Outstanding). Renu Tewari, Manager, Distributed Storage Systems, received recognition for Scientific Advances in the Field of Content Distribution Networks. Corporate awards were presented during an all-hands meeting at IBM Research - Almaden on Tuesday, May 3.
Today, IBM also announced its eight new Fellows - the highest technical award given in the company for breakthrough technical achievements. Watson's chief scientist, Dave Ferrucci, was one of them.
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