IBM's cognitive computing chips make waves

Last week, IBM unveiled the first ever cognitive computing chips - designed to learn without set programming, the chips emulate the brain's ability for perception, action, reaction and sensation, and have demonstrated the ability to recognize handwritten numbers and provide its best answer for what it "sees" on the screen. The chips have also learned how to play the game Pong, in which it "watches" the ball, predicts the trajectory, and moves the paddle to block the ball with amazing accuracy.

You can read all about the SyNAPSE project at ibm.com/synapse and catch up on the 10 ten things to know about the SyNAPSE project on the IBM Research news blog. Selected press clips follow, as well as a video highlight reel.



New York Times: I.B.M. Announces Brainy Computer Chip
Associated Press: IBM Pursues Chips That Behave Like Brains
The Wall Street Journal: IBM Announces Move Toward ‘Cognitive’ Computing
Bloomberg Businessweek: IBM Chip ‘Senses’ Events to React Like Brain
AFP: IBM unveils computer chips that mimic human brain
NBC: IBM's New Chips Act Like Your Brain
BBC: IBM produces first 'brain chips'
CNET: IBM says new chip mimics the human brain
GigaOm: For our sensor heavy future, IBM cooks up a new silicon brain
MIT Tech Review: IBM's New Chips Compute More Like We Do
Gizmodo: IBM's Processors Will Think Like Brains
Engadget: IBM's cognitive computing chip functions like a human brain, heralds our demise
Venturebeat: IBM produces first working chips modeled on the human brain

"Fascinating? No doubt. It's initiatives like these that demonstrate just how different IBM is from Hewlett-Packard and other peers, especially now that CEO Leo Apotheker is cutting consumer-facing operations to focus on big-ticket sales. Reverse-engineering brainpower would have to seem like a frivolous enterprise."

- Motley Fool

IBM CEO visits IBM Research - Almaden

Researchers at Almaden were thrilled to attend a townhall event with IBM Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano on Thursday, August 4. In his first speaking engagement (to employees) at Almaden, he gave an overview of IBM's first half, and the audience of over 350 enjoyed his casual and personable presentation style, complete with a few friendly jokes.




Following the townhall, Mr. Palmisano presented a Centennial Lecture at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Analyst Rob Enderle, in an article about the event, said:

"I attended a truly brilliant speech last night. It is now one of those that I’ll likely take with me to the grave...[IBM CEO Sam Palmisano] spoke about what it takes to make it through 100 years and I’ll remember both what he said and, more importantly, what he did, which is give IBMers hope."

(Read the rest of Rob's article here: What IBM and Sam Palmisano Could Teach Apple, Microsoft and President Obama on itbusinessedge.com)

Addtional coverage:

Harvard Business Review
IBM at 100: How to Outlast Depression, War, and Competition

EE Times
IBM CEO: How to live to be 100

eWeek
IBM CEO Palmisano Reflects on Company's 100 Years

Forbes
IBM's Palmisano: How You Get To Be a 100 Year-Old Company

Watch Mr. Palmisano's lecture at the Computer History Museum: What Changes and What Endures below:

Intern Spotlight: Summertime at Almaden

The days are longer, the temperature is higher and the Thursday BBQ days in the cafeteria have commenced; IBM Research - Almaden is bustling with a fresh vibrance that can only mean one thing - it's summertime!

With most of the interns being from out of state and even out of the country, a few casual discussions over free afternoon popcorn and tea warranted some interesting perspectives on the lab. When asked what their favorite part about the lab was so far, almost everybody mentioned the location, the weather, the people and the wildlife. University of Denver student DiDi Wei saw cows on her first day and "thought it was really neat." Shripad Nadgowda from Napur, India added that his favorite part is the research that he's involved in during his time here; he chose IBM for his summer internship because "IBM is the biggest technology hub. IBM technologies are very well studied in the academia. I wanted to join IBM to get chance to learn these technologies from people who invented them."

The interns come from a wide variety of scientific and mathematical backgrounds: chemistry, applied mathematics, systems, ubiquitous computing, epidemiological modeling, and robotics and intelligent systems to name a few. So why IBM?

The words legendary, resume-builder, fun and famous came into play. University of Washington MBA candidate, Naureen Manekia replied, "Who wouldn't want to work for such a world famous company in beautiful California? As a Human Resources Intern, I was interested in learning best HR practices from a global, high performance organization and this internship provided me with this valuable opportunity. I will be able to more effectively build my network and expand my experiences with IBM this summer. I'm looking forward to the fun and challenges IBM has to offer!"

Jorge Guerra, a Caracas, Venezuela native, expressed that "as a PhD student, IBM Almaden offers an excellent opportunity to experience research from an industry perspective, which complements the academic training I get from school. Also, I found that IBM has a very diverse group of researchers from different backgrounds and this greatly helps enrich discussions and debate on product ideas."

The internship experience in general is designed to enrich and add value to University studies, future job searches, and life lessons. IBM proves its success - Douglas Willcocks from London lamented that this is "an excellent opportunity to gain experience at a world class research lab." Sureyya Tarkan also agreed on the notion that IBM is a world-class facility and wanted to know what it was like to work in a "large research group."

All in all, their experience at IBM is beneficial in that future employers will recognize that they've contributed to a professional environment and will be prepared to take on challenging tasks. Kim Weaver mentioned that she "always thought that professors should have some experience in industry to better relate to their students, most of whom desire industry and not academic jobs. This was a good opportunity to work with some great, well-respected people."

Finally, there were some discussions on the benefits and perks of being an IBMer, even if it is for a few short months out of the year. Some of the interns are taking advantage of Great America Theme Park tickets at a discount of $20 off regular ticket price; others are enjoying free public transportation all summer long, thanks to IBM's free eco-passes. Discounted movie tickets are popular, as are the on-site dry cleaning service and on-site car wash. Almaden's full service library also got kudos, due to their excellent assistance in providing books ordered specially from other IBM sites.

While Almaden's full-time residents are doing their part in making the lab a comfortable home-away-from-home for the interns, there's definitely mutual benefits - learning, networking, and having fun all come into play during this season, for all parties involved.

Summer Intern Showcase

The wide range of business applications and discoveries developed by the interns this year were largely ideas stemming from existing research projects or those that were yet to be executed by Almaden’s research teams. With the help, enthusiasm and refined expertise of this year’s interns, many of those ideas and projects were realized in just three short months, while others gained significant momentum toward fulfillment.

Many of the interns worked on projects that were vastly different from their current course of study at their universities. Shripad Nadgoda from Stony Brook University took on a GPFS project in the storage area that didn’t align with his coursework, but changed his frame of mind to a new type of research, which he indicated "will be helpful later because I’ve been able to explore a different area and start from scratch." Yang Ye of Colombia University echoed those sentiments stating, "It was nice to learn how to solve real problems in the industry. It was hard at first, but then your mind switches, and you take off in the right direction."

Others, however, were recruited based on their expertise in certain areas. Sunyoung Kim from Carnegie Mellon University authored/co-authored several published papers around air quality research. IBM Human Computer Interaction researcher Tom Zimmerman read her paper and recruited her to join the team of Almaden computer scientists working on an iPhone app that monitors water quality. In this mutually beneficial scenario, Sunyoung was able to build on her current research focus, and IBMers were able to tap into her knowledge about application development for mobile environmental monitoring.

Interns in the Extreme Blue Program at IBM Research - Almaden shared some thoughts on camera:

Services Innovation Lab strengthens Research

This post originally appeared on the IBM Research news blog on July 28.

Today, IBM announced an initiative designed to link state-of-the-art IBM Research projects directly to the largest part of the company - services.

The Services Innovation Lab (SIL), led by researchers with development and client experience in virtually every field of science and technology, will bring together researchers and services professionals to generate ideas, solve problems, capture opportunities and create new innovations that will transform services. You can learn more about the SIL here.

IBM Research - Almaden senior manager for services research, Stefan Nusser, has been named Almaden Lead for the SIL. Below, he provides some additional thoughts on the motivations, goals and ideal outcomes.



Stefan's team, composed of researchers with varying expertise - nanotechnology, computational biology, user interaction, computer science, data mining, security and compliance, mathematics, business optimization and more - includes Sandeep Gopisetty, IBM Research Distinguished Engineer, who already has a portfolio of projects in place for the launch of the SIL:

• Backup and recovery tools to help with the majority of critical situations in the customer environment.
• Provide insights into a customer environment to check the heal and performance, reducing critical situations as well as helping to manage the customer environment more simply.
  
• Addressing the management of firmware and patches for hardware.
• Intelligent performance aware automation for complex storage tasks.
• Unified policy-based ILM for enterprise storage.
  

GPFS breaks file scanning record by 37x

Editor's note: Guest author Richard Freitas is a computer scientist in storage class memory at IBM Research - Almaden.

In our increasingly instrumented, interconnected and intelligent world, individuals and companies are struggling to deal with the explosive growth of data. According to a recent study there will be 1800 exabytes (EB) of digital data in 2011, up from 220 EB in 2007. Such growth places the data user under tremendous pressure to turn data into actionable insights quickly, while straining the world’s IT infrastructure to its limits. This forces the data user to manage the explosive growth of data and storage using tools designed for easier times.

Existing storage management solutions find it difficult to provide timely storage backup, migration to appropriate performance tiers, replication and distribution. In many cases, users go without the kind of daily backup that industry experts would expect of a large data store. As new applications emerge in industries from financial services to healthcare, traditional systems will be unable to process data on this scale, leaving users exposed to critical data loss.

Anticipating these storage challenges decades ago, Almaden researchers created GPFS, a highly scalable, clustered parallel file system. Already deployed in enterprise environments with one billion files to perform essential tasks such as file backup and data archiving, this technology’s unique approach overcomes the key challenge in managing unprecedented large file systems with the combination of multi-system parallelization and fast access to file system metadata stored on a solid-state storage appliance.

GPFS advanced algorithms make possible the full use of all processor cores on all of these machines in all phases of the task (data read, sorting, and rules evaluation). GPFS exploits the excellent random performance and high data transfer rates of the 6.5 TB solid-state metadata storage. The solid-state appliances sustainably perform hundreds of millions of IO operations, while GPFS continuously identifies, selects and sorts the right set of files from the 10 billion-file file system. Performing this selection in 43 minutes was achieved by using GPFS running on a cluster of ten 8-core systems and four Violin Memory solid-state memory arrays. This is 37 times the rate that was achieved in 2007 on a file system containing 1 Billion files.


You can read more about this IBM Research breakthrough here.

Community: Help through horses for autism

When Carolyn Wallace, IBM Research - Almaden Client Relationship Manager learned about IBM's Centennial Day of Service, she was quickly motivated to rally around a particular cause that affects her personally: autism. Carolyn's 10-year old grandson, Max, has autism, and in the spirit of IBM's 100th year, she decided to gather the efforts of her colleagues and friends in the area to donate their time to Gilroy's DreamPower Horsemanship Camp.

The DreamPower Horsemanship Camp offers a number of therapeutic services to individuals affected by physical and mental disabilities, ranging from equine facilitated psychotherapy, groups for cancer patients and confident rider clinics to couples communication workshops and therapeutic horsemanship lessons for children, teens and adults.

"Max struggles with speech and has been in speech therapy for several years," Carolyn said. "I don't know if it's my imagination or wishful thinking, but I believe his speech is much clearer when he is riding."

Founded by Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Martha McNiel, the program was developed with a specific mission in mind: Building lives filled with dreams, and the power to make dreams come true. Martha is a NARHA Registered Therapeutic Riding Instructor and a Certified Equine Interaction Professional in Mental Health. Along with her staff, she hosts groups at the camp ranging from juvenile delinquents to individuals with cerebral palsy - all with the intent to provide emotional and physical healing for their clients.

With an IBM cash grant of $5,000 used to support the week-long DreamPower Horsemanship Camp for Children on the Autism Spectrum, IBMers and DreamPower staff worked together to create 15 hours worth of horse riding, grooming, arts and crafts and science projects for the children to participate in. Ranging in age from 4 - 13, 16 camp participants from San Jose and Morgan Hill learned about things like horse safety and care, horseriding commands and coordination activities, and also played interactive games like giant Jenga. On the last day of camp, the group got to decorate a mini horse with paint and glitter.

"We have had Max in therapeutic horseback training since November of 2010," Carolyn said. "He is very enthusiastic about his riding classes on Monday evening - he gets ready and stands by the door when it gets close to time to depart for class."

In order to qualify for the grant, which was proposed as part of IBM's Centennial service commitment, the program had to incorporate a science and technology component. By enlisting the help of Schmahl Science - in essence, a science lab on wheels - the kids had an opportunity to explore science, math and engineering through projects tailored specifically to their needs.

Mayor Steve Tate, City of Morgan Hill, coincidentally a 38-year IBMer, supports the philanthropic efforts of IBM, and is proud to have the affiliation attached to his resume: "they're community builders. And that's what we're all about here in Morgan Hill," he said.

In fact, IBMers in the Silicon Valley have donated time directly to the South County in a number of different ways. Community teams have partnered with Solorsano Middle School in Gilroy to put on Lego Robotics Workshops and to invite students to IBM's Annual Technology Camps. Around 25 IBMers volunteer for Rebekah's Children's Services by cleaning up, painting, organizing or planting at various locations. Overall, IBM has donated $182,494 in cash and equipment to the City of Morgan Hill and $10,208 to the City of Gilroy since 2006.

IBM is committed to serving local communities - in fact, IBMers volunteer more than any other company in the world. Since 2003, more than 11 million hours of service has been recorded. In the Silicon Valley alone, IBMers are committed to donating 32,000 hours of service in 2011.



Read about IBM's involvement in the DreamPower Horsemanship Camp in the Morgan Hill Times.

Photo captions, top to bottom:

A camp participant straps on her helmet with the help of a volunteer in anticipation of a therapeutic ride through the arena.

IBM Fellow, CTO and VP, Technical Strategy and Senior Location Executive for the Silicon Valley, Jai Menon, visits the camp to support the nearly 100 IBM volunteers and to express his praise for a program dedicated to an extremely relevant cause.

Middle school girls jump start passion for math and science

Last week, 28 girls gathered at IBM Research - Almaden, some having no idea how interested they were in math and science until they built a PC, had fun with liquid nitrogen, and checked out a homemade robot by local high schoolers that can play soccer. IBM rockstar volunteer, Rick DiPietro, was able to win over a handful more with his "cool chemistry" session where they extracted the DNA from a strawberry. The homemade slime they created was too cool to forget about, and seeing a cotton ball explode was also something many of the girls talked about after the event.

"I learned a whole new side of me that I never knew I had," exclaimed 8th grader Lauren Miller as she tested circuit boards and made her LED light shine. Her fellow camp friend Alice Chu was also surprised at "how fun science can be."

Led by IBM Outreach Program Manager, Bob Martinez, and Corporate Citizenship and Community Affairs Manager Jennifer Hernandez, 42 IBMers volunteered their time throughout the week to help the girls navigate through several science projects. While at Almaden, the group also got to learn about the A/V field with leader Alex DeLuca, how to give an effective business presentation, and a tour of the site which included visits to the computer rooms, telepresence videoconferencing rooms, and the lobby's latest addition, the OmniGlobe. In the middle of the week, the girls were treated to a field trip to San Francisco's California Academy of Science, where the living roof and the 4 story rainforest were favorite exhibits.

Bob Martinez, who has been running this program with the help of his core team for the past 6 years, credits his IBM colleagues for the time they spend volunteering, not only during camp, but throughout the year. Because of the active engagement in youth outreach by IBM employees in the Silicon Valley, Bob and team have developed partnerships with several schools in the area - most with a high concentration of minority students. Additional programs such as Traducelo Ahora and MentorPlace, help give young kids exposure to math and science, which according to experts, is crucial in helping develop the next generation of high-tech professionals.

"The kids get exposure to science and technology during the camp, but they also learn other things that help them prepare for their future," says Martinez. "Creating their project presentations using a manuscript versus conversational method, different teambuilding exercises, and being able to talk intelligently about what they've learned are all things they can take away from this camp and help them excel no matter what career they choose. But when you see the spark in their eye, that's when you know we've done what we set out to do."

A look inside the girl's technology camp from last year:



Picture Captions (Top to Bottom):

The girls participate in cool chemistry with liquid nitrogen.

A MedEvac helicopter, which landed right on-site, gave the girls a chance to learn about air ambulance services, go inside the helicopter, and experience the medical, technical and communication devices used in transport.

A popular project with the girls is soldering wires together to create their own individual LED light box.

The 6-foot OmniGlobe in the building's lobby shows girls the different areas of technology that computer scientists are working on, like 3-D visualization.