IBM Research: Using data to power and feed an island nation
Using data to power and feed an island nation. Analysis of weather and climate data will help Brunei to: 1) diversify from oil and gas to renewable energy; and 2)improve food security by increasing rice production from 3% to 60% by 2015.
(via ibmsocialbiz)
A Boy And His Atom: The World’s Smallest Movie
Scientists are known for loving their work. Biologists tend to their cultures and animals. Physicists polish their exquisite machines like sports car entusiasts treat vintage Ferraris. So do chemists love atoms? Apparently they do. At least enough to write a love story with, and about them.
IBM scientists have created the world’s smallest movie using individual atoms. It’s the story of a boy and his playful atom buddy, drawn in stop motion and with each quantum pixel positioned using a scanning tunneling microscope. Every frame is magnified a stunning 100 million times!
This amazing feat was accomplished by using a charged atomic needle to drag single carbon monoxide molecules (the individual atoms we see are one side of that two-atom molecule) around on a copper substrate. I’ve posted a little bit about these feats of atomic art before, with these “quantum corrals” and “ferrous wheels”.
See those ripples around each atom? They remind me of pebbles being tossed into a still pond. They are actually ripples in the electron field of the copper surface below! It’s a reminder that, contrary to many textbooks, electrons behave more like waves than particles following an orbit. And like any other wave, they can form intricate interference patterns. Check out this previous post for more on that.
The hope is that manipulating atomic structures like this may lead to even greater information storage capacity. Imaging all the world’s books and movies on your mobile phone at once!
Here’s a “making of” movie from IBM, featuring the sound of atoms being moved as well as the encouraging sight of several female team members.
This makes me as happy as atom boy there.
With a drop of liquid, IBM develops a new microchip switch | CNET News
Ionic liquids can switch the state of a metal oxide from conducting to insulating and back again, something that could be useful for computer processing and memory.
IBM Research - Africa (by IBMSocialMedia)
Announcing the IBM Customer Experience Lab
Yesterday IBM announced the creation of the IBM Customer Experience Lab, an exclusive Research and GBS capability aimed at the front-office agenda of clients in the world of Big Data. One hundred Research scientists worldwide will work with thousands of GBS business consultants to address the emerging C-Suite Front Office Digitization priorities.
In her remarks at IBM’s annual briefing for financial analysts, Ginni called the front-office transformation of functions like sales, marketing and customer service the most significant wave of business change since the advent of ERP in the 1990s. To lead in this opportunity, we are scaling access to the highest levels of expertise for CEOs, CMOs, CxOs, public officials, and other global business leaders who recognize the urgency to create new models of engagement and move at the speed of individual attitudes and preferences.
Banorte-lxe, one of the leading banks in Latin America, and Nationwide, the world’s largest building society, are among clients already engaged with the Research and consulting experts of the new lab. During its start-up phase, the Lab will focus on six priority industries — Banking, Insurance, Retail, Consumer Products, Telco and Energy & Utilities — and we are going to select and manage the engagements coming into the Lab through GBS Global Industry Leaders and partners.
The Lab will be co-led by Sarah Diamond, general manager, Global Consulting Services, and Mahmoud Naghshineh, vice president, Services Research, with support across all 12 of IBM’s Research labs globally and a team of innovation leaders selected from the GBS Centers of Competence. Jade Nguyen Strattner has been named director of the CXLab, with overall responsibility for its day-to-day operations and the ongoing integration of Research and GBS capabilities.
IBM Research: IBM Customer Experience Lab
To help its clients successfully navigate these changes, IBM has established the IBM Customer Experience Lab to invent new ways for them to provide best-in-class customer experiences across their many channels. Located at the T.J. Watson Research Center, with additional virtual collaborators around the world, the IBM Customer Experience Lab is a partnership between IBM Research and IBM Global Business Services. A dedicated team of researchers and consultants will work with clients on customer insights, customer engagement, and employee engagement through the use of mobile, social, cloud and analytics technologies.
“The best inventors do it because it is so much fun, they can’t stop doing it.”
Bob Friedlander + James Kraemer
120+ patents, 350+ pending
IBM and IBN create antimicrobial hydrogels (by IBMLabs)
Bacterial biofilms appearing on the skin and on medical devices and household surfaces are difficult to treat and demonstrate high resistance to antibiotics. Antimicrobial hydrogels developed by IBM Research and the Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology demonstrate 100% efficiency in destruction of these biofilms, with application potential for catheter and medical device coatings, implants, skin and everyday surfaces.
Big Brains. Small Films.
An IBMer on galaxies and chickens.
Q&A with Scott Reynolds, IBM Research scientist specializing in integrated chip design.
A winner of a Pat Goldberg Best Paper Award for Organic Packages with Embedded Phased-Array Antennas for 60-GHz Wireless Chipsets (pdf), Scott talks about the challenges of designing an organic package capable of transferring data at very high rates.
What problem did you set out to research when you began developing an organic package with antennas and a microchip?
Our integrated circuit team wanted to build a chipset you could use to stream uncompressed video data at five gigabits per second. That’s a really high rate, and that’s a lot of data.
Almost any data source, whether it’s coming from a DVD or streamed from an online source, is compressed. But when it gets to that box in your living room, it’s uncompressed. You actually do not want to compress it when you transmit it to your television set: Every time you compress and decompress data, your video image is going to get a little bit worse. That compression-decompression cycle also adds latency, or time delay. The latency involved in these compression-decompression algorithms is hundreds of milliseconds. That’s too long for movies and way too long for video gaming.
Remember too that the consumer electronics companies have to pay royalty fees every time they go through a compression-decompression cycle.
Why are you working with organic materials instead of semiconductors?
IBM taking two paths toward making solar power cheaper than fossil fuels | Ars Technica
The price of photovoltaic hardware has dropped so dramatically in recent years that, according to some projections, a well-sited panel may become competitive with fossil fuels before the decade is out. To reach that point, which comes when panels cost below $2 per Watt, prices will have to continue their steep decline. During our visit to IBM’s Watson research center, we talked to two people who are working on ways to drive the cost down—but they are taking radically different approaches. The panels that most people are familiar with use silicon as a semiconductor. That has a few advantages, like cheap raw materials and reasonably high efficiency. But manufacturing panels remains expensive, and there aren’t obvious ways of squeezing large gains in efficiency out of standard silicon. So, IBM is looking at materials that don’t involve silicon: thin films and concentrating photovoltaics.
IBM Breaks Efficiency Mark with Novel Solar Material - Technology Review
An IBM-led research teams says that a combination of copper, zinc, tin, and selenium (CZTS) could meet current thin-film efficiencies with more abundant materials.
IBM says it has made technical progress on a solar technology that researchers hope will yield efficient thin-film solar cells made from abundant materials.
IBM photovoltaic scientists Teodor Todorov and David Mitzi on Friday detailed the findings of a paper that showed the highest efficiency to date for solar cells made from a combination of copper, zinc, tin, and selenium (CZTS). Published in Advanced Energy Materials, the technical paper described a CZTS solar cell able to convert 11.1 percent of solar energy to electricity.
That level of efficiency is a significant jump from the 10.1 percent efficiency Mitzi and colleagues showed last year. (See, Efficiency Solar Cells from Cheaper Materials). The paper also argues that CZTS solar cells could achieve efficiencies high enough to make them commercially viable.
Over the past few decades, Moore’s Law, processor speed and hardware scalability have been the driving factors enabling IT innovation and improved systems performance. But the von Nuemann architecture—which established the basic structure for the way components of a computing system interact—has remained largely unchanged since the 1940s. Furthermore, to derive value, people still have to engage with computing systems in the manner that the machines work, rather than computers adapting to interact with people the way they work.
With the continuous rise of big data, that’s no longer good enough.
We now are entering the Cognitive Systems Era, in which a new generation of computing systems is emerging with embedded data analytics, automated management and data-centric architectures in which the storage, memory, switching and processing are moving ever closer to the data.
Whereas in today’s programmable era, computers essentially process a series of “if then what” equations, cognitive systems learn, adapt, and ultimately hypothesize and suggest answers. Delivering these capabilities will require a fundamental shift in the way computing progress has been achieved for decades.
Last week, I attended, as a speaker, IBM’s EMEA Academic Days in Frankfurt. The main topic of the event was “Big Data Analytics“. I was particularly intrigued by the presentation of Professor Andy Neely from Cambridge who spoke about “Big Data and Analytics: Changing the Face of Business Performance Measurement“.
