Adventurous Research (AR) program

The Adventurous Research (AR) program was established in 1996 to foster research that addresses very challenging and highly risky technical objectives by using a scientific approach -- and that has the potential to lead to significant business opportunities for IBM if technically successful. The AR program provides a "bottoms up" means for proposing such research.

AR projects have been characterized by a focused effort over multiple years by a dedicated team. They have ranged in duration from two to four years and in size from three to six full-time members. An AR technical advisory team assesses the progress of all AR projects, typically twice a year, provides guidance to the projects and makes recommendations about continuing or terminating AR projects. (See sidebar for members of the AR technical advisory team.)

The AR program has been highly selective. Of the approximately 150 proposals submitted since the program was established, 23 have been accepted. Currently we have two active AR projects. Fourteen AR projects have been completed; seven were ended early. The fourteen completed projects have resulted in ten Research Accomplishments.

In 2007, the AR program was merged with the Exploratory Research (ER) program (initiated in 2006), into a single program called Exploratory Research (password required). Questions about the ER program should be directed to Mark Wegman and Haixun Wang (see sidebar for e-mail addresses).


Active AR Projects

Project name	Date completed	Type of accomplishment
Self-aware Distributed Systems	August 2007
Personal Wizards: Acquiring Sharable Procedural Knowledge by Demonstration	November 2005
Robust Facial Analysis Using Biometaphorical Computing Techniques	June 2005
PeopleVision: A Multiscale Human Perception System	2005	2006 Research IBM Impact Accomplishment
Multimedia Mining via Linguistic Association	August 2004	2005 Research Science & Technology Accomplishment
Responsive Information Architect	July 2004	2005 Research Science & Technology Accomplishment
Speech to Speech Translation	May 2004	2007 Upgrade to Outstanding Accomplishment
Trainable Information Extraction Systems (TIES)	September 2003
Everywhere Displays - Graphical Interfaces for Pervasive Computing	July 2003	2003 Research Science & Technology Accomplishment
Knowledge Communities as Socially Translucent Systems	September 2002	2005 Research Science & Technology Accomplishment
K42 Multiprocessor Operating System	December 2001
Text Independent Speaker Recognition over Large Populations	December 2000
Creating an Information Economy	December 2000	2000 Research Science & Technology Accomplishment
Gryphon: Intelligent Information Spaces	December 2000	2001 Research IBM Impact Accomplishment for the pub/sub engine; 2004 Research IBM Impact Accomplishment