Computer scientists at IBM work on a wide range of issues that shape the way we communicate with each other, collaborate on business and scientific projects, organize information, protect our privacy -- and live our lives online and off.
Every month, IBM computer scientists publish original articles in Innovation Matters, a series that explores the technical challenges of their research -- challenges that ultimately foster innovation in databases, servers and software code. Read about research developments in research areas such as Artificial Intelligence, Design Automation, Graphics & Visualization, Mobile Computing, Security & Privacy and Human-Computer Interaction, to name just a few.
For earlier articles on innovation, see Research Spotlights.
2006
September: Security & Privacy
SPARCLE (Server Privacy ARrchitecture and CapabiLity Enablement) policy workbench
This policy workbench simplifies the management of organizational policies across the enterprise, improves the quality of rules and enables the technical implementation of rules to ensure consistency, reliability and compliance. Author and featured researcher: Clare-Marie Karat.
August: Statistics
A statistical approach to capacity planning for On-Demand computing services. Capacity planning becomes an important issue in a "shared" customer environment. Author and featured researcher: Jonathan Hosking.
July: Distributed & Fault-Tolerant Computing
Smart Middleware and Light Ends (SMILE). Applications of this distributed stream processing technology aid in identifying financial trading opportunities, detecting potential banking fraud, locating problems in enterprise IT systems and managing RFID applications, to name a few. Author and featured researcher: Rob Strom.
June: Signal Procesing
Print verification system. The PVS scans and processes printed pages in real time to ensure that their print quality meets application-critical customer needs. Adding to the challenge is the high rate at which the images are printed: more than 750 printed pages per minute. Author and featured researcher: Gordon Braudaway.
May: Artificial Intelligence
Estimating the difficulty of queries submitted to search engines. This AI work attempts to predict the chances of a search engine providing the correct documents for any given query. Author and featured researcher: Elad Yom-Tov.
-- Communications & Networking
Flow-based data traffic analysis. A system developed in the Aurora network traffic analysis and visualization project uses techniques for collecting, storing and analyzing flow-based network traffic information. Author and featured researcher: Andreas Kind.
-- Computational Biology & Medical Informatics
RNA interference: small molecules that carry a big stick. RNAi is believed to be an indispensable component for running the biological processes related to limb formation, heart development and stem cell division, to name a few -- once thought to be managed entirely by the action of proteins but now understood to be controlled by microRNAs. Author and featured researcher: Isidore Rigoutsos.
February: Design Automation
VLSI critical area analysis via Voronoi diagrams. The ability to accurately and quickly extract critical area is essential for Very Large-Scale integration (VLSI) manufacturing, especially when considering Design for Manufacturability (DFM) changes to chip designs in order to improve yield. Author and featured researcher: Evanthia Papadopoulou.
January: Artificial Intelligence
Self-aware distributed systems. Researchers worked to automate the complex and expensive task of real-time problem diagnosis in large-scale distributed systems by using state-of-art machine-learning, probabilistic reasoning and information-theoretic approaches. Author and featured researcher: Irina Rish.
Last updated on 15 January 2008