In his short story "The Purloined Letter," Edgar Allan Poe illustrated the difficulty of finding something that is "hidden" in plain view. A similar difficulty confronts Web surfers trying to zero in on relevant information amid the mountains of what is available.
Moreover, users often do not have time to search for information they would like to see on a daily basis. How much simpler it would be to have that information show up regularly in one's computer, much like the morning paper, only in a more personalized form. Projects to address these issues are among the many areas of Web technology now being pursued by IBM researchers.
In
"Information on the Fast Track" , Bruce Schechter takes stock of a new project, called Grand Central Station, whose aim is to develop an improved way of gathering and summarizing digital information from many different sources, and to tailor its delivery to users based on their profiles stored in a central server. It also forms the basis of more efficient Web searches.
Even when ones finds something on the Internet that looks relevant, one might still want to know whether the information is current, whether anyone has independently evaluated its accuracy, or whether it is suitable to be shown to children.
In
"Labeling the Web", Marguerite Holloway highlights Research's efforts to broaden the value of labels and metadata used with the industry standard Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS). While directed in part toward the filtering of offensive content, PICS also has the potential to take some of the uncertainty out of Web searches.
The Internet has not only proved a bonanza to millions of legitimate users but has spawned its own underground. Unauthorized access to systems and data can pose a threat to individuals, companies and governments. In "Helpful Hacking" , Mark Fischetti describes work in IBM's Global Security Analysis Laboratory aimed at discovering and plugging security loopholes.
Occasionally a good idea becomes a great idea. Such is the case with a tablet that marries handwriting recognition technology with paper-based writing and drawing. In "Putting Pen to Smart Paper", W. David Gardner tells how handwritten notes, drawings, or other marks made on a pad of ordinary paper can be digitized, time-stamped and saved for later transfer to a personal computer, where the notes can be turned into ASCII text.
As anyone who has worked in a successful team can testify, there are advantages to be gained from sharing the workload and backing one another up. Computers, too, can benefit from teamwork. Joining them together in so-called clusters leads to higher performance and high availability, whereby processing continues even if one machine fails. In
"The Cluster is the Key", Gary Taubes explains the logic behind clustering and efforts to implement it in IBM, in particular a new cross-platform clustering technology for UNIX systems.
Finally, in "Where Research Meets the Market", Peter Gwynne gives an overview and update of IBM's three Industry Solution Laboratories, which are proving to be an ideal venue for researchers to learn about the current needs of the marketplace while offering customers insights into technologies that could form the basis of novel solutions to the problems that confront their industries.
