Spinning to the Surface
Honors
Research Participates in New Institute
New Initiatives - HotVideo: The Cool Way to Link
LabNote - IBM Creates Indian Link
Fractals and Finance
Measuring Magnetic Moments
Ensuring Network Security
Spinning to the Surface
Chemical reactions involve more than just the chemical identity of the reactants. Some take place only when the reacting molecules are properly aligned. Scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Center and the University of California, Santa Barbara, have recently extended the understanding of geometry's role to a new arena: reactions at surfaces. In a pioneering experiment, they have found that molecules that spin parallel to an approaching surface, like helicopters landing, are more likely to react with the surface than molecules that approach perpendicularly with a cartwheel-like spin.
The work has basic and commercial objectives. "The ultimate goal is to understand chemical reactions at surfaces on an atom-by-atom basis," says Daniel Auerbach, an Almaden participant in the team. "That understanding is important for manufacturing processes in microelectronics and storage, and in general to vacuum processes that involve reactions with surfaces."
The team used a simple, well-characterized reaction, between molecules of deuterium - an isotope of hydrogen - and a copper surface. For technical reasons, they studied the reaction backward, monitoring how atoms of deuterium combine on a copper surface to form molecules that then leave the surface. Those observations showed the existence of a reaction barrier that can prevent arriving molecules from splitting into atoms, which attach to the surface, once they land. Molecules that rotate parallel to the surface as they approach, the team reports in the July 4 issue of Science, are up to three times more successful in reacting with the copper surface than those tumbling end over end.
That finding supports the idea that the barrier to reaction is smallest if both the atoms in the incoming molecule can form chemical bonds with the surface at the same time. In that case, explains Auerbach, the energy required to break the molecular bond between those atoms is immediately offset by the energy released as the atoms form new bonds with copper atoms on the surface.
Now, in the effort to gain deeper understanding of chemical reactions at surfaces, the team is seeking better data and more sensitivity for experiments on alignment effects for rotating molecules. The researchers are also studying the surface reactions of strongly vibrating molecules. "We're very excited about understanding the role of large amounts of vibrational energy in reactions at surfaces," says Auerbach. "We're hoping to find new and exciting chemistry with potential applications."
HONORS
The 134 members of The National Inventors Hall of Fame have been joined by Robert H. Dennard, a Fellow at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center who invented the one-transistor dynamic random access memory (DRAM). Created in 1966 and patented two years later, DRAM first appeared in commercial products in the early 1970s. Since then, it has developed into a $25 billion business.
Dennard drew his inspiration from a presentation in which in-house competitors to his project team outlined their plans for thin-film magnetic memory. "That evening, I started exploring the possibility of storing data in a simpler way, as a charge level on a capacitor," he recalls. "Within a few hours I had gotten the basic ideas for the creation of DRAM ironed out in my mind."
Richard L. Garwin, an IBM Fellow Emeritus who spent most of his career at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, has received the Enrico Fermi Award for a lifetime of achievement in the field of nuclear energy. The award, the U.S. government's oldest for science and technology, recognizes Garwin's many contributions to national security and arms control, as well as his achievements in nuclear and particle physics.
Garwin joined IBM in 1952, with the understanding that he would spend one-third of his time working on national security and arms control for the federal government. As an IBM researcher, he worked on basic physics issues: liquid and solid helium; superconductivity; the nonconservation of parity; and means of measuring gravity waves. He also helped to develop several widely used products, among them computer touch screens, medical imaging equipment and laser printers.
Now formally retired from IBM, he works on the elimination of excess nuclear weapons and weapon material, on chemical and biological weapons, and on technology and policy for U.S. security. "I am pleased that...I have been able to do this at IBM while continuing to make occasional contributions to IBM patents and technology," he said.
Fran Allen, the first woman to become an IBM Fellow, is one of 15 recipients of the 1997 Women in Science and Technology Hall of Fame Award. A senior technical consultant at Watson, Allen has made strong contributions to programming languages for most of her 40-year career at IBM. Her achievements include seminal work in compilers, code optimization and parallelization. She has also served as president of the IBM Academy of Technology.
Research Participates in New Institute
The Research Division is collaborating with other IBM units to create a new Personal Systems Institute (PSI), which will be based at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. The Institute has the objective of moving advanced technologies from concept into products in the desktop, mobile, server, workstation, consumer and network computer arenas. The PSI will have a formal start at a symposium in Raleigh on October 22 and 23.
Employees from a number of Research sites will join members of the PC Company and the Consumer and Network divisions in staffing the Institute. Two individuals will manage the Institute: Robert J. T. Morris, director of personal systems and advanced systems technology at Watson; and Trey Smith, the PC Company's director of technology and chief technology officer, who is a former director of physical sciences at Watson.
"Personal computing is the computing that everyone can relate to, and it is fast becoming the ground on which the rules are set for the entire industry," said Morris. "The Personal Systems Institute will break down organizational boundaries to create a single team that will combine the innovation found throughout IBM with the market power of our personal systems group. That powerful mixture offers us a chance to reestablish the lead in this fast-moving technology."
The Institute has defined some ground rules to ensure that it maintains an appropriate mix of work on products, new product concepts and future technology. It will seek inspiration from far and wide. "The PSI will be a virtual organization throughout IBM, and anyone who has ideas will be welcome to join," explains Morris.
New Initiatives - HotVideo: The Cool Way to Link
"Only connect," urged the novelist E. M. Forster. That is often easier said than done. But connections of a particular type - called hyperlinks - lie at the heart of the Internet.
Documents with hypertext - highlighted words or phrases in a document that allow one to link to related Web sites - became part of the Internet when the World Wide Web emerged in 1989. The multimedia universe that the Web introduced made inevitable the next innovation: hypervideo, which gives users a multimedia linking capability directly from a video.
HotVideo is an innovative implementation of hypervideo developed at IBM's China Research Laboratory (CRL). It allows one to connect to an associated resource by clicking on any dynamic object in a video, explains Jeane Chen, who led the HotVideo effort at CRL and is now manager of interactive media solutions at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center. "For example," she explains, "you might see an IBM ThinkPad¨ in a video, and by clicking on it, jump to the ThinkPad home page or even another video specifically about that product line."
Conceived in September 1996, the first version of HotVideo took a mere two to three months to develop. A second version, which involved a complete revamping of the basic architecture, was completed in mid-July. While not the first use of hypervideo, HotVideo has introduced important new ideas, especially in regard to the user interface.
"Hypertext signals a link by means of distinctive colors or highlighting, but that would be too intrusive for video," says Chen. HotVideo addresses that problem by means of a hot-link indicator. When a hot link appears in a frame, a green light outside the frame turns red. HotVideo offers various options for communicating the location of the hot links to the user. For example, the user can have the hot link revealed via a color or highlighting change by clicking on the right mouse button.
HotVideo also includes an authoring tool for creating links and customizing the user interface. In certain kinds of applications, such as games, an author might require that the user guess or otherwise discover the links.
These flexible options reflect the general nature of HotVideo, which Chen and her colleagues are positioning as a platform for interactive video. With the use of Active X Control (OCX), a standard that allows a given application to be easily adapted into other programs, one can plug HotVideo into one's Web browser or use it to work with videos in other digital media.
Chen and IBM's Media Industry Solutions Unit are currently talking to prospective customers. These include TV networks, which could use HotVideo to explore new forms of programming, to learn about customer preferences, or to sell subsidiary services. For example, a travel program might sell HotVideo links to the sites of travel agencies, airlines, shops or other businesses shown in the program.
The authoring tool can also give new capabilities to individuals who
create Web pages, presentation videos, CD-ROMs or DVDs, the latest format for digital video (see "Digital Disc Diplomacy," Research, Number 1, 1997). "Our data structure," says Chen, "allows the source data and the hyperlink data to reside in different files, which are synchronized when the video is played." That makes it possible for a DVD producer, for example, to sell links to the home page of a company whose product is shown in a film. Since the link information is stored separately from the DVD, the video itself is never changed.
Indeed, videos may soon be judged more by what they link to than what they look like. An entire aftermarket could develop, offering hypervideo links. "What HotVideo really does," says Chen, "is to transform the two-dimensional space of ordinary video into a true multidimensional information space."
For more information see: http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/formula
Lab Note - IBM Creates India Link
Extending the reach of its Research establishments to a new part of the world, IBM has announced plans to open a Solutions Research Center in Delhi, India, around the end of this year. Alok Aggarwal, a senior research manager at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, will become the center's first director.
Aggarwal will oversee an institution that will focus on exploratory technologies and solutions designed to support India's growing infrastructure. "Our goal is to build on the success of IBM's worldwide research organization and create an environment that encourages researchers to make major technological advances that benefit both India and IBM," he explains.
Among other projects, Aggar-wal expects his team to work on weather forecasting, supply chain management and cellular telephony. Weather forecasting technology is in demand because the Indian Ocean has complex weather patterns; supply chain management will apply to India's emerging manufacturing and marketing processes; and cellular solutions are critical for a region trying to overcome its poor telecommunications infrastructure. In each case the new center will adapt existing technology from IBM Research to local conditions.
In forming the Solutions Research Center, IBM recognizes the technological dynamism of a nation with a rapidly growing middle class and a steady supply of highly trained technologists. "India is one of the fastest-growing markets for information technology and is producing outstanding scientists, researchers and engineers," says Paul Horn, director of IBM's Research Division.
As his role model, Aggarwal says he will use IBM's Haifa Research Laboratory. That started with just three researchers; a quarter of a century later, it has become a technological powerhouse (see Research, Number 2, 1997).
Following Haifa's example, the Delhi center will foster joint research projects with India's top educational institutions. The center will coordinate existing partnership programs IBM Research has with the India Institute of Science in Bangalore and the India Institute of Technology in Delhi. It will also form up to 10 more partnerships with Indian universities in the coming year.
IBM will invest $25 million over five years to establish the center, and an additional $10 million in grants and information technology to support independent university research projects. About 20 scientists and engineers will staff the center when it opens. Aggarwal expects that number to double by the end of 1998, and to reach about 100 by the end of the century.
Fractals
and Finance
After a long detour through the rest of the universe, Benoit Mandelbrot's exploration of fractal phenomena has come back to its roots. While it was not until 1975 that he coined the term "fractal" - to refer to mathematical and natural objects characterized by the same extreme degree of irregularity at all scales - the underlying ideas had been germinating for much longer. In his just published book, Fractals and Scaling in Finance: Discontinuity, Concentration, Risk, Mandelbrot - who is IBM Fellow Emeritus at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and Abraham Robinson Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Yale University - returns to the topics in economics that did so much to shape his thinking about randomness and its appropriate descriptions, beginning in the early 1960s.
The book itself consists of, in roughly equal parts, old and new material, including his reprints of articles on finance and economics from 1960 to 1973. In a long, multichapter introduction, Mandelbrot places the evolution of his work in context and explains the new picture of economic phenomena that his ideas entail.
While fractal geometry has come to permeate almost every area of science and, indeed, become part of our very conception of nature, Mandelbrot's contributions to economics have been less widely known. Yet, they have not gone unrecognized. Paul A. Samuelson, a Nobel laureate in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, acknowledges that "economists have been blessed by his insights." And Paul H. Cootner, also at MIT, has stated that "there can be no doubt that his hypotheses are the most revolutionary development in the theory of speculative. prices since Bachelier's work in 1900."
As in his other excursions into fields as diverse as condensed-matter physics, mathematics, linguistics, geophysics, fluid dynamics and astronomy - to name a few - Mandelbrot brought to the study of finance and economics a gift for geometric insight and a capacity to seize on and synthesize ideas that others had either overlooked or failed to see could be applied in a novel context.
At the heart of Mandelbrot's approach to economics is a contrast he draws between different "states of randomness." From his viewpoint, the randomness dealt with in traditional physics and used by Bachelier in his Brownian-motion, or random-walk, model of price variations is mild, whereas financial reality is characterized by the state of "wild randomness." Thus, he argues, there is no underlying equilibrium whose fluctuations average out; rather, price changes experience cycles of turbulent behavior.
The IEEE has also elected several employees of IBM Research as Fellows. They
are: Ram Chillarege of Watson, for contributions to the theory and practice of
the design of reliable software; Philip G. Emma of Watson, for innovation in
high-performance computer architecture; Ronald Fagin of Almaden, for
contributions to finite-model theory and to relational database theory; Roger F.
Hoyt, an Almaden alumnus now in IBM's Storage Systems Division, for
contributions to magnetic rigid disk storage and interface reliability; Klaas B.
Klaassen of Almaden, for contributions to advanced measurement and analog
circuit designs for magnetic recording; Eric Kronstadt of Watson, for
contributions to processor architectures, compilers and operating systems; Jorma
J. Rissanen of Almaden, for developing the principle of minimum description
length and stochastic complexity for model selection and data compression;
Lubomyr T. Romankiw of Watson, for inventing the magnetic thin-film inductive
head and the magnetoresistive inductive merged head, and for major contributions
to the science and technology of electrochemistry; Jane M. Shaw of Watson, for
inventing the silylation process and other contributions to microlithographic
resist technology.
The American Physical Society has elected the following Watson researchers
as Fellows: Philip E. Bateson, for contributions to electron spectroscopy
studies of matter; Massimo V. Fischetti, for predictive modeling of submicron
semiconductor devices; Jeffrey A. Kash, for application of optical techniques to
understanding excitations in semiconductors; Fenton R. McFeely, for applying
photoemission techniques to processes that underlie microelectronics technology;
and James A. Misewich, for applying innovative laser techniques to fundamental
problems in molecular dynamics and interactions.
Mandelbrot's goal in creating economic models was to obtain some degree of understanding of phenomena that seemed impervious to mathematical description. By showing that the wild randomness of the data can be modeled more accurately than previously believed in a way that does not depend on a variety of ad hoc "fixes," Mandelbrot has also produced practical tools to evaluate the inherent risks of financial trading.
The search for understanding must continue, says Mandelbrot, "but financial engineering cannot wait for full explanation." Meanwhile, the increased breadth, depth and accessibility of Mandelbrot's ideas will undoubtedly spur new efforts in a field that affects us all.
Mandelbrot's new book, published by Springer Verlag (ISBN 0-387-98363-5), is the first of several forthcoming volumes of his selected papers, which will combine reprints with a wealth of new material.
Measuring Magnetic Moments
Scientists at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory and the University of Zurich have developed the most sensitive device ever for measuring magnetic moments. Called a torque magnetometer, it measures the torque, or rotational force, exerted on magnetic anisotropic microcrystals exposed to a magnetic field.
The novel instrument consists of a silicon microcantilever, similar to that used for atomic force microscopy, with an integrated piezoresistive element to measure its deflection. Its sensitivity is about 1,000 times better than that of the best commercially available SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) magnetometers. For example, the magnetization of a tiny cube of magnetite, 650 nanometers wide and 400 picograms in weight, is measurable in an applied field of one tesla. Similar magnetite crystals are located in the heads of
pigeons and function as microcompasses, orienting the birds in the earth's magnetic field.
In action, an external magnetic field generates a torque on a small sample mounted on the cantilever. As it rotates, the sample causes the cantilever to bend, which results in a strain on the piezoresistive element mounted in the external legs and a corresponding change in its electrical resistance. That relationship between the amount of bending and the change in electrical resistance provides a means of measuring the strength of the sample's magnetic moment or its magnetization.
The academic-IBM team has demonstrated the torque magnetometer's capabilities in experiments designed to derive the intrinsic magnetic properties of specific high-temperature superconductors. The team also expects the instrument to find application in investigations of submicrometer magnetic systems in general and thin magnetic films in particular. The technology has been transferred to Quantum Design, a company in San Diego, California, that specializes in cryomagnetic sensors, and which plans to commercialize the device soon.
Ensuring Network Security
Names do not necessarily change reality, but a suitable terminology can help one keep track of it better. That is particularly true of technology, whose arcane alphabetic soup of acronyms and eponyms often make it more difficult to understand than to use. Now, an emerging classification of information technology based on "tiers" could help reduce some of the complexity in this field.
Tier-1 technology consists of PCs, including desktop and notebook computers; Tier-2 encompasses workstations and servers; and Tier-3, backend systems, that is, host or mainframe computers. Squeezed in at Tier-0.5 are network computers, and at the bottom of the hierarchy - but constituting the most pervasive aspect - are Tier-0 systems. These include office equipment, such as copiers, printers, and fax machines, as well as personal digital assistants and other mobile hand-held devices.
"Tier-0 will create a huge opportunity for the entire information-technology infrastructure," says Shigenori Shimizu, manager of the recently formed embedded technology department at IBM's Tokyo Research Laboratory. "So far, Tier-0 equipment has been used primarily in a standalone mode, but now these devices are being networked."
While networking itself is not new, Tier-0 devices pose a novel set of constraints because of the need to provide sophisticated functions in a very cost-sensitive area of the market. The embedded technology needed for sharing data between Tier-0 and higher tier devices must accommodate the limited memory capacity, processor performance and input/output functions of low-cost Tier-0 equipment, without adding a significant cost overhead. In addition, the need for low-power consumption, as well as high performance, to prevent Tier-0 devices from becoming communications bottlenecks, adds to the challenge of designing Tier-0 technology.
Ensuring security is a major concern as Tier-0 devices are incorporated into networks. Shimizu's team, however, has already produced a prototype of an RSA accelerator chip suitable for Tier-0 devices. Based on the Rivest-Shamir-Adelman scheme of public-key encryption, the chip provides a means of ensuring network security. "Although other RSA chips exist," notes Shimizu, "they are expensive and designed for high-end Tier-2 or Tier-3 machines."
The TRL acclerator chip, whose hardware embodies a unique RSA algorithm that eliminates the need for multiplication and division, has achieved the world's fastest speed (27 milliseconds) for encrypting a message with a 1024-bit key. Moreover, its small size (less than 6 square millimeters for the RSA core) and low power (less than 350 milliwatts at 40 megahertz) allow it to fit comfortably in a device as small as a smart card. At the same time, it can be used in high-end systems, thus providing a unified, cross-platform solution from Tier-0 to Tier-3.
