Inventors' corner: U.S. Patent #7,529,693 - Method and system for designing a catalog with optimized product placement

Online shopping has rapidly become the preferred means of acquiring goods and services for many consumers. Recognizing this trend, retailers are constantly looking for new ways to increase online sales and revenues by offering products tailored to an individual's needs.

IBM inventors, Jayanta Basak and Rajendra Sureka, earned a patent for an invention that can enhance a consumer's online shopping experience by dynamically presenting or placing product information within an online catalog that matches their personal preferences. The invention also can help retailers optimize the design and presentation of their products by automatically adjusting online product placement to maximize sales.

New Paradigms in Using Computers: NPUC 2009 Webcast

TODAY: Catch the external webcast of NPUC 2009 (New Paradigms in Using Computers) from IBM’s Almaden Research Center, today, July 9th, starting at 9:00 a.m. Pacific, on the GBS New Intelligence Video Studio.

Additional Resources:

NPUC Co-Chairs Guest Blog

NPUC 2009 Homepage

NPUC Hashtag: #NPUC09

You can also watch it here at noon ET on July 9 (U.S. date):

Guest blogger: Charles Lickel on IBM's cryptographic breakthrough

Guest blogger: Charles Lickel, vice president of software, IBM Research

It's been an exciting number of weeks here on IBM's cryptographic research team, as the cryptography community finds out more about the breakthrough made by Craig Gentry, who joined our team in April while finishing up a Ph. D. from Stanford.

Sometimes it's the relative "newcomers" to the field who bring the freshest perspective to the longstanding challenges we grapple with. They don't have the same assumptions and biases that veterans might have. This seems to be the case here, where Craig took a different approach to achieving complete homomorphic encryption. That's just a fancy way of describing how one might perform nearly unlimited calculations on scrambled, protected information without actually seeing the data.

It's been compared to working in the dark and wearing gloves to delicately manuever toxic or sterile substances in a hermetically sealed plexiglass box.

It's not that you can't analyze encrypted data -- you can -- but you wouldn't get very far, as the data gets progressively more muddled every time you perform a mathematical operation. And even if you could work meaningfully with the data, we assumed that you would also be limited to either multiplication or addition operations, not both. However, during his internships at IBM, and while at Stanford (with the help of some Manhattan coffeeshop-inspired daydreaming), he came up with a way for encrypted information to kind of clean up after itself, on the fly. It can do this after each mathematical operation, when the data is at risk of becoming hopelessly scrambled.

Now, why would you even want to analyze encrytped information? That seems impossible, doesn't it?

Well . . . not necessarily. Let's say a business wanted a computer vendor to host information about its customers, and perform complex mining on that data to discern sales trends. (Vendors are touting this service as "cloud" computing.) The host may be the most trustworthy vendor around, but a client would always be concerned that the proprietary data would somehow leak out or be seen by the wrong set of eyeballs. Craig's privacy encryption allows the vendor to perform very sophisticated analysis on the data they host without ever "seeing" the underlying information.

Or, here's another example: enabling the authorities to screen airplane passengers without compromising personal privacy. Or, let's say you wanted to submit queries to search engines in a way that keeps your identity confidential. The same goes for electronic medical records, which might need to be shared among, and analyzed by, doctors, public health officials and pharmacies, but without revealing specific biographical or personal information.

Of course, we still, need to smooth out a few rough edges, but peers and pioneers of modern cryptography agree that Craig's method is an exciting breakthrough. We're very proud of him as he has gone on to brief a variety of academics and conferences all over the world. One should begin to see the technology applied to actual products in the private sector a few years down the road.

As for Craig's forthcoming Ph. D? I'm not an academic advisor, but I'd say he's earned it :-).

IBM receives three IEEE awards

IBM Research took top honors at the recent 2009 IEEE Honors Ceremony in Los Angeles by being presented with three prestigious awards. IBM’s triple crown of IEEE awards includes:

• Robert Dennard, inventor of the single transistor Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor;
• The T.J. Watson Research Center was awarded the 2009 IEEE Corporate Innovation Recognition Award for its long term commitment to pioneering research, innovation development and commercialization of speech recognition; and
• IBM emeritus Dr. Peter Franaszek was a recipient of the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal for his contributions to channel coding for magnetic and optical storage.

“Winning three major awards in a year from IEEE is a tremendous honor, and is both a significant accomplishment and acknowledgement of IBM’s extraordinary leadership in pushing the boundaries of science and technology,” said John E. Kelly III, senior vice president and director of IBM Research. “The satisfaction from these awards can be shared by all IBM researchers as part of the world’s leading research organization, as well as IBMers everywhere for delivering innovation that matters to our clients and the world.”

The IEEE Awards program has paid tribute to technical professionals since 1917, awarding them for exceptional achievements and outstanding contributions that have made a lasting impact on technology, society and the engineering profession.

Dennard Honored with IEEE Medal of Honor

“I’m a humble person, and I realize in engineering that things are a team effort. On a project like DRAM, everyone contributes,” said award recipient Bob Dennard. “The award is a great honor for me, but it’s an even greater honor for DRAM and the creation it is.”

Dennard was first granted a patent for the DRAM in 1968. Soon after, DRAM became commercially available and is now used in all computer component and system manufacturing. DRAM consists of an array of memory cells integrated on a silicon chip in which each cell consists of a metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) transistor and capacitor in the same MOS technology. Information is stored as a charge on the capacitor and the transistor is used to control reading and writing.

IBM Speech Recognition Leadership

“The IBM Speech Research team is honored and proud for receiving this award,” said David Nahamoo, IBM Fellow and Speech CTO. “The speech recognition project at IBM Research has been a long crusade that has been led and influenced by great many researchers for half a century. Our success is not only due to so many great innovators who have worked here during these years, but also a testimony on the wisdom and culture of IBM Research in providing an environment that promotes long term research and innovation.”

The IBM T.J. Watson Research Center has pioneered much of the basics of speech recognition technology and continues to be influential in setting the directions in which the technology moves today. Statistical modeling for the technology became in the 1970s, but can be seen in various aspects of everyday life today, from vehicle, cell phone and audio system voice commands to voice-automated phone menus.

IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal presented to Franaszek

Peter Franaszek, who recently retired from IBM, was recognized by IEEE for pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of run-length constrained channel coding for magnetic and optical storage. Widely used in digital recording and communications systems, the tool puts limitations on the sequence of data streams to allow clock and fast data synchronization. Franaszek was the first to develop practical methods for the limited codes, which ensure that the boundary lengths between bits of data are neither too short nor too long so that data can always be accurately found.

Guest blogger: Wireless Communications is Way More Than Just Handsets

Guest blogger: Manish Gupta, Ph.D., Associate Director, IBM India Research Laboratory

With the banking crisis, we've become a little numb to just how much $100 million really is, but believe me when I tell you that it's a lot of "spare change." That's the amount of money IBM announced this week that we are allocating over the course of five years toward telecommunications R&D. These are for technologies that will help telcos better serve their business and consumer customers, especially when it comes to shopping, health care, travel and entertainment. We're calling it one of the seven big technological "bets" that our Research laboratories are "doubling down" on, but it's not a particularly risky bet. More of a sure thing, I'd say, and here's why:

The majority of the world uses a cellphone -- not a PC -- to stay in touch with one another, or to conduct business. And that's a trend that's going to accelerate. So the cell networks will have to change with the times. For the folks that just use cellphones to place calls, there's a lot of untapped potential. And for those that use it to tap into the Internet, there's a lot of wasted potential. That's got to change, we think. Telecommunications providers need a way to take their subscribers to the next level, right?

And many of these subscribers, especially in developing nations, are not privileged with easy access to technology, such as the Internet. For example, India currently has more than 415 million mobile users; whereas the broadband subscriber base stands at a relatively paltry 6.4 million. How do we bring the benefits of the Internet, the largest and most easily available source of information, to these people? Mobile phone is a great medium and a technology like Spoken Web, developed by IBM Research, can potentially change the game. By creating a network of VoiceSites, analogous to the World Wide Web, Spoken Web opens up a completely new avenue for content creation and sharing. And interestingly, it uses one of the fundamental instincts of human beings -– speech.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have folks in more industrialized corners of the world that use the Web on their smartphones, but haven't begun to scratch the surface when it comes to taking advantage of the potential of the cellphone network. I know people have been saying this for a few years now, but we're really not far from a day when your smartphone will sit at the heart of, say, an entire retail transaction. We already know about the growing number places where you can buy a soda from a vending machine or paying for parking space using a cellphone. But very soon, it will go way beyond that.

For instance, we're helping telecommunications providers and retailers become more useful to their customers. For example, we're helping them reach out to customers in a timely way, offering them special offers based on purchase histories, weather, schedule and proximity to stores. The customer, whose curiosity is (hopefully) piqued, will be able to try on the merchandise and take pictures for friends' input on social network sites. They might also scan the bar code and read ratings on consumer review sites. And then they might conduct a credit card transaction with the phone. This isn't science fiction. Our Researchers, particularly in our labs in India and Israel, are working with companies right now to help make this stuff happen.

Bet on it.

IBM Researcher Don Chamberlin 2009 CHM Fellow Award Recipient

The Computer History Museum (CHM) announced its 2009 selection of Fellow Award honorees: Robert R. Everett, Don Chamberlin, and the team of Federico Faggin, Marcian Edward “Ted” Hoff, Stanley Mazor and Masatoshi Shima. The 2009 Fellows will be inducted into the Museum’s Hall of Fellows on Oct. 20, 2009 at a formal Gala Ceremony where technology industry leaders and supporters will gather to celebrate the Fellows’ accomplishments and their impact on modern day life.

The Fellow Awards are an extension of the Computer History Museum’s overarching vision to explore the computing revolution and its worldwide impact on the human experience. The tradition began with CHM’s first Fellow, Grace Murray Hopper, inventor of the compiler, and has grown to a distinguished and select group of 47 members. This award represents the highest achievement in computing, honoring the people who have forever changed the world with their innovations.

“The goal of the Fellows program is to annually recognize select individuals of outstanding merit who have significantly contributed to the field of computing,” said John Hollar, CHM’s President and CEO. “The Museum’s Fellows are a distinguished and special group. It’s an honor to bring together industry executives, the people who are currently building the future, to honor and celebrate those who contributed so significantly in the past.”

The 2009 Fellows are:

Robert R. Everett: For his work on the MIT Whirlwind and SAGE computer systems and a lifetime of directing advanced research and development projects.

Don Chamberlin: For his fundamental work on Structured Query Language (SQL) and database architectures.

The Team of Federico Faggin, Marcian Edward “Ted” Hoff, Stanley Mazor, Masatoshi Shima: For their work on the Intel 4004, the world’s first commercial microprocessor.

The Museum will host the annual Gala Ceremony in honor of the achievements of the 2009 Fellows whose creativity, persistence, vision, and global influence in the field of computing have helped reshape our everyday lives. The Fellows candidates were nominated by the public and selected by an esteemed panel including CHM executives, technology historians, industry leaders and executives, led by Board of Trustees Member Ike Nassi, Executive Vice President, SAP.

For more information on the 2009 Fellow Awards, please visit: http://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/.

Don guest blogs for us today:

It was a very great privilege for me to be at the IBM San Jose Research Laboratory (precursor to Almaden Research Center) in the 1970's. Ted Codd had published his groundbreaking paper introducing the relational data model. Researchers had been brought together from several IBM locations to build System R, an industrial-strength implementation of Codd's ideas. Jim Gray was working on transactional semantics, for which he would win the ACM Turing Award. Pat Selinger and Raymond Lorie were building the world's first cost-based relational query optimizer. Ray Boyce and I were designing the SQL language. We were sending early prototypes to IBM customers and learning from their experiences. There was a sense of excitement and optimism that our work would have an impact on the world. Opportunities like this are rare and I am grateful to been a part of the System R team. Recognition for our accomplishments belongs to the whole team and especially to Ted Codd, whose ideas provided our inspiration.

Inventors' corner: Inventing in the Cloud

Over the past 16 consecutive years, IBM has received more U.S. patents than any organization in any industry. This includes the company’s record-breaking total in 2008, when IBM shattered the U.S. patent record, becoming the first to eclipse 4,000 patents in a single year.

Behind IBM's unprecedented patent tally are thousands of inventors around the globe that pioneer new innovations that enable the company expand into new areas, so IBM and our clients can capitalize on emerging business opportunities. More than 6,000 IBM inventors contributed to the company's record-breaking 2008 patent results. They reside in 44 different states and territories in the U.S. and 27 other countries globally.

The nature of ideas patented by IBMers span the gamut of industries and applications, such as the rapidly evolving cloud computing market. During the past few years, IBM inventors have expanded the company’s collection of cloud computing patents with variety of inventions that support its efforts to lead the way in furthering cloud architecture design and development.

A few sample patents that support the company’s cloud computing portfolio include:

Provisioning web services – U.S. Patent # 7,506,021

A benefit of cloud computing is the ability to offer “self-service processing”, where end-users submit requests that are satisfied by the Cloud. Such requests are implemented as business processes, which are used to perform a wide range of tasks ranging from fulfilling customer orders for books or stocks to upgrading computer systems. This invention simplifies the execution of business processes by automating provisioning—preparing computing hardware and software to operate on a network—of the web services needed to accomplish the task.

Inventors:

Michael G. Polan

Marika Joannidis

Stephen P. Roberts

John W. Stephenson

Gabi Rothenstein

Secure system and method for enforcement of privacy policy and protection of confidentiality – U.S. Patent # 7,401,352

As the amount of information transmitted over networks by businesses, individuals and other entities continues to grow, the ability to guarantee privacy of information has become an ongoing challenge, especially in large-scale, shared-resource environments such as Clouds. This invention allows businesses to exchange information securely, while respecting policies that protect the privacy of both parties.

Inventors:

Sastry S. Duri

Xuan Liu

Paul A. Moskowitz

Ronald Perez

Edith G. Schonberg

Moninder Singh

Jung-Mu Tang

Charles P. Tresser

Marco O. Gruteser

Method and system for third party resource provisioning management – U.S. Patent # 6,871232

Networks are commonly used to provide users access to network resources such as software, electronic data, or files in storage systems or databases. As the number of users on a given network increases, and as resources become increasingly distributed, it becomes especially important to ensure that users are able to access only resources to which they have proper authorization. In the Cloud, this challenge is paramount and this invention improves the management of resources, especially resources that are geographically dispersed.

Inventors:

Frank Yeh, Jr.

Jeffrey C. Curie,

Kai Mildenberger

The creativity and inventiveness IBM’s technical community is helping the company pursue a cloud computing business strategy designed to enable rapid delivery of computing resources, while providing a means for clients to turn complex business processes into simple services.

In addition to helping IBM seek new cloud computing client engagements, the patented inventions also will help the company generate IP income; protect its huge investment in R&D; establish cross-licenses, which provide IBM and many other companies with significant freedom of action in the marketplace.