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Jonathan Bnayahu |
Editor’s note: This article is by Jonathan
Bnayahu, Manager of Smart Decision Solutions at IBM Research – Haifa.
Location-aware technologies and their sensors in our
mobile devices, connected cars, and environment, have become ubiquitous – and
big business. Analyst firm Gartner expects Software as a Service (SaaS) and
cloud-based business application services to reach $32.2B by 2016, and that revenue
generated by consumer location-based services will reach $13.5B by next year. To
take advantage of this growth, today's smarter systems need to be able to
sense, analyze, monitor, predict, and respond to space- and time-based
situations.
To meet this challenge head-on, my team at IBM Research
– Haifa is developing location services that can be incorporated into mobile
apps or cloud services. These solutions embrace a comprehensive set of technologies
that make it easier to build smart systems than can identify, predict, and take
proactive actions in space-time situations.
Just a few examples of location queries these services
can provide, includes:
- Get a list of
the five technicians closest to a specific location
- Get the last
few minutes traveled by an entity
- Alert when a
customer is near the shop, alert when a visitor has left a group of people
doing a tour of the premises
- Get
notification when all staff have arrived at the facility
- Alert when the
speed of a vehicle goes above a certain threshold
- Alert when a
vehicle, vessel or person deviates from the planned route
- And more…
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When a user who visited the website last week enters the area, he gets a tailored message based on his loyalty card |
The visualization and mapping technologies we create as
part of this solution are especially helpful in identifying spatio-temporal
patterns and trends. One example is the visualization of maritime traffic on a
map of the port. In a pilot with a port authority, we were able to help
identify smuggling boats that were evading customs agents by discovering areas
where singular vessels slowed their speed significantly in places that were not
part of the typical routes taken.
In another pilot, we were able to use these
technologies to help public transportation officials check the efficiency of
their bus schedules. By mapping unscheduled stops buses make throughout the
day and identifying encounters between buses serving different lines we
provided city officials with data on specific problematic time slots and
frequencies.
By delivering new cloud services that streamline
development for mobile applications, our research is helping create more
efficient enterprise apps and improve interaction with customers.
Labels: cloud services, IBM Research - Haifa, Jonathan Bnayahu, location-based services, mapping technologies, mobile application development, mobile backend services, spatio-temporal visualization