IBM Research: Research Day @ Insight – new trends you didn’t know were happening

For this year’s IBM Insight conference, I was privileged to organize a day dedicated to Research. The sessions and demos represent the innovation across our worldwide labs that fuel the Insight Economy driven by cognitive computing.

Attending Insight? The IBM Research @ Insight day will give you a glimpse into some of the new technologies that will help transform businesses into cognitive businesses that can take the leap from just data, to insight and knowledge. Among the program topics, my colleagues and I will share IBM’s vision of future technologies – from data curation and advanced multi-modal analytics to scaling up systems using machine learning on Spark and applying analytics in education scenarios.

In the talk about Content Services, Sekar Krishnamurthy, Sriram Raghavan, and Mary Roth describe a set of tools and technologies that improve collaboration, discovery, content enrichment, and democratize access to content, enabling data curation at scale. Dalit Naor will cover some of the underlying analytics and storage platforms, in particular how to integrate OpenStack Swift with opensource platforms like Kafka (via Secor), Spark, CouchDB, Tachyon, Hadoop, and ElasticSearch in order to perform analytics close to the data. Wie Tan, will describe new techniques that demonstrate significantly enhanced Spark performance by exploiting attached GPU accelerators. In the last session before the break, Sima Nadler and Suresh Chari will describe advanced Research in Information privacy and Security.

The afternoon session opens with a talk by Lisa Amini about Knowledge Graphs – what are they, why do we need them, and how do we represent knowledge in a way computers can use this knowledge to reason. Then Tal Drory and John Smith will cover two major research efforts in the area of multimedia analytics: In the first talk Tal will describe how we understand the world via video cameras on mobile devices, and use this information for augmented reality applications. In the second talk, John will explain a set of cognitive vision capabilities that allow developers to easily compose solutions that analyze, tag and search photos and videos. These capabilities are now available as Services on the Watson Developer Cloud.

The last part of the day is devoted to analytics solutions in the areas of education, internet of things, commerce, tech support, and datascience.

Education is an area I am particularly excited about. In this talk Satya Nitta and Lin Zhou will describe their work in education starting by asking questions, like: “What is a school?” How do we model a school? We need to understand what data is involved, what processes exist, how these processes are related to each other, and how it all works. Only then can we create cognitive tutors, personalized learning agendas, and customized content for students.