Creating the utility of the future

 Q&A with Dr. Dario Gil, the director of the Smarter Energy Research Institute 

The Smarter Research Institute (SERI) was publicly announced last October with the goal of creating the utility of the future. Dr. Dario Gil, its director, described the institute’s partners as “researching and developing techniques that improve the balance between energy supply and demand using predictive analytics, optimization, visualization and advanced computation.”

Dario Gil

This month SERI hosts its first conference of partners, clients, and energy and utility experts from across the globe to discuss and demonstrate the institute’s projects and goals. Dr. Gil answered a few questions about SERI’s progress, the conference, and creating the utility of the future. 

What progress has been made in Energy Research in the months since SERI's announcement, last year?

Dario: We now have six active projects with the three founding SERI members (Alliander of the Netherlands, Hydro Quebec of Canada, and DTE Energy of Michigan). All of the projects now have their first prototype applications, which are being demonstrated at the inaugural SERI Conference. There is much work left to do to turn them into operational applications – the coming year will be focused on that.

Since SERI's announcement in October of 2012, the U.S. alone has experienced Hurricane Sandy and severe tornados in Oklahoma, while Central Europe has experienced historic flooding. What kind of predictive capabilities are the SERI partners working on that may help prepare for, and possibly prevent, the damage from such natural disasters?

Dario: One of SERI’s applications, called OPRO (Outage Prediction and Response Optimization), relies on a predictive weather service within IBM Research called Deep Thunder. It provides high-resolution forecasts up to three days in advance, with the intent (in the case of OPRO) to provide utilities more precise time, location and damage prediction estimates to help them better prepare for and respond to severe weather. 

Screenshot: Outage Prediction & Response Optimization

SERI's projects, such as the integration of renewable and distributed energy resources, and wide-area situational awareness (WASA) to detect grid anomalies, deal with Big Data. Where is the data coming from, and how is SERI analyzing it to uncover insights?

Dario: The WASA application consumes high velocity data coming from Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) that Hydro Quebec has deployed across their transmission grid. In order to create timely alerts that can allow an operator to react within seconds to potentially prevent large blackouts, the WASA application must be able to ingest high velocity data and perform rapid analytics ‘in flight’ – this is probably the best example of the velocity component of real time Big Data analysis across the current SERI projects.

Screenshot: Wide-Area situation Awareness

What's next for SERI?

Dario: We hope to expand the portfolio of applications as new members join SERI over the course of the next year. We have many new ideas worthy of exploration, ranging from demand-response technologies, to using text analytics to improve utility operations.  Certainly extreme weather directly motivates some of the work in SERI, such as the OPRO application, but other projects focus on stabilizing the use of renewable energy sources, for example.

Interested in join the Smarter Energy Research Institute?

Membership requires a two-year minimum commitment, in order to address large-scale business, planning or operational issues that will provide extraordinary value to the member.

Members are free to deploy the software code and algorithms developed in SERI, and are encouraged to participate in and contribute to each of their own projects as well as collaborate with and share in other members' projects.

Members define up to two projects with IBM Research, and have rights to the outcomes of all SERI projects.

Membership is limited, and members have a seat at the table with IBM Research to guide the direction of SERI through the Governance Committee.

For inquiries regarding joining SERI, please contact IBM Research Solutions Sales Manager Thomas Ether (ether@us.ibm.com).

IBM researchers receive IPSJ Kiyasu Special Industrial Achievement Award 2012

At its annual meeting this month, the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ) recognized IBM Research – Tokyo's Koichi Takeda and Hiroshi Kanayama with the 2012 Kiyasu Special Industrial Achievement Award for their achievements in the research and development of Question Answering (QA) technology. The award, funded by a donation from the family of the late IPSJ honorary member Prof. Zenichi Kiyasu, recognizes outstanding contributions to the industry.

QA technology, most recognizably used in IBM's Watson computer system, takes a question expressed in natural language (such as the text on this page, for example), and seeks to understand it in much greater detail to return a precise response. Koichi and Hiroshi led the effort behind Watson's ability to attach meaning to the words, expressed as clues, on the quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011.

The need to understand a wide variety of subjects to play Jeopardy! demanded a new approach to QA computing confidence and speed for Watson to succeed.

“The traditional approach in QA technology needed to set rules in order to answer questions in a particular field. Before Watson, the existing technology was incapable of answering ambiguous questions written in natural languages, or questions outside its programmed areas of expertise. By taking a more-flexible approach to how Watson stored massive amounts of data, quickly extracted and indexed information, and calculated a statistical bias, it was able to understand the broad range of topics on Jeopardy! -- and win," Hiroshi said as he looked back to his time as a member of the Watson project.

“The biggest reason for Watson's victory on Jeopardy! was that it could store and access a wealth of high quality information put into its system. But perhaps the biggest reason that Watson drew such significant attention was because of its promise as a technology capable of understanding and finding value in unstructured data, which has exponentially increased in recent years," Koichi said.

"The QA technology that the Watson project team developed brought further sophistication to the methods for information access. Through the combination of its highly advanced QA technology, and improved text mining technology, intellectual enterprise solutions that integrate structured information with unstructured data (for example, obtained from sensors and social media) will advance many fields of industry.”

Today, Hiroshi and Koichi's research focuses improving QA technology in a Japanese environment, applying Watson's QA system in healthcare through collaboration with their colleagues at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in the US, and furthering what QA technology can understand, and how we can interact with it.

(Left) Koichi Takeda worked on statistical analysis of background text sources on the Watson project. His research interests include text mining, question answering, and unstructured information management. (Right) Hiroshi Kanayama worked on mining evidence from background text sources. His research interests include syntactic parsing, text mining, and sentiment analysis.

"Smart Machines" Preview

IBM Senior Vice President and Research Director Dr. John E. Kelly III and IBM writer Steve Hamm have authored a book, Smart Machines: IBM’s Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing, which will be published by Columbia University Press this fall. The book presents a comprehensive perspective on the future of technology and calls for government, academia and the global tech industry to help power this coming wave of innovation.

Steve answered a few questions about the book and its focus on cognitive computing in a recent interview, below. You can also read a free sample chapter at Columbia University Press.

IBM Research: What is the era of cognitive computing?

Steve Hamm

Steve: John and other leaders at IBM believe that we’re on the cusp of a new era in computing. Scientists at IBM and elsewhere are creating machines that sense, learn, reason and interact with people in new ways. These machines will help people penetrate complexity and make better decisions.

You can think of a cognitive system as a truly intelligent assistant that helps individuals live and work more successfully, and that helps organizations become more efficient and effective. The implications are huge for individuals, businesses and society as a whole. With these technologies, we will be able to make the world work better and more sustainably.

IBM Research: Why write a book now?

Steve: The idea that we’re entering a new era of computing emerged over the past couple of years. It began when a small group of IBM Research scientists engaged in the mental exercise of envisioning how computing would evolve over the next century. They realized that, because of recent and anticipated advances in science and technology, computers of the future would be fundamentally different than the machines that evolved since the 1940s. But revolutions don’t happen on a timetable. You need a forcing function to get things going.

So the idea behind the book is to stimulate new thinking within industry and academia. Just as importantly, we hope to inspire university and high school students to pursue studies and careers in science, technology and mathematics. Amazing progress has been made in computing, but we believe a lot of effort by a lot of people and organizations will be needed for the era of cognitive computing to come on strong.

IBM Research: John Kelly will be talking about the era of cognitive systems at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley next Tuesday. How can people find out what he says?

Steve: Anybody who wants to can attend the fireside chat between John and museum director John Hollar. The museum will later post a video of the conversation on their YouTube channel a couple of days later. In addition, we’ll have coverage at IBM's Research homepage and the Smarter Planet blog.

Steve Hamm is a communications strategist and writer at IBM. Previously, he was a journalist for 30 years, most recently at BusinessWeek magazine. He has authored two books, Bangalore Tiger, about the rise of the Indian tech industry, and The Race for Perfect, about innovation in mobile computing; and co-authored Making the World Work Better, which IBM published in connection with its centennial.

From Vivaldi to Wagner to Schubert

A machine that knows a musical era within three notes

Editor’s note: This article is by Computational Biologist Guillermo Cecchi of IBM Research.

Music may "soothe a savage breast." But a machine can now identify the music’s era and composer.

Periods of Western Music* 1700-1770 Baroque Era 1770-1830 Classical Era 1830-1900 Romantic Era 1900 - Post-Romantic Era * -- available on Peachnote

Pablo Rodriguez Zivic from the University of Buenos Aires, Favio Shifres from the University of La Plata and I developed an algorithm that can identify the Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods – after “hearing” only three notes.

Peachnote recently added these near-three centuries and 20,000 songs worth of Western music periods to its online database. Pablo tested our algorithm on the transcribed music from Peachnote. Our machine then discovered patterns across the songs down to the semi-tones or notes. The patterns learned could now possibly extend to human speech or “humming.”

Visualization of the clusters for the conditional distribution of melodic intervals. Each shaded area corresponds to a different cluster, and its corresponding line represents the proportion of years assigned to it within a 10-y smoothing window. Vertical dashed lines correspond to the approximate boundaries between Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods. A fifth cluster was removed because it was a noise cluster with only three elements.

Can you identify your favorite song within three consecutive notes from any point within the song? In just three semi-tones, say “A,” followed by “C,” followed by “F,” a pattern emerged that the machine accurately matched to an entire era of music. 

For example, we identifies late Baroque factors by the high frequency of adjacent notes, such as “C” is often followed by “F” and “G,” and then by “B” and “D.” The tune “Happy Birthday” follows this pattern: [hap/C]-[py/C]-[birth/D]-[day/C]-[to/F]-[you/E]. As the tonal music developed over time, the corresponding patterns of note combinations became more complex.

And while we did not focus on this aspect in the present work, we have unpublished results identifying many of the composers, such as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven.
 

Music-making machines Computers can do more than identify music. Pablo Zivic has also developed a computationally creative machine that can produce an era-based, but unique piece of music.

From music to speech 

The structure of three consecutive semi-tones determines the way we hear and perceive music. Simple factors, such as the time between the three notes, the tone between the notes, and the order of the notes account for identifiable trends within the eras of music.

We could perform this study because of the available data – the “big data” of music. This same approach could identify other patterns in other sounds, namely our speech. Computer algorithms can already identify speech patterns in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease through a recorded phone interview.

Doctors know that the vocal chords are affected early on in the onset of Parkinson’s. We want to push the ability to identify the combination of sounds – like the three notes in our Western music study – to make an even earlier diagnosis.

With more-comprehensive speech data, we could uncover patterns in other diseases. We're now using our tool to study past individual cases to tease out features and patterns in the way people with a particular psychiatric disorder speak or even “hum” music. From this, we could come up with models to explain the behavior.

Perhaps in the future, other disorders can be identified through simple, non-invasive verbal tests.

Read the study, Perceptual basis of evolving Western musical styles, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

IBM Research - Zurich (Officially) Turns 50

On 22 May 1963, IBM Research was officially inaugurated in Rueschlikon, Switzerland, the leafy suburb of Zurich. A temporary lab was actually established in 1956 in the nearby town of Adliswil, but it was on this day where the current lab was opened in front of hundreds of guests, including IBM's CEO Thomas Watson Jr.

A History of Success

While he never could have imagined it, the Zurich lab's first director Ambros Speiser made a significant dent in the history of science when he helped build IBM's first research lab outside of the United States.

From left to right, Ambros Speiser,  the first lab director,
and Thomas Watson Jr, CEO of IBM at the opening
of the Rüschlikon lab on May 22, 1963.

Five Nobel prizes have been awarded to members of IBM Research, four of which went to scientists in Zurich.

In 1986, Gerd Binnig and the late Heinrich Rohrer received the Nobel Prize for physics for their invention of the scanning tunneling microscope. Only one year later, Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller received the same award for their discovery of high-temperature superconductivity.

Other breakthroughs include the token ring, the secure electronic transaction protocol, storage sequence detection and energy efficient supercomputers.

Since its founding 50 years ago, the Zurich laboratory has grown its spectrum of research areas, which now ranges from exploratory research to software and services, such as the optimization of supply chains and trains schedules and routing.

Why Switzerland?

Original invitation to the opening in 1963.

IBM had many reasons for founding a research lab outside of the United States in the 1950s. And with the success of its recently opened San Jose lab, management realized the benefits of having research conducted with the support of -- but not the proximity to -- headquarters in New York.

Switzerland wasn’t IBM’s first option for a European research lab. In 1955, an IBM electrical engineer named Arthur Samuel was tasked with scouting the final short list of cities. IBM eventually selected Switzerland for its proximity to talent, which included access to universities, such as ETH Zurich. The country is also an attractive place to live for expatriates -- today, employees from 45 different nationalities currently work at the lab.

The Zurich Lab Today

Scientists at the Zurich Lab planted
trees in Rueschlikon in 2011.

The expansion in Zurich continued well into 2000s. Today, there are five departments including storage, computer science and systems, in addition to physics (science and technology) and mathematics (mathematics and computational sciences).

In addition, the lab has a new cutting edge facility called the Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology Center, named for the two Nobel Laureates. Speiser’s intuition to keep the lab close to ETH Zurich proved prescient. Nobel Laureates K. Alex Müller, Georg Bednorz and Heinrich Rohrer all came from ETH. And now, five decades later, the partners' $90 million facility features a large clean room and six noise-free labs unlike any in the world.

In addition to exploring nanotech, IBM scientists are working on some of the greatest challenges of our society today, including:

• ASTRON, The Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, and IBM are collaborating on a 32.9 million euro, five-year project to build an extremely fast, but low-power exascale computer systems targeted for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The SKA is an international consortium to build the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope. Scientists estimate that the processing power required to operate the telescope will be equal to several millions of today’s fastest computers. 

• IBM’s Battery 500 project, led by scientists at IBM Research – Almaden in California, is an interdisciplinary consortium to develop a lithium–air battery that aims to increase the range of electric vehicles to 500 miles (approximately 800 km). This is more than five times the range of today’s batteries, which average some 150 km per charge. If the project is successful, battery-powered vehicles could finally become a practical reality and thus overcome the main obstacle to becoming generally accepted and widespread. In a recent survey conducted by IBM, 64% of consumers said that the limited range was their strongest objection to driving electric vehicles.

• To improve the much-strained energy grid, IBM scientists are collaborating with utility companies in Denmark and Switzerland to improve the balance between demand and the supply of renewable energy in projects including EcoGrid EU and Flexlast.

While much as changed at IBM Research – Zurich, the essence of collaboration and the spirit of innovation and excellence that Speiser envisioned remains true to this day.


 

Profile of an IBM Scientist: Abu Sebastian

Who: Abu Sebastian

Location: IBM Research - Zurich

Nationality: Indian (born in Kerala)

Abu (right) accepting the IFAC Award.

Something about me: I’ve lived on four different continents for at least three years including India (Asia), Nigeria (Africa), the state of Iowa in the U.S. (North America) and Switzerland (Europe).

Focus: Dynamics, modeling and control at the nanometer scale.

Nanotechnology was an emerging area when I was starting my PhD. We found that control and system-theoretic concepts can play a key role in addressing some of the challenging problems in the area. That is how I got into this field of research. The multi-disciplinary nature of the research as well as the strong experimental component makes it particularly attractive.

I have worked on, and continue to work on areas such as scanning-probe technology, nanopositioning, nanoscale sensing, and data storage. More recently, I have focused my attention on emerging memory  technologies. One area that keeps me awake at night is the development of a low-power, high endurance, scalable non-volatile memory concept that can bridge the wide performance gap in a computing system (between storage and the rest of the computing system).”

If I have to predict the future,  I see great potential for a memory element to serve simultaneously as both memory and logic, or even as component of a non-von-Neumann neuromorphic computing hardware.

Career Advice: The current multi-disciplinary nature of research demands a diverse background. For example, during my studies I focused my attentions in math, physics, systems theory and engineering.

Fond Memory:When I first joined IBM as a post-doc, I had the privilege to work on a project with IBM Fellow and Nobel Laureate Gerd Binnig. He was incredibly humble. I remember him once politely knocking on my office door asking, ‘Would it be okay if we scheduled some time for a chat?’

What's New: Abu was recently awarded the International Federation of Automatic Control’s Young Researcher Award for 2013.

The award is presented triennially to a researcher who is 40 years or younger (on the first of March of the year of the award), who has an established a history of participation in and contributions to IFAC mechatronic systems activities, and who has demonstrated outstanding research contributions in mechatronics, either of a fundamental or applied nature.

Connect with Abu on LinkedIn.

Atom + Atom = Molecule

IBM Research scientists Susanne Baumann and Ileana Rau explain how atoms form molecules, and why they used carbon monoxide in the film A Boy and His Atom.

What properties attract atoms to connect and form molecules?

Susanne Baumann

Atoms contain charged particles such as electrons and protons. The protons reside in the nucleus, while the electrons orbit around it. When you put atoms together, some of their electrons get shared between the atoms. This binds the atoms together, and they may form a molecule or a more complex structure such as a crystal.

Atoms can also interact (connect) via electrostatic forces (attraction or repulsion between charged particles), which can also lead to the formation of a bond between atoms. Depending on the details, such as what kind of atoms you use, you can have ionic bonds, covalent bonds, hydrogen bonds, or others.

Traditionally, physical chemists study the bonds between different atoms.

Why were carbon monoxide molecules used to film "A Boy and His Atom"?

Ileana Rau

First, the atoms that make up the surface (for the movie shoot) are all the same kind -- copper (but silver and aluminum are also used). They are arranged in a periodic pattern called a crystal lattice. As a result, these atoms are tightly stuck together. Now, depending on what kind of atom we put on top of this surface, the bond between this atom and the copper surface can be weak (the atom just slips around the surface easily), strong (the atom is stuck to the atoms in the surface) or somewhere in between.

To make the movie, we used carbon monoxide because the bond between its carbon atom and the copper are well balanced. The oxygen atom also must bind with the tip of the scanning tunneling microscope so that we could move the entire molecule.

We also need the carbon atom to bind with the copper surface tightly enough to hold still while acquiring the image. It turns out that carbon monoxide on copper has just the right balance of these bonds between the atoms of the surface, the atoms of the tip, and the oxygen atom to be arranged on top of the surface (although we can also slide single atoms such as iron, cobalt, manganese, sodium, cesium, and iodine on a copper surface).

The carbon atom in the molecule attaches to a copper atom in the surface, while the oxygen atom sticks out. The atoms in the STM tip pull the oxygen atom around. The oxygen atom then pulls the carbon along with it.

We don't see the atoms that make up the copper surface -- we're actually "seeing" their electrons. Inside the copper crystal, the conduction electrons are shared among all atoms, which forms a uniform background at the resolution that we used (a magnification of 100 million). You see these electrons as a cloud or waves that appear around the individual structures we built out of carbon monoxide -- that make up the frames of the movie.

Feeling an Atom