Research history highlights

Autonomic computing:
IBM Research continues to develop autonomic computing technologies - where interacting sets of computing elements regulate and adapt behavior to respond to changing conditions with only high-level direction from people.

The Unity project explores how a component (such as a database, storage system or server) can be made to be responsible for its own internal autonomic behavior, including managing the resources that it controls, and managing its own internal operations. Researchers have created a working prototype of an autonomic data center that configures, optimizes and heals itself.

The Change Management with Planning and Scheduling (CHAMPS) system, a prototype under development, is able to figure out what configuration changes (such as software fixes, hardware upgrades and performance enhancements) need to be done, plan how these changes should be rolled out, and make them happen.

The Elix0r project aims to build a policy-enabled system for effecting security incident response-and-recovery procedures to reinstate services halted by issues, including non-compliance with a security policy, and vulnerability to and infection by worms and viruses, among others.

The Event Mining (EM) project mines historical data to construct problem signatures, which indicate the underlying cause of a malfunction or slow-down. The EM system will improve the quality and speed of signature construction by mining current data sets, the historical data generated by a distributed computer system (log files and event logs, for example), and finding correlations between events and run-time behavior. Ultimately, by finding these patterns will greatly reduce the cost of determining and resolving problems.

Collaboration:
The Collaborative User Experience (CUE) Research group conducts computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) research with an emphasis on the interaction between people and computer systems in support of collaboration. The team has focused on several projects in 2004. The Unified Activity Management project explores new tools to support business activities, including both formal elements such as workflows and structured documents, as well as informal collaboration such as chats and e-mails. The Activity Explorer project explores a hybrid application that supports ad-hoc collaborations that fall between the informality of e-mail and the structure of a more formal collaborative environment. The Kontiki project examines a tool to support co-construction of informal workflows based on a wiki-like authoring environment. Social Network Analysis discovers the hidden connections that are important for sharing information, decision-making and innovation within organizations. History Flow analyzes changes to documents. ForumReader browses large discussions, and applications of scale-space theory to perceptual organization. The Jazz project integrates lightweight tools, such as chat and screen sharing, directly into the Eclipse development environment.

Nanotechnology:
IBM is one of the true pioneers in nanotechnology, an emerging set of tools, techniques and unique applications that involve the structure and composition of materials on a nanoscale. IBM's innovative breakthroughs have the potential to enable important advances in industries as diverse as microelectronics and healthcare.

Material self assembly provides an alternative to photolithography, the current method of choice for patterning integrated circuit elements that is approaching fundamental physical limitations. Self assembly is pattern formation at the nanometer-scale with feature sizes defined by fundamental molecular properties, which means that it can access dimensions and densities beyond the capabilities of conventional patterning techniques.

IBM researchers achieved the highest transconductance (measure of the current carrying capability) of any carbon nanotube to date, which implies that transistors can run faster, ultimately leading to more powerful integrated circuits. Furthermore, these nanotube transistors use the same structural design that manufacturers currently use to build silicon-based transistors, indicating that a costly retooling of fabrication plants may not be necessary if carbon nanotubes become a viable replacement for silicon in future computer chips.

IBM and Stanford University have formed the IBM-Stanford Spintronic Science and Applications Center (SpinAps) to collaborate in researching and creating new high-performance, low-power electronics in the emerging field of nanotechnology called spintronics. This new area aims to produce such advantageous circuit properties as low-power switching and nonvolatile information storage by controlling the spin of electrons within tiny structures made of ultra-thin layers.

For more than a decade, IBM Research has made pioneering advancements in the nanoscale detection method called magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM). The research team has improved MRI sensitivity to detect the spin of a single electron -- some 10 million times more sensitive than medical MRI devices used to visualize organs in the human body. This achievement was hailed as the top physics news story for 2004 by the American Institute of Physics and was named as one of the year's most important science achievements by a half-dozen science and technology magazines.

IBM scientists measured a fundamental magnetic property of a single atom -- the energy required to flip its magnetic orientation. This is the first result of spin-flip spectroscopy, a promising new technique developed to study the properties of nanometer-scale magnetic structures aimed at revolutionizing future information technologies.

Semiconductors:
Semiconductors are used in a wide array of applications, but the industry has reached a point in its development where it can no longer continue to improve performance in the same way it has been over the past few decades. IBM's advances in basic materials and manufacturing techniques have the potential to lower costs and broaden availability in products that touch people's lives every day.

For many years, Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) has been the on-chip memory used in virtually every type of microchip, but it consumes an increasingly large area of the chip. IBM used nanotech approaches to design an SRAM cell that is about 10 times smaller than current cells, making it the world's smallest. In fact, the materials and techniques used have been proven to scale to even smaller dimensions -- beyond the 32 nanometer node -- a level of miniaturization not expected to be reached by the industry for another eight or nine years.

IBM has developed spin on semiconductors, a simple, low-cost process for making extraordinarily thin films of semiconducting materials that allow electrical charges to move through them about 10 times more easily than had been reported for all other similar approaches. This is a significant step toward creating very low-cost electronic circuits with record high performance. This technique could significantly accelerate progress toward widespread use of thin-film electronics in such applications as: advanced displays, flexible devices, high-function smart cards and RFID tags, photovoltaic solar cells and phase-change solid-state memories.

IBM researchers demonstrated how to use strained germanium gate transistors in semiconductors to triple the performance of a standard transistor. Scientists created a layer of the element germanium (Ge) in the channel, a critical portion of the transistor through which electrical current flows. IBM's results are unique because the strained germanium is introduced selectively - only in the critical areas of the integrated circuit - so it does not affect other devices or circuits on the same chip. This helps to make the process compatible with conventional CMOS technology, which makes it a major step toward achieving continued chip performance enhancement for electronic systems.

Services:
Despite the economic focus on services, there is a shortage of individuals with comprehensive knowledge of business, people and information technology - the combination most needed to provide effective innovation in services. Moreover, there are few focused efforts aimed at preparing people for this new environment. To begin to rectify this shortcoming, faculty from prestigious universities joined IBM's researchers and consultants to discuss a bold undertaking: develop and introduce a new academic discipline -- Services Science, Management and Engineering (SSME). This new field will bring together ongoing work in computer science, operations research, industrial engineering, business strategy, management sciences, social and cognitive sciences, and legal sciences to develop the skills required in a services-led economy.

While only in its second year, On Demand Innovation Services (ODIS) proved to be a major differentiator for IBM. ODIS directly involves researchers in clients' projects through IBM Business Consulting Services, bringing a higher level of expertise and technology to work on their toughest problems. In return, researchers gained direct client insights that allowed them to refine their research work and, often, create reusable assets that could be applied in subsequent client engagements.

Search technologies:
Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) is a software architecture and framework for supporting the development, integration and deployment of search and analysis technologies. The high-value information in vast collections of data is, unfortunately, buried in lots of noise. Searching in unstructured sources is impractical. First, the data must be analyzed to detect and locate items of interest. The results must, in turn, be structured so that powerful search technologies like search engines and database engines can efficiently find what you need, when you need it. The bridge from the unstructured world to the structured is analysis. IBM's UIMA is an architecture and framework that helps build that bridge.

Software:
IBM launched its Workplace Client Technology, a client-side framework to enable server-managed business applications that combine the enhanced user experience of traditional full-function clients with the desirable cost characteristics of Web-based applications. IBM Research has played a key role in providing the vision, multiple innovations, architecture and technology for the centrally managed, dynamic and rich client computing capability at the core of the Workplace Client.

Speech:
The goal of IBM Research's superhuman speech recognition project is to develop a recognition system that meets or exceeds human performance across the full spectrum of noise, channel, and speaker characteristics that is encountered in the real world. By developing a system that works "out-of-the-box" as well as a person, this project will enable the truly pervasive use of speech recognition technology. The MASTOR project enables speech-to-speech semantic translation that will help a patient and a doctor who speak different languages communicate effectively. The Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) project is aimed at boosting speech recognition in noisy environments by, such as a car, using a camera to effectively read lips. The Conversational Biometrics project is ideal for conducting financial transactions over the phone as it combines voiceprint authentication with a contextual semantics question and answer system that asks different personal questions every time you call, thereby enhancing security and removing the need to remember a PIN number.

Supercomputing:
Blue Gene is an IBM supercomputing project with two overall goals: to build a new family of supercomputers optimized for bandwidth, scalability and the ability to handle large amounts of data while consuming a fraction of the power and floor space required by today's fastest systems; and to use this computing platform to attack a broad range of challenging scientific and data analysis problems.

On November 8, 2004, an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer officially claimed the top spot as the world's most powerful supercomputer. While a landmark achievement for supercomputing, now the real work begins as IBM Research moves ahead to explore the wide range of applications that will run on the system, and to continue its efforts to reach even greater heights in ultra-powerful supercomputers.

Perhaps more important than its speed, IBM's BlueGene project has revolutionized the economics of supercomputing due to its small size and power efficiency. The combination of high performance with smaller size, cost and power consumption has brought supercomputing technology to the point where it can now be made more widely available and applied to a broader set of applications. As a result, IBM has begun to offer the technology as a commercial product under the name IBM eServer Blue Gene Solution.

Verification tools:
Verification tools determine whether a design functions according to a specified set of properties. These tools help to ensure a high degree of design quality, as well as faster time-to-market for the final design. RuleBase Parallel Edition uses a technology called model checking to exhaustively check all possible behaviors of the chip while still on the designer's desk, and offer a mathematical guarantee of their validity. FPgen is specifically for the simulation-based verification of floating point units, which are traditionally known as a complex unit where bugs are hard to find and often escape detection - even at later stages of the design. FPgen uses mathematical knowledge and IBM's vast experience to generate floating point instructions. Genesys-Pro is currently the main test generation tool for functional verification of IBM processors, including the complex processors inside the new Cell. The tool uses automatic, random stimuli generation for processor- and multiprocessor-level verification and has proven to be highly successful in finding bugs. X-Gen is the only ready-made test generator tool available for verifying chip design at the system level. Once all the blocks, units and processors have been verified, X-Gen checks communication between the previously verified chip components and ensures that they interact correctly at the highest levels of integration.

Web accessibility:
Web accessibility refers to making the World Wide Web accessible and available to everyone, including people with disabilities or senior citizens. IBM Research has developed three new technologies to remove barriers that might prevent people from using the Web to improve their quality of life. Web authors can use aDesigner to analyze their sites to ensure that Web pages are accessible to individuals who are visually impaired or blind. Home Page Reader uses an IBM text-to-speech synthesizer to speak Web-based information aloud in a clear and effective manner as it is presented on the computer screen. And the Assistive Mouse Adapter enables people who suffer from hand tremors to eliminate excessive cursor movement, thereby allowing more normal use of personal computers.