As IT investments focus more and more on cost reductions, enterprises are seeking more advanced and strategic use of computer systems through data analytics and optimization technologies based on sophisticated mathematical models. IBM Research - Tokyo has world-class researchers in applied mathematics, especially in the field of data analytics, machine learning, and optimization. Through collaboration with clients, these technologies have had a great impact on real-world problems, such as optimization in steel mill plants.
Competency fields
Optimization
Business solutions often involve optimization problems to find the optimal sequences, combinations, assignments, and packings, and so on, in various business areas, such as manufacturing, distribution, and the public sector. Examples of the optimization problems we are tackling include printed-circuit-board drilling, vehicle routing, logistics network design, warehouse location planning, free-form nesting, workforce scheduling, and various scheduling problems in the steel industry.
Discrete Algorithms
Algorithms and efficient data structures for core discrete algorithms are being studied to cope with various optimization problems encountered in the real world, such as vehicle routing and scheduling. We are also studying methods to evaluate discrete systems whose inputs vary stochastically.
Text Mining
We are developing text-mining technologies, such as systems to analyze the "voices of customers" as found in contact center logs and webpages, and using these results to seek insights that can guide corporate activities. Combining natural language processing technologies, fast indexing technologies, and interactive mining views, we developed a text mining tool called IBM TAKMI, which has now been productized as the IBM Content Analyzer.
Data Analytics
Our research focus is on methodologies and frameworks for deriving insights into businesses and services from the huge volumes of data now available from maturing IT infrastructures, and linking these insights to actions. We are studying fundamental analysis methods such as anomaly detection and risk-sensitive data analytics, and also obtaining many results by applying these methods to time series data in manu-facturing and CRM data, leveraging the merits of our proximity to advanced companies and markets in Japan.
Previous activities
- Problem Determination System
- Performance Modeling
- Autonomic Computing Manifesto
- Language Translation (IBM Research - Tokyo)
- Automatic Text Summarization
- Data mining
- Site Outlining
- Spatial Data Mining
- Time series forecasting
- Logistics optimization
- Drill route optimization
- Air-crew scheduling
- Free-form nesting
