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Innovation @ IBM India Research Laboratory

IBM researchers take pride in the value that they deliver to the company’s clients, society and the world, writes Vinita Gupta

From its inception a decade ago, IBM India Research Laboratory (IRL), the youngest of the IBM Research’s eight globally integrated research labs across six countries, has been driven by one mission—to advance state-of-the-art breakthroughs in IT through research in software and services, and to provide leadership by delivering innovations to IBM’s clients globally. Located in two sites, New Delhi and Bangalore, the IBM India Research Laboratory focuses on a wide range of research areas.

The current focus of IBM IRL includes several indigenous projects in the areas of information and knowledge management, interaction and collaboration technologies, systems management, distributed and high performance computing, software engineering, analytics and optimizations, servisces innovation, industrial and telecommunications research.

“People are looking for value that arises from a creation and not just looking at technology for technology’s sake. When it comes to innovation, there is a need to think collaboratively and in a multifaceted manner, as this determines who wins and who loses. Innovation today is more about services, processes, business models or cultural innovation rather than just product innovation,” said Daniel Dias, Director, IBM India Research Laboratory.

Dias remarked that a bright mind could create wonderful ideas or invent interesting technologies, but for those inventions to have any impact, these bright minds needed to be linked with the needs and challenges of society. That’s why IBM researchers work closely with the beneficiaries of their technology breakthroughs.

IBM Research has created teams of researchers and consultants to work on client engagements that explore ways to increase competitive advantage and business value, and provide unique solutions, strategies and processes for business transformation. A variety of programs have been implemented to expedite the transition of inventions into the marketplace. Joint programs with IBM’s product development laboratories have been established to focus on solving the essential technical problems necessary to evolve the product line, from systems and software to semiconductors and storage products.

Dias added, “Our work with clients includes the First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) program in which researchers and clients partner to create solutions to solve real-life business problems and explore new technologies for emerging opportunities.” On Demand Innovation Services (ODIS), a services arm of IBM Research, extends the technical reach of IBM’s Global Business Services by engaging researchers as consultants to bring innovative solutions to complex business problems faced by clients in areas such as business optimization and analytics, supply chain, security and privacy, and mobile enablement.

Let’s look at some of the upcoming and innovative technologies developed by IBM.

Business finder for service providers

Business finder technology is a next-generation, real-time, presence based mobile resources management technology developed by Telecom Research and Innovation Center (TRIC) team at IRL. This technology empowers a consumer to find and use the nearest, highly rated and available professional be it a plumber, electrician, carpenter or doctor. TRIC group has been working on this technology for the past 18 months.

The technology combines sophisticated geographic information system (GIS) applications and data analysis with mobile telephone networks to provide information, wherever and whenever, to a consumer who is looking for a specific nearby service. This technology also enables on-demand business in a mobile marketplace, anywhere, at anytime.

The business finder technology provides a flexible, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based, Internet Protocol (IP) Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) compliant services solution to telecommunications service providers. It also facilitates the evolution of service providers from existing networks into a converged network that allows easy interoperability using industry standards.

Dias added, “The existing location-based search techniques suffer from the fact that they do not adequately exploit the mobility of business entities. Today’s telecommunications market is incredibly competitive, making value-added services one of the most critical aspects of doing business, and that’s where business finder technology can play a significant role offering more innovative and consumer-oriented-services.”

The technology could either be hosted by an individual network operator (telecommunications service provider) or can cut across operators. In the former case, it can be marketed by the operator as a differentiating value-added service to its consumer base. In the latter case, the business finder application would be a third-party service that draws a consumer base and mobile vendor workforce from a number of telecommunications operators.

IBM India Research Lab has demonstrated a working prototype of the solution. “We are in the process of talking to service providers, both in India and abroad. The initial response that we received was quite encouraging,” stated Dias.

Combining structured and unstructured information

SCORE (Symbiotic Content Oriented information Retrieval) and EROCS (Entity Recognition in the Context of Structured data) give an organization the ability to generate insights to help enhance customer satisfaction as well as identify new business opportunities.

These two technologies automatically combine structured and unstructured information that are distributed across the organization, enabling companies to generate new contextual and actionable insights to help determine appropriate business decisions. These technologies are useful for customer information management, targeted marketing, fraud detection and prevention and legal compliance.

EROCS addresses the problem of linking a document with related structured data in an external relational database. It views the structured data in the relational database as a set of predefined entities and identifies the entities from this set that best match the given document.

It further finds instances of the identified entities being embedded in a document. These embeddings are essentially linkages that interrelate relevant structured data with segments within a given document.

Dias added, “A highlight of this technology, which clearly differentiates it from the traditional named-entity recognition systems, is that EROCS identifies an entity even if it is not explicitly mentioned in the document. It exploits the context information present in the document to match and identify entities.”

SCORE addresses the problem of consolidated querying of structured and unstructured data, wherein the application specifies its information needs using only a SQL query on the structured data, and this query is automatically translated into a set of keywords that can be used to retrieve relevant unstructured data. At the core of this technology lies a technique for obtaining these keywords from not only the query result, but also from additional related information in the underlying database.

It also works on customer e-mails and transcribed calls and rapidly categorizes and manages a wide variety of customer e-mails and calls on numerous subjects, such as complaints, billing questions or other types of inquiries, and enables the identification of specific issues associated with each inquiry. The solution also automatically assesses the sentiment of the customer to determine their level of concern or satisfaction, and identifies the top keywords mentioned throughout the content. These keywords can be used to find the key pain-points of a customer who has a complaint.

“SCORE /EROCS technology helps enterprises use unstructured data for business intelligence which was hitherto impossible. It has immense applicability in call centers. By using the technology an enterprise can combine its structured and unstructured information and provide call center agents with a complete history of all customer activity so they are aware of information that has already been shared through previous interactions,” said Dias.

The technology has been tested and deployed at HDFC Bank.

The bank has partnered with IBM India Research Lab on this project to get new insights from customer information.

Resiliency Maturity Index

Business leaders and enterprises are faced with the challenge of keeping their enterprise running and growing, no matter what. Failure to deal with risk, stay agile and prepare to plan for business continuity can have disastrous consequences on operations, revenue, even intangibles like a company’s brand. Effective strategies to contain such disasters are more important now than ever in the age of outsourcing and globalization, and IBM has developed Resiliency Maturity Index (RMI), an innovative disaster management framework for building a resilient enterprise.

The framework characterizes and evaluates the resiliency of an organization and quantitatively computes it resiliency sco re. Business or organizational resiliency means the ability to rapidly adapt and respond to internal and external dynamic changes—opportunities, demands, disruptions or threats and continue operations with limited impact to the business. With the RMI framework, enterprise-wide organizational resiliency can be assessed and the resiliency score computed.

The resiliency score can also be computed for a part of an organization such as a specific business unit or a service line. The framework and information helps organizations make investment decisions by viewing the impact of an investment in a specific area on the overall resiliency score of the organization. Technically, it means to be able to represent an organization into a set of components (at appropriate granularity), which can be independently assessed for resiliency and capture the complex relationships/interactions between components to compute an overall resiliency score.

Dias revealed that it is related to Operational Risk Assessment and Reliability Analysis technologies, “These technologies require specification of failure rates of components in hard probabilities. In our approach, simple English language descriptions are used to score components which make it easy to use in practice. Another novel feature of our model is the substitution relationship which brings in a certain softness that factors in the flexible nature of interactions between organizational components.”

Organizations, especially those whose products or services need to be delivered to clients in a highly reliable manner, can avail of this framework to have themselves assessed, and use the analysis to identify ways to either improve their score, or differentiate themselves from their competition based on a higher score.

IBM Global Technology Services-Business Continuity and Recovery Services (BCRS), sees high potential value in using RMI for their resiliency assessments and the RMI team and BCRS are closely working together to see how this value can be unlocked. The BCRS team is in the process of evaluating and exploring how they can integrate RMI into their current models, specifically into the Resilience Program Assessment (RPA) model. The technology is in the early stages, and here is no timeline yet.

IRL is committed to sustaining a culture of innovation to apply its discoveries and insights to important business and societal issues.

vinita.gupta@expressindia.com