IBM Fellow Chieko Asakawa Recognized with Japan's Prestigious Medal of Honor

The Japanese government  has awarded the 2013 Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon to IBM Fellow Chieko Asakawa for her outstanding contributions to accessibility research, including the development of a voice browser for the visually impaired.  First awarded in 1955, this medal is given to individuals who have contributed to academic and artistic developments, improvements and accomplishments.

Chieko, who became blind when she was a teenager, put her life experience to work. Her goal: to answer questions like "How can we easily access products and information without using the sense of vision to communicate and interact?" and "What kind of interface will adapt to user needs?" 

Joining the IBM Research Tokyo Lab in 1985, Chieko set out to work on Braille digitization, well before PCs and the Internet were household words. In the late 1980s, she collaborated with Braille libraries and volunteer groups from across Japan to advance the digitization project. The group launched an inter-library Braille network in Japan with the goal of putting Braille books online in 1988. 

Read more about Chieko at IBMResearchNews - her story and her long list of accomplishments as a researcher, inventor, designer, developer, author, and over the past two decades.

 

IBM Connect 2013 - One Innovation Lab...Four days...700 demos

The 2013 IBM Innovation Lab was one of the best attended since we started the lab over 12 years ago at Lotusphere. This year we had three main themes:

• Smarter Social Business:  tools to monitor social media to know what's being said, understand the message being delivered through visualization, and predict the effect of responses through simulation. Two examples...
  • TwitterViz, from Steve Rohall, is a visual dashboard that offers rapid insight into  the TwitterSphere. Users can enter key word/s and get real-time results of top words, their sentiments, topic clusters and co-occurrence of terms. Bring your favorite terms and see what the world is saying about them. TwitterViz is brought to you by the IBM Center for Advanced Visualizations.
  • OmniProfiling from Eben Haber, explores social data to provide richer profiles to better serve our customers.  It creates “omni-profiles” of many traits from content on social media, and provides ways to view and explore this information both at an individual and group level.
• Smarter Workforce: social technologies and analytics that empower the workforce. Two examples...
  • Timeline Visualization for Case Management, from Yannick Assogba, is a timeline-based visualization currently applied to case histories. The visualization allows one to quickly identify what has happened in a case and discover issues in the execution of a process.
  • 1x5 Enterprise Crowdfunding, from Werner Geyer, inspired by the crowdfunding phenomenon on the Internet, brings crowdfunding to the enterprise. The 1x5 prototype was a 30-day internal trial that demonstrates how tapping into the collective intelligence of your social workforce can foster innovation, lead to more engaged employees and better decision-making about investments, and increase cross-departmental collaboration. It is now being used by other groups across IBM.
• Best Fit Expertise:  innovations to help a business tap into the expertise in their organization when they need it. Two examples...
  • Smart Social Q & A, from Lin Luo, helps people get good answers quickly. When a question is posed, the system searches the existing set of questions and responds immediately if an answer exists. If the question is new, the system finds people who can answer it, bringing together the knowledge stored in the heads of the crowd to solve problem. And, our system works within IBM Connections.
  • Visualizing the Social Graph, from Inbal Ronen, is a dynamic visualization of community evolution, allowing a community owner to replay the activities in the community over time. You can observe and get insight on how and why certain behavioral patterns occurred, who contributed, what they did, and when. And you can see interactions between multiple communities.

Check out a longer list of research projects at the Center for Social Business web site.

Get a Social Business Checkup at the IBM Connect Innovation Lab

Is your organization a Social Business? 

• Are you enabling your workforce to delight your customers?  
• How far along are you in making social technologies a central part of your business?

Spend 20 minutes at the IBM Connect Innovation Lab and find out. What can I do in 20 minutes? 

• Take the IBM Business of Social Business survey.  
• Meet with researchers from the Center for Social Business, thought leaders from the Institute for Business Value, and consultants from IBM Global Business Services. They will help you to compare and analyze your results. 

You can make a difference in the design of the workplace of the future! 

• While you're in the lab, learn about the future of Social Business by seeing our newest innovations. 
• Check out the research demos and share your ideas with our researchers. They are listening!

How can social technologies and analytics empower your workforce? Find out at the IBM Innovation Lab.

IBM Connect 2013 asks you to imagine the power of a workforce where people are in the 'best fit' jobs, fully engaged, empowered and highly productive. Picture a workforce as a network of communities where employees can instantly find the right colleagues, inside or outside the immediate work group, to fill gaps in their expertise, and tap knowledge across departments, across languages, across oceans. These images are no longer just visions of the future; today smarter workforces are driving innovation to bring products and services to market faster, resolving problems before they arise to improve customer service, and increasing sales by building new skills.

Being a social business is not only about new interactions with your customers. It is also about new interactions with your employees. A social business measures its employee engagement, acts in real-time to resolve workforce issues, and leverages social technologies and analytics to unlock the potential in its workforce. 

So, how do you unlock this potential?  Visit the IBM Innovation Lab at IBM Connect and see some of the new tools our researchers are developing to do just that. Here's a preview...

Steve Dill of the Almaden Research Lab asks "What if you could not only exchange information and ideas with colleagues, but share “work” with anyone in your “crowd” of colleagues?" The Work Marketplace provides a work exchange where people can post requests for work and find people to do it. Requests can be shared within a small community or across the enterprise. Colleagues can select, bid, or compete to do the work, and earn points as currency for the work they've completed. The Work Marketplace connects people and work in new ways to improve productivity and spur innovation. 

Werner Geyer of the Cambridge Research Lab will be demoing an enterprise crowdfunding project called 1x5. Inspired by the crowdfunding phenomenon on the Internet (such as Kickstarter), IBM Research has brought crowdfunding to the enterprise. In this demo, we will show you an internal crowdfunding prototype and results from a 30-day trial at IBM that demonstrates how tapping into the collective intelligence of your social workforce can spur innovation, lead to more engaged employees, foster better decision-making about investments, and increase cross-departmental collaboration. 

Casey Dugan, also from the Cambridge lab, will demo two related projects. Social Pulse offers enterprises a deep look at what their employees are saying on internal and external social media by augmenting social media content with enterprise personnel data. It presents sentiment and topic analysis aggregated by this demographic information through interactive visualizations, offering marketing and HR professionals valuable, real-time insights. IBMersWhoTweet is a crowdsourced solution that invites employees to match Twitter accounts to the employees who own them. Over 500 IBMers have helped classify 7,000 Twitter accounts, and we have studied different ways to increase participation. See them in action. 

Hiro Takagi, of the Tokyo Research Lab, wants to know if your company has  knowledge sources hidden away. Of course! We all have valuable data frozen in archived documents or sitting in an old team room on a server somewhere. Our new Social Knowledge Management tools will help you rediscover that knowledge and give it new life. We analyze several information sources and use employee interests and work contexts to make recommendations. Users can easily “like,” “mention,” or “bookmark” the information to reactivate the lost knowledge. And, to get people started, we use gamifcation to help that knowledge go viral.

If you are at IBM Connect, please stop by the lab. Talk firsthand to researchers from all over the world who are envisioning how the workplace will look in 5 years. 

We're located in the Dolphin Hotel in Asia 3.

 

 

The Future is Now: The IBM Innovation Lab at IBM Connect

Tap into the expertise in your organization when you need it.
Your customers are talking. Are you responding? 
See how social technologies and analytics can empower your workforce.

IBM Research is known the world over for its global network of scientists who work on a range of exploratory research projects in search of innovations that advance the capabilities of technology as well as applied research projects to help clients, governments, and universities apply scientific breakthroughs to solve real-world business and societal challenges.

Meet team members from the IBM Research Center for Social Business whose work focuses on social analytics, collaborative decision making, best-fit expertise solutions, and other cutting-edge technologies—game changing research helping transform today's companies into tomorrow's social businesses.

Visit the Innovation Lab, Asia 3 in the Dolphin Hotel, at IBM Connect and share your ideas with top researchers and developers, see innovative prototypes, and tell us how what we are working on might help solve your top business challenges.

 

 

 

Kirk Goldsberry - Spatial and Visual Analytics: Giving the World an MRI

A few seats left: Monday, September 24, 3:30 to 5:00 PM (EDT) at the IBM Center for Social Business, Cambridge, MA

Register here at Eventbrite.

Join us for a talk with Kirk Goldsberry, a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s Center for Geographic Analysis and an Assistant Professor of Geography at Michigan State University.

Kirk's research focuses on the visual dimensions of analytical communication. He is particularly interested in the links between visual form, graphic design, and spatial reasoning. This avenue of research is significantly influenced by the principles of cartography, visualization, cognitive psychology, vision science, spatial analysis, and human computer interaction.

Kirk received a Ph.D. from the Department of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in August, 2007. His dissertation investigated real-time traffic maps - both to understand and enhance their future design.

More recently, Kirk found a way to blend his research expertise and his love of basketball; in 2010, he developed CourtVision, an ensemble of analytical techniques designed to quantify, visualize, and communicate spatial aspects of NBA performance with exceptional precision and clarity.

IBM Research Cambridge is looking for a UX Research Design Engineer

Do you consider yourself to be both a designer and an engineer? When you look at a user interface, do you envision a different way of presenting the information? Do you play with visualization toolkits in your spare time?

The IBM Collaborative User Experience Research group, part of IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, is looking for someone who can both design and contribute to building innovative visual interfaces, tools for new ways of collaborating, and one-of-a-kind visualizations for exploring complex data analytics.

In this role, you will join a team of researchers and developers who are setting the standard of design of social media tools for businesses. Our research focuses on collaboration and social media for businesses, and our goal is to imagine and invent the future of how people will work together. Our applications and research discoveries inform IBM's next generation of products for workplace collaboration and data analytics.

Our ideal candidate will have a combination of the following skills:

• Demonstrated experience in designing the user interface of database-driven Web and mobile applications, bringing these designs from concept through to a working prototype
• Demonstrated ability to distill a complex data set into an impactful and insightful visual representation of the data
• Expertise in the Adobe Creative Suite or similar
• Expertise in Web UI technologies (HTML, CSS, AJAX, and JavaScript)
• Experience with one or more web application frameworks such as Ruby on Rails or J2EE
• Experience with one or more data visualization tools such as D3 or Raphaeljs
• Experience developing mockups and prototypes to effectively communicate interaction and design ideas
• Strong interest in social media, communication tools, and data
• Strong interest in research questions about user behavior
• Excellent leadership, communication and teamwork skills

Click here to learn more about this position and to apply.