IBM's India lab develops disaster management tool
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(InfoWorld) - IBMâs India Research Laboratory has developed the Resiliency Maturity Index (RMI), a framework that quantitatively assesses the ability of an organization to recover from a variety of disasters such as floods, power outages, software glitches, epidemics, and terrorist attacks. The software tool, which IBM has used to assess the ability of its own global services delivery operations in India and Brazil to withstand disasters, also assists in telling organizations where they can best spend more money to improve their ability to cope with disasters, Guruduth Banavar, associate director at the Bangalore center of IBM India Research Laboratory, said Thursday. IBMâs services business will offer to its customers services around the RMI framework that will help them assess and plan their resiliency to disasters, Banavar said. The framework developed by IBM is generic so that it can be used across a variety of organizations in a variety of industries with little customization, he added. Besides a score that indicates the organization's overall resiliency to disaster, the model breaks the score down at different levels of the organization, from an individual score for each business unit, to a score for each component or sub-component in a business unit, Banavar said. Components could include the network, email system, or even the transportation system. The RMI framework brings out the interactions between these components and their influence on the organization's overall resiliency, Banavar added. The tool is expected to be useful for companies outsourcing work, as they can now use the RMI tool to assess the resiliency of the service providers they outsource to, Banavar said. Companies outsourcing work typically worry about the ability of their suppliers to withstand with and recover from threats or disaster. Service providers can in turn use the RMI tool to assess and improve their ability to cope with disasters, he added. Despite the best efforts of organizations to create business continuity and disaster recovery plans, few will have considered the impact of say a widespread disease that would affect human resources, Banavar said. IBM is working with the Information Technology Services Qualification Center (ITsqc) at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to incorporate parts of the RMI assessment framework into an industry standard. The eSCM-SP (eSourcing Capability Model for Service Providers) model, developed jointly by ITsqc and industry, is a "best-practices" model that is used to evaluate IT service providers along a number of dimensions, including their ability to withstand various threats or disaster. IBMâs RMI team has been interacting with Carnegie Mellon to understand how the RMI or parts of it can be useful within eSCM-SP. IBM researchers have also developed a "Skills Planning" model for optimal allocation of skills and job roles across an organization's multiple sites, to minimize the impact of a disaster at any one site. This model takes into account various operational aspects, including critical workloads, skill levels, mobile workers, multi-skilled workers, cross-training, operations in shifts, wage costs, and multi-location communication or management overheads, IBM said.
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EMC says its parameter-driven software can automate fail-over operations during planned outages such as maintenance operations and upgrades, and can test disaster-restart operations without needing to write, verify and maintain custom scripts.
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IBM will announced the pre-release of several tools for SMEs designed to speed development of solutions built on IBM middleware. The tools support the IBM Solutions Builder Express Portfolio, which provides
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IBM researchers on Friday released free software to help public health officials prevent pandemics of diseases such as bird flu or dengue fever.
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BANGALORE, INDIA - Microsoft Corp. is setting up a research lab in Bangalore, India, that will focus on areas including computing technologies for emerging markets, according to a company executive.
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In San Diego, technology companies, nongovernmental agencies and the Pentagon held a five-day test of a new set of digital tools for responding to disaster.
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The 10-year project is designed to deliver a worldwide network that could forewarn of impending natural disasters like tsunamis.
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InfoWorld - An organization in Mumbai, India has proposed that police use key-logging software at cybercaf&#233;s to keep track of communications between terrorists.
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US researchers are turning to peer-to-peer technology to help in the wake of natural disasters.
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US IT giant IBM and a number of research organisations have launched the World Community Grid, a global humanitarian effort that applies the unused computing power of individual and business computers to help address the world&#39;s most difficult health and
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High confidence in computer models of the storms enables more effective evacuation planning.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft Research in India has formed a group to work on advanced software algorithms, looking for a way to more efficiently process and analyze the large volumes of data generated by Web applications and scientific research.
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Microsoft Research in India has formed a group to work on advanced software algorithms, looking for a way to more efficiently process and analyze the large volumes of data generated by Web applications and scientific research.The challenges thrown up by the increased data volumes can&#39;t be solved by throwing more computing resources at them, said Padmanabhan Anandan, managing director of Microsoft Research India, on Thursday.The focus of new algorithms has to shift to sampling data efficiently, rather than trying to analyze all of the data, even if results may not be completely accurate, he said.&#8220;You have to do statistical sampling when mining such large quantities of data to get patterns in it, and perhaps help scientists see laws in it,&#8221; said Ravindran Kannan, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, who heads the new group.Algorithms are conceptual and mathematical descriptions of a method for solving a problem, which are then included in computer programs. Traditional algorithms depend on analyzing data that is stored locally, and focus on achieving exact results even if it takes time. That approach is no longer suitable because of the large volumes of data being analyzed, Kannan said.The research into principles and techniques for the new algorithms will be relevant across a wide variety of applications, he said.Microsoft decided to work on algorithms in India because educational institutions in the country have considerable expertise in theoretical computer science, which makes it easier to find and attract talented staff, Anandan said.The research lab in Bangalore also works on other areas including cryptography, security, mobility, and technologies for bridging the digital divide. It works in tandem with top educational institutions in the country, such as the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Research that could differentiator for Microsoft&#8217;s own business tends to be done in-house, however, and later patented by Microsoft, Anandan said.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM's India Research Laboratory has developed technology for retrieval and integration of information from both structured and unstructured data. The new technology integrates data that is currently stored in separate silos, Mukesh Mohania, lead researcher on the project, said on Wednesday. "We are leveraging the structured data by extracting the information from the unstructured repositories, and then providing rich business intelligence on this consolidated information," Mohania said. A research prototype of the technology has been deployed in the customer support operations of HDFC Bank, a large private bank in Mumbai. The prototype application integrates customer data from a structured database and business intelligence sources, with incoming information on customers from multiple sources, including e-mails and phone calls. The lab decided to use the new technology at HDFC Bank to validate it in a real, operational environment, Mohania said. IBM announced Wednesday it will offer the technology early next year. The middleware software developed on Java technology currently runs on Linux, but can be ported on to any Java compliant operating system, Mohania said. The technology can be used in other areas of an enterprise, besides customer relationship management, where there is both structured and unstructured data to be integrated and analyzed, he said. ByÂ  automaticallyÂ  combiningÂ  structured and unstructured information, HDFC BankÂ canÂ provideÂ callÂ center agents with a more complete history of all customerÂ activityÂ soÂ they are aware of information that has already been shared through previous interactions, IBM said. The technology also enables HDFC Bank to generate newÂ contextual and actionable insights that can be used to automate tasks, enhanceÂ up-sellingÂ andÂ cross-sellingÂ opportunities,Â andÂ improve agent performance, it added. EROCS (Entity Recognition in the Context of Structured data) is a key component of the technology developed by the lab. EROCS addresses the problem of linking a document with related structured data in an external relational database. Partial information provided, for example, in e-mails from customers do not often allow identification of the entity, such as the customer, in the structured data, Mohania said. EROCS 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, he added. A highlight of EROCS is that it identifies an entity even if it is not explicitly mentioned in the document, according to Mohania. It exploits the context information present in the document to match and identify the entities, Mohania added. Another technology, called SCORE (Symbiotic Content Oriented information Retrieval) addresses the problem of consolidated querying of structured and unstructured data, using a type of contextual search. The application specifies its information needs using 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 "neighborhood" related information in the underlying database, Mohania said.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it has made available an advanced software technology that can help predict the transmission of diseases across countries and around the globe to the open source community.
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The IBM project at EPA, being performed jointly with prime contractor Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), includes the Grid Toolbox, a collection of open standards-based Grid software from IBM, Red Hat Linux Enterprise 2.1 and Avaki Enterprise
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IBM on Wednesday announced the pre-release of several tools for SMBs (small and midsize businesses) designed to speed development of solutions built on IBM middleware.