Preface: Frontiers of Information Technology

This issue of the IBM Journal of Research and Development is part of the IBM Centennial celebration. Maney, Hamm, and OBriens Making the World Work Better: The Ideas That Shaped a Century and a Company highlights IBMs discoveries in science, technology, leadership in business, and corporate policy. This issue of the IBM Journal takes a look into the future and tries to answer some key questions in information technology. How will computer systems change? How should they change? In BFrontiers of information technology,[ Dillenberger et al. describe a roadmap from present-day computers that sort, calculate, and index to systems that provide insights. Today, humans ask the computer for information. This presupposes that humans have well-formed questions or keywords. In the future, systems will come up with pertinent suggestions and questions that humans did not even think to ask. How will we interact with future systems? Humans are more than eyeballs and ngertips that can type and touch screens. As species, we delight in using our senses. Speaking and hearing are natural to us. In BTrends and advances in speech recognition,[ Picheny et al. describe the state of the art and future direction in speech recognition. How will our systems change, as more of our data becomes nontextual and nonnumeric? Pankanti et al. examine some trends in BPractical computer vision: Example techniques and challenges.[ Imagine looking at complex equipment, and an overlay of what you see pops up with identication information and the relevant technical description and plans? This describes the real-time application of Deffeyes BMobile augmented reality in the data center.[ We can all learn from each others experiences. Perhaps, no area is more important in this respect than healthcare. Who else on this planet has or has had symptoms similar to mine? How are they different from me? How are they similar to me? Which drugs and treatments did other patients respond to? There are petabytes of healthcare data available in different formats, with different pedigrees of accuracy and context. In BInformation technology for healthcare transformation,[ Bigus et al. discuss how we can build systems that would help humans nd the relevant patterns. Can we anticipate the next pandemic? What if we could predict the next inuenza mutation or, more importantly, identify the mutations that do not respond to current treatments? In BModeling mutations of inuenza virus with IBM Blue Gene,[ Xia et al. show us how to do this. Just as important, how can we share important data that no single institution owns and yet have a reasonable guarantee of its privacy? Future systems will be more

Digital Object Identifier: 10.1147/JRD.2011.2165679

effective when they have access to both public and private data. In BA publication process model to enable privacy-aware data sharing,[ Gkoulalas-Divanis and Cope show how we can combine public data with private sources of information and protect privacy. As stated earlier, the goal of future systems is to come up with insights and patterns even when humans cannot create a well-formed question, precisely identify a topic, or explicitly specify attributes to search for patterns. In BLarge-scale matrix factorizations for topic detection and tracking in social media,[ Sindhwani et al. describe a system that mines through free text, blogs, tweets, forums, and discussion sites, extracting unsupervised insights. In BSmarter log analysis[ by Aharoni et al., the system applies a temporal analysis to detect aberrant patterns in system log messages in order to ag system errors before crashes and outages occur. In BAnomaly detection in information streams without prior domain knowledge[ by Beigi et al., the system sifts through infrared data, temperature, and passenger arrival rates to learn unsupervised anomalous activity, respectively, in hallways, environmentals, and airport terminals. The trend is from calculators to Binsightors[; from experts directing the system on what search results to nd; to enabling data to offer up its own patterns hidden in its corpus and suggest new lines of thought for people. As data grows from thousands of bytes to petabytes, and as systems become more complex, a top-down directed code dictating IF-THEN-ELSE workows for each pattern will be too restrictive. In petabytes of data, one cannot presuppose that one knows all the patterns to direct a search. In a system with thousands to millions of interacting components, one cannot code a directive for every action that is combinatorially possible. Such trends point to self-organizing systems, where principles or Bgoals[ are given to complex systems and each component independently works to achieve the overall goal. Pappas and Vermas paper, BSelf-organizing systems based on morphogenesis principles,[ focuses on this evolution. Physically, how do we build such systems? How do we get past Moores law? How do we overcome current computer systems processor/memory/network imbalances and energy restrictions? One approach can be found in the paper by Steffen et al., BQuantum computing: An IBM perspective.[ Coteus et al. describe new technologies to overcome these barriers in BTechnologies for exascale systems.[ In BToward ve-dimensional scaling: How density improves efciency in future computers,[ Ruch et al. use brain-inspired allometry and packaging as an approach to zetascale systems. In the year of the IBM Centennial, new information systems such as IBM WatsonA, which defeated the most successful human contestants in the game Jeopardy!i, are approaching some of the original goals in machine learning.

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In BArticial intelligence research at IBM,[ Fan et al. summarize additional breakthroughs in machine learning from IBM. The key technology of the IBM Watson system will be the subject of its own future issue of the IBM Journal. The papers in this issue are from women and men across the globe. In the past 100 years, IBM has advanced science and pushed the boundaries of mathematics and computer technology. IBM did not become famous for adding a new widget. In our hearts, IBMers are tinkerers. We are scientists, researchers, and engineers. We are curious. As you read the papers in this issue, imagine that it is the year of IBMs bicentennial, and every system described in this issue has become commercially pervasive. In the year of our bicentennial, there will be time capsules one can immerse ones self in, highlighting IBMs milestones as each of these systems became de rigueur. We are not that far away. Donna Eng Dillenberger Distinguished Engineer IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center Guest Editor

IBM J. RES. & DEV.

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NO. 5

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