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For more than three decades, IBM Research has produced major contributions to the area of information management. This includes E. F. Codd's seminal work on relational algebra; the System R relational database management system prototype (which led to IBM's DB2®); ARIES transaction recovery and logging; Starburst extensible database technology, and DB2 parallel database technology.
We continue to explore new data management technology in the areas of data warehousing, object-relational features, digital libraries, multimedia content management, federated databases, and integration of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, as well as the emerging areas of e-commerce, Internet, and mobile applications. We design information systems that preserve the privacy and ownership of data while not impeding the flow of information. Our work is motivated by the technical challenges posed by the emerging 'On Demand' world whose success is predicated on protecting the privacy, security, and integrity of interactions between individuals and enterprises as well as between enterprises. We do fundamental and "visionary" research that closely ties with applications, i.e. identifying and studying new frameworks, models, methodologies, opportunities. We work at the intersection of data management and distributed systems to develop the next generation of distributed information systems. We design algorithms, build prototype systems, and transfer technology to IBM's software products.
Healthcare Informatics
The healthcare market is in a great state of change, driven by consumer pressure, regulatory pressure, governmental pressure and the availability of vast new sources of healthcare data at the molecular level. Major initiatives to improve healthcare through the use of IT can be found around the world, including the launch of a National Health Infrastructure Initiative (NHII) in the US in May 2004 - with the goal of providing an electronic health record for every American within the next decade. The major challenge to the market is to significantly improve the quality and success rate of healthcare delivery while decreasing costs to patients and payers and improving the overall positive experiences of consumers and providers.
To address these issues IBM Research has launched the HII project involving scientists around the globe. The state of a national healthcare infrastructure can be vastly improved through better management of data and an improved understanding of how healthcare services are delivered. In 2005 we will demonstrate a prototype IBM Healthcare Information Infrastructure that can support Regional Healthcare information Organizations (RHIO) and is scaleable up to a national system. This technology will support cross-institutional and longitudinal healthcare and health records. The core of the platform derives from IBM’s vision for an Aligned Clinical Environment (ACE). The HII prototype will be instantiated in Almaden, Haifa, and Rochester MN. It will bind together IBM Research efforts across the Division and showcase innovative new technologies and new healthcare services.
We are also exploring new business models for investment and deployment of
a future NHII, including the concept of Independent Health Record Banks (IHRBs). IHRBs are likely to evolve along with the national
infrastructure and will make possible new services including personalized medicine. Customer interaction will better frame research priorities to understand, foresee, meet and adapt to customer requirements.
A modern Health Information Infrastructure will also transform public health information allowing CDC and state and local departments of public health to better understand the spatial and time evolution of infectious disease. As part of the HII project we have also developed a new public health toolkit that will allow such agencies to base plans and forecasts on well grounded scientific models for infectious and
chronic disease.
Our current interests are: Healthcare Privacy, Interoperability and Multimodal Analysis.
The User Sciences & Experience Research (USER) group at IBM Research - Almaden focuses on understanding and improving how people interact with technology. Our goal is to improve the ease-of-use of existing products and explore new paradigms in using computers.
Building a good user experience is a systems problem that we explore from many perspectives. To understand the issues, we study users in the field and spend time with customers. We design, build, and evaluate technologies, prototypes, and systems that improve people's experiences with technology. The systems we work on range in size from small memory cards to large corporate IT systems. We focus on issues that effect the user's experience: performance, security, usability, design, and more.
Our cross-disciplinary team includes human computer interaction (HCI) and human factors researchers, software engineers, computer security experts, cognitive and social computing scientists, user interface designers, and user study analysts.
The IBM Computer Science Principles and Methodologies Group (aka the Theory Group) explores foundational issues that confront the computing industry today. Because theory cuts across every aspect of computer science, we tend to interact with a large number of other research teams.
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