Image and Multimedia Systems

Robin Williams,

Senior Manager

 

 

Projects:

Compression

DARE

Data Links

Madison

IPNetwork

Content Management means managing all your data.
 
 
 
 

Content Management means managing all your data.

n our Content Management work we deal with all kinds of data (text, music, video, as well as traditional corporate data). Most of this data lives in file systems, object servers and web sites rather than in databases, but our customers tell us they would like to manage all their data like they manage their database data. Therefore we invented DataLinks to link this "other" data to database data and create a way to manage the linkage to provide security, access control and recovery (transaction) semantics for all the data. We are using it in eLinks, a web asset management system for managing complex web sites.

We are adding additional services like security and access control, modeling, ingestion, indexing, searching and distribution as part of Content Management and working on architectural issues with our product development colleagues at the nearby Santa Teresa Lab.

Some of our customers need to protect data that they distribute via the internet, so we are working on copy protection techniques; both new algorithms and tamper-resistant software. We are using these techniques for secure delivery of music and other content and have participated in trials with consumers. others would like to preserve their data for a very long time so we have begun a new project called Data Archiving with the challenging goal of being able to read, in year 2100, a file one would write today.

In other cases data compression is needed, so we've developed the underlying technology, especially one called JBIG that has become an international standard for bi-level data. The work includes theory, software and hardware VLSI chips, and the results are used in products for banking, for data mining and for printing systems.

We also have contracts with the Department of Defense for Content Management (to evaluate our ideas and help some key customers) and for the development of a secure workstation (to replace many workstations on separate networks with one).

Some of our recent work was in character recognition: specifically reading mail addresses (printed and hand written) for automating the sorting of large envelopes, magazines and parcels. There are still some applications of this technology used in portals and elsewhere.

Overall we have had many successes by doing "Research in the marketplace" and by solving real customer problems, and it helps us contribute to many IBM products. Some of our recent customers have been: the Vatican, US Department of Defense, Hollywood, the Library of Congress, Boeing, Dassault systemes, IBM's product and services divisions, and several European Post Offices, .... all of which keeps our life quite interesting.

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