News

Almaden Computer Science Workshop in Los Gatos, CA

On Thursday, September 25th, Computer Science held a one-day workshop focused on research innovation, cross-team collaboration, and open communication. There were 100+ attendees featuring over 30 research initiatives in the works. The guest speaker was Dr. Mark Musen, head of Stanford Medical Informatics and Co-Director of Program in BioMedical Informatics.

IBM Research at the 32nd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) 2006 in Seoul, Korea

IBM Research recently had a huge presence at the 32nd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB2006) in Seoul, Korea. VLDB is the leading international conference on database and information management technology.

IBM Research garnered the following impressive accomplishments:

• Best paper award for Windsor Hsu, Master Inventor, manager, and Soumyadeb Mitra, both from Almaden Storage Systems.
• Keynote address was provided by Anant Jhingran, Distinguished Engineer, vice president and chief technology officer, IBM Software Group, Information Management, Silicon Valley Lab.
• Laura Haas, Distinguished Engineer, director, Almaden Computer Science, was the Endowment Liaison from the VLDB Endowment Board, the organization responsible for VLDB, on which she serves.
• Guy Lohman, manager, Manager of Advanced Optimization, was Program Co-Chair for the Industrial, Applications and Experiences Track (one of three paper tracks).
• Sixteen IBM Research papers were accepted, eight of which were from Almaden.
• Laura Haas was featured on a panel entitled "One Platform for Mining Structured and Unstructured Data: Dream or Reality?" C. Mohan (IBM India) and Honesty Young (IBM China Research Lab) were featured on a panel entitled "Globalization: Challenges to Database Community."
• A demonstration on "POP/FED: Progressive Query Optimization for Federated Queries in DB2" by Holger Kache of SVL, Wook-Shin Han, Volker Markl, and Vijayshankar Raman of Almaden, and Stephan Ewen of IBM Boeblingen.

Almaden Computer Science Director's Contest

On Friday, August 25th, Laura Haas, Director of Computer Science, presented Almaden Computer Science Director's awards to Ajay Gulati (1st place) and Mohammad A Hasan (2nd place). Consolation prizes were given to Ahmed M Radwan, Hetal Thakkar, Sandeep Tata, Daniel G Little, Tharaka Devadithya,and Paul G Nepywoda. The Avatar group hosted an information extraction contest. The contest was designed to evaluate the usefulness of simple information extraction tool that would enable users to accomplish powerful information extraction tasks by creating automatic annotators using a simple search-like interface. The tasks for this year's competition included building two named-entity annotators, namely a PERSON and a Telephone Number annotator, and a relationship annotator relating a PERSON to his or her Telephone Number. Watch this space for updates containing a pointer to the technical report describing the results.

LinuxWorld held a special one-day symposium on the role of open source in Healthcare IT

On August 15th, 2006 OSDL hosted the first ever Healthcare Day at LinuxWorld Expo. Jamie Kaufman was a speaker on a panel discussion on the subject "Transforming Healthcare with Open Source". Also, Eishay Smith and the IBM Extreme Blue team did a live demo of interoperability using OHF and two different ISV applications. The event allowed attendees to learn from industry peers about the issues and driving forces behind the growing use of open solutions throughout healthcare. OSDL created a compelling program that provided essential information on how Open Source Software and Open Standards are being developed and deployed by innovators throughout the healthcare industry. The agenda included real world application demos, deployment case studies, interactive discussions and a close up look into the emerging revolution of open solutions and standards for the next generation of healthcare.