A US researcher is looking at better ways of analysing huge streams of data at IBM’s new ‘collaboratory’ in Dublin

LESS THAN a year ago, the long, squat rectangle of Building 3 at IBM’s huge Mulhuddart campus in Dublin clamoured with the sound of industrial manufacture, as large servers were assembled and moved around with forklifts before being sent off to every corner of the Earth.

Now, the newly quiet building has been transformed into the freshly painted and carpeted offices, collaborative meeting areas and auditorium of IBM’s first IBM research and development laboratory in the European Union, housing its global Smarter Cities Centre, formally launched this week.

The Smarter Cities venture, which got off the ground here in March 2010, is IBM’s centre for looking at the ways in which technology can be put to work on large-scale city issues such as providing more efficient transport and utilities services by combining intelligent sensors with high-end computing power which is able to analyse the massive data sets being produced.

Overall, the lab is focused on what IBM calls “global challenge projects” – finding ways to use technology to solve urban and environmental problems. It will also tackle the technology issues associated with making this happen – namely, the increasing demands on computing performance.

Both initiatives are supported with up to €66 million from IDA Ireland, and will employ up to 200 people. More than 100 are already based in the lab, which continues to look for appropriate research personnel in Ireland and abroad.

Heading up the lab is US researcher Lisa Amini, an IBM Distinguished Engineer who came from working on similarly large-scale projects – in this case, looking at better ways of analysing huge streams of data – at its New York-based TJ Watson Research Centre.

Amini refers to the new facility as having elements of what IBM calls a “collaboratory”, bringing in people and teams from various parts of the organisation doing potentially complementary research. Among other internal and external hires, three people have joined her from the Watson Lab, some have come from the Galway Smart Bay initiative also run by IBM, and some from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Smarter City team.

The lab mixes academic researchers – the kind of people who have PhDs and are interested in getting their results out into publication – and research developers, people with the skill sets to turn abstract research ideas into a functional form that might then be incorporated into a service or product.

A particular interest of Amini’s is to bring together teams doing research and place them alongside people making products, she says. She sees them as having interlocking goals and hopes such collaborative work might accelerate some research into products.

Given that researchers might be looking at a range of issues, from problems that could be addressed immediately to those that will need solutions a few years out, along with trying to imagine the problems facing organisations a decade or two in the future, it makes sense to anchor theoretical work to practical development in many cases, she says.

“We want to make sure this research isn’t something that works well in theory, rather than in the real world,” she says. “If people are only looking at theory, they’ve got a beautiful hammer, and no nails.”

Transportation and water management are two of the key research areas for the lab. “The transportation problem is an information problem. People shy away from public transport because they don’t have information – for example, they don’t know when the bus is going to arrive, or if it might be better to take the Luas – and the people managing the transport system don’t know the answer either. We already have lots of sensors out in the transport system, on buses, for example, and on roads – but there’s a gap in the ability to analyse the information they produce,” Amini says.

Through a broad collaboration with the city of Dublin – one of the major reasons why IBM chose to place this particular lab in Ireland, she says – IBM researchers have access to live data feeds from Dublin Bus and are working to figure out how a system might clean the data up and use it to feed information back to system managers and the general public.

“It’s noisy, messy, sporadic data and is coming in different forms, that needs to be put together into one model,” she says. A more intelligent transport system would influence human behaviour by providing motivation to use public transport, or to use roads more efficiently, avoiding traffic bottlenecks if driving, she says.

In contrast to transportation, she says water is “an energy problem. You need to clean it, treat it and transport it – all of those consume energy and infrastructure.” The problem with today’s systems is that they manage utilities like water, based on an assumption that managers already know precise values for all the different variables going into the system – and then the system will tell you what to do. Instead, IBM is looking at how systems might work if you don’t know precise values and want to know how to make the entire system run more efficiently.

The lab will also look at issues pertaining to sustainable energy use, urban information management and risk management.

On the pure computing end, the lab has teams in hybrid systems and exascale computing working on how to optimise systems to work most efficiently, and build systems that can take in huge amounts of data from sources such as millions of sensors, and efficiently analyse them for complex business applications.

Amini notes that the problem of handling big data is no longer limited just to large organisations or research institutions, but is trickling down to the small and medium enterprise sector. That too poses challenges for IBM – to meet the demand for business applications that suit smaller scale companies.

One feature of the Smarter Cities project that particularly intrigues her is an open data initiative to get some of the data sets, which are anonymised for privacy and security, out to the public, whether that be university researchers or the person on the street who might find interesting ways to turn data into a service or, say, an app.

“We definitely wanted to get some data out to people – citizen data. We knew that doing so would get more people working on these systems and issues. We are releasing some in association with NUI Maynooth, through its Dublinked project. As much as possible, we’ll try to release it out into the open.”

On an initial three-year appointment here, Amini says what particularly attracted her to the job was “the area – data analytics coupled with the systems aspect. It’s extremely fascinating for me.

“And another aspect is that in IBM, labs don’t get started every day. It was the chance to come in and start it and have fingerprints on it. That’s really exciting, too.”