Tom’s ITPro: Gateway to Innovation conference in St. Louis

What is the impact of innovation on the lives and careers of IT pros in the trenches? From the perspective of the Midwest, it seems that innovation is still very much alive and there is plenty of recent activity. The evidence is from feedback from some of the presenters and attendees of the annual “Gateway to Innovation” conference held in April in St. Louis. There is lots of daily innovation happening in the rank and file of IT workers we spoke to, along with some pretty cool applications that were on display as part of some home-grown pride. You can read my coverage of the event here in Tom’s ITPro.

Watson, come here, we need you

I spent some time with Watson over the past week or so at various conferences and I came away impressed. This is IBM’s Jeopardy-solving computer. At the St. Louis Gateway to Innovation conference, IBM had a kiosk showing off its prowess. You had your chance to try to come up with the correct question (remember, the game gives you the answers) before the computer did. Now, I consider myself a fairly decent Jeopardy player: when I watch the show on TV, I can usually get the right question more than half the time. But that is sitting in the comfort of my own living room.

When it came to standing in front of the Watson kiosk, I choked. Big time. It was interesting, because you get to see how Watson “thinks” and formulates its replies. I could barely start typing before it had finished figuring out its (correct) question. The kiosk doesn’t contain the actual Watson computer: it is just a remote interface. You can see a picture of part of the kiosk here, and how it judges among three different possible responses, along with assigning confidence values to each.

Then, at the IBM Impact conference in Vegas, I got to attend one of the sessions where Bob Madey, one of Watson’s developers, was talking about their next steps. Watson isn’t a product: with all the processors and storage it isn’t exactly portable. And you can’t really buy it anyway. It isn’t quite a service yet, although IBM is working on commercial versions for healthcare and financial services, and eventually for other industries such as sales contact management. But what is interesting is how IBM is going to make money from their efforts with this research project.

Anyone who signs up for Watson (and you better believe there is a waiting list) has to agree to a unique arrangement: IBM will take 40% of the calculated savings from its use. So if Watson is helping to diagnose diseases (as was being shown in the session that I attended), the hospital and IBM will come to some agreement as to what the cost savings will be from this activity. It is an intriguing way to sell computer services. The client only pays if Watson delivers.

This differs from usual computer services types of deals where you pay by the CPU minute or the amount of storage or other resources consumed. But that wouldn’t do for Watson, because there are a lot of resources involved in processing its natural language queries and storing all the data it needs to figure out the context of the query and possible answers to your questions. And one other thing: IBM will own all the data that is fed into Watson. You just get the results, and that’s it.

There are 220 people involved in the Watson project and this large staff is needed. It took them more than a week to load in a new database for each Jeopardy build. For the medical apps they are currently working on, it still takes them several days to retrain Watson. Part of the problem here is in understanding how to retire old data, or to assign lesser confidence intervals as you learn new things about the particular subjects you are covering. One of the audience members at Impact raised that issue, and it was an important one. Another asked how long it would take IBM to develop the Watson equivalent of a WebMD.com that anyone could query its medical data online. While Madey was cagey about answering this, if Watson would be allowed to reply the machine would probably agree that was a reasonable goal. I started thinking of the HAL9000 computer that powers the spaceship in 2001. “Dave, that’s a really good idea.”

It was fun to watch Watson on TV last year, although none of the human contestants stood a chance and eventually it was a total silicon rout. I know a bit how those fellow carbon-based life forms all felt: it was humbling just to try my hand at a couple of questions. But it is exciting to see where IBM is taking the project, and I suspect we will be hearing more about this curious machine sometime soon.

A new Dice.com talent community on security

I have begun for the job seeking site Dice.com what they call a new talent community centered around security for IT professionals here. The site will contain links to their job openings in the area as well as resources on where you can security certifications, upcoming security-related conferences, and other materials. Please check it out and let me know how I can make it a better place.

Hanging out with the First Kids

If it is April in St. Louis, it is time for our downtown to be swarming with thousands of the smartest kids on the planet. They are here to participate in another First Robotics Global Competition, one of my favorite events to cover. For those of you that haven’t yet heard about this, the kids take part in this very fun and challenging event. They have to build and operate robots of varying shapes and sizes, depending on their age group.

The event is held in our indoor football stadium-cum-conference center, and it is big: both buildings are filled with so much positive energy and the level of activity is enormous and loud. There is an area where the robots are being tweaked and fine-tuned, called “the pits” which is as active as a pit crew in an auto race. There are conference sessions where mentors talk about techniques that will help the teams develop the skills they need. And then in the actual football arena is the competition area where the robots do their thing. This year the older kids’ robots have to gather and shoot basketballs, which sounds easy until you see it in action. The younger kids have Lego Mindstorm obstacle courses to navigate.

The amount of team-to-team cooperation is awesome: One team based in Detroit lost its sponsor and another team took the time to build its robot. Another team from Arizona helped draw attention to its mostly Hispanic composition to bring other teams into the competition and to bring awareness to science and math education in the state. A team in Hawaii needed to bring the number of total teams up to become a regional event: they started with four teams and this year they have more than 30. Last year one team’s robot was lost by the airline baggage handlers, and within a few hours after a call had gone out the team had enough spare parts to rebuild their own robot and get back into the competition. Imagine if our World Series or Superbowl gave out awards for this kind of team spirit rather than honoring a single player.

As Dean Kamen, the originator of the event and the inventor of the Segway told me this week, “There are no losers to this competition.”

I am amazed how many girls make up the contestants: some teams have more girls than boys on them. In a sense participating in First is like building an actual business that has just a few weeks to operate. There are lots of different roles besides building the bots: there is marketing, creating a business plan, publicity, fundraising and other tasks. One of the kids told me, “you need to have a team that has to have a long-term sustainability plan; you have to have money and community partnerships.” Does this sound like a child talking? Exactly: what is going on here is building character, building entrepreneurism, and celebrating smarts. Where can you find all of that in one neat package?

First attracts a boatload of corporate sponsors. Many of them are your typical high tech corporations that have a lot of science and engineering talent and want to promote their brands. I spoke to a representative from the Gates Corporation, which is a century old and makes rubber belts. They have been a sponsor for many years and also provide a set of college scholarships along with a trip for high school seniors to tour their engineering plant. You would at first think that a company like this would be the last place to be here. But no: every robot has some kind of gearing mechanism, and this low-tech company is actually working on some interesting high tech materials for bicycles, for example. They donate a half million dollars worth of belts each year to the various teams, in addition to their scholarships.

Speaking of scholarships, First isn’t just about bots shooting hoops. There is serious money on the line for the graduating high school seniors, and one part of the convention is devoted to schools that are trying to snag the kids to come apply.

Can’t come downtown this week? Don’t worry: you can watch a video that I did last year if you want to get some sense of the activity and energy of the kids at the competition.

Nine Years Ago On the Web

Last week I read with interest Richard MacManus’ story about nine years of history with ReadWriteWeb and I am glad to see that the site has continued to evolve over the times. But let’s look at where the Web was nine years or so ago, and the surprise that many of the issues I wrote about back then are still au courant and very much in today’s news.

• Hard economic times. The Internet bubble burst in 2000/2001, but several years later we still has some tough times to deal with. It seems like we are always either coming out of one bubble or going into another one. Here is something that I wrote then:
  Surely, those wild ride days of the late 1990s are over: we live in more sober times and many of us are lucky to still have jobs in this industry. I know many friends who have decades of experience and are looking for work after several months.
• Enterprise wireless management was just getting going back then, and while now we take wireless access almost for granted, there were some issues with deploying wireless networks back nine years ago. And guess what? With BYOD, there still are issues. I wrote then:
  Enterprise network administrators are finding out that managing all this mobility is messy and fraught with multiple complicating factors, making wireless networks more of a burden than dealing with wired connections. The reasons have to do with a combination of poor tools and the ad hoc nature of wireless networks themselves.Sadly, while we have newer tools, they still aren’t where they should be.
• Dell as the dominant player in desktop PCs. In the past nine years, IBM has left the desktop PC market, and many other vendors who were active then have disappeared from the landscape. But Dell has solidified its position and indeed has made several strategic non-PC purchases over the past year to widen its reach beyond desktops and show its dominance in the IT marketplace. I wrote back then:
  I think Dell has set the tone for 2002, and will continue to do so in the coming years. And they are like a Predator guided aircraft, homing in on excess profits all over the computer industry landscape.
• Google wasn’t the only big company collecting private user data. While Google has tried not to be evil, they have run into problems with capturing user data through their street-by-street monitoring vehicles. Back in 2001, Microsoft was collecting information on individuals’ use of their operating systems through the global unique ID identifier. Some things never change.
• Astroturfing online comments. The notion of adding comments to a website from people who weren’t real (or who misrepresent themselves) happened back then, too.
  The grassroots lobbying organizations have figured out their own take on mass customization, and are now locked in a new technological war with the editorial page editors across the country. Blame it all on the Web. The technique has been labeled “Op-ed Astroturf.”
• The rise of Linux.Linux has been around a lot longer than 9 years, but even back then we saw its advantages.
  And many developers are weighing doing their own open systems shuffle. They are finding out that the payment to implement an all-Microsoft solution is too pricey for these penurious times. If a consultant can deliver the same application for $50,000 less by using Linux and open systems tools, they will do it.
• VM servers. The advantages of using virtual machine server technology were apparent even nine years ago.
  And one of the best ways to fight server sprawl is to deploy virtual machine technology to run multiple simulated server environments on a single machine.
• Web application security. It seems back nine years we were just as careless about Web app security then as now. The same exploits that we saw then, such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting, are still happening today. In 2003, I wrote:
  Port 80, the communications port that is used by mostly all Web servers, has become the great applications dumping ground and a backdoor to entering many corporate networks.

How SoftLayer Uses GPUs to Enable High Performance Cloud Computing

Hosting company SoftLayer to offer a new high-performance cloud computing service that combines Intel’s ES-2600 Sandy Bridge servers with one or two of Nvidia’s Tesla M2090. More than five years ago, the fastest supercomputers were just a collection of individual CPUs that could be found in your average high-end Sun or IBM server. But then computer scientists began marrying GPUs to these collections and the result was a new breed of hybrid supercomputer. This week SoftLayer has taken things to the next level with a hosted service that runs on a hybrid GPU/CPU stack. You can read more in my article that was posted on Tom’s IT Pro here.

Three ways to use the TPM chip

I bet you didn’t know that your laptop has a built-in encryption device that can be used for all sorts of goodness, including creating an encrypted hard disk partition using Bitlocker and for managing the overall security of the laptop itself. But you can watch my latest screencast video here that I did for Wave Systems (who makes software that leverages this wonder chip) and in three minutes learn three different ways that this Trusted Platform Module chip can work to keep your mobile computers safe.