Readying for what it termed is the "new Web," technology colossus IBM has expanded its research network in Asia by inaugurating its newest research facility in the Chinese financial capital Shanghai.

Company executives, led by Thomas Li, director of IBM’s China Research Laboratory, led reporters in a tour of the facility and gave demos of ten of the 50 cutting-edge solutions it was developing.

IBM said the opening of a new research facility will provide greater accessibility for clients to tap into IBM research expertise and greater opportunities for collaboration with universities and other research institutions.

The new facility is an extension of the IBM China Research Laboratory — one of IBM’s eight research labs worldwide. The IBM China Research Laboratory was established in Beijing in 1995.

Li, a native of Taiwan who obtained his masters and doctoral degrees from American universities, said the Shanghai lab will work in close collaboration with other IBM research labs because "thats the way things work nowadays.

"The Web today is not the Web that we’ll have in the future, which will be more complex. We need to have the platform that will serve this new Web, and the new research laboratory will help IBM prepare for that," Li said.

Unlike in previous years when the US firm held its researches based in its own whims, Li said IBM researchers now conduct "inmarket" studies to better understand the needs of the consumers.

The IBM China research lab in Shanghai will focus primarily on research areas such as information analytics, Web delivered service computing, cloud computing and stream computing.

Cloud computing, for example, is emerging as a significant shift as today’s organizations are facing extreme data overload and skyrocketing energy costs. IBM’s work in this area includes an exploratory system which monitors comprehensive factors such as application workload, resource utilization and power consumption to intelligently schedule the workload migration and save unnecessary power consumption.

The lab also will focus on integrating service science management and engineering (SSME) into the Chinese University Curriculum. SSME is a new academic discipline that brings skills together in various courses, such as computer science and management sciences, for people involved services-led organizations.

Some of the current researchers being done at the Shanghai lab include:

TransMedia — This solution takes advantage of IBM’s speech transcription technology to convert audio information into text information and enables organizations to store, index, utilize, and manage the massive intelligence contained inside multimedia documents.

Web Delivered Service Platform — This is an IBM research program exploring business and technology innovations to enable a Web delivered service ecosystem. For service customers, the platform provides a one-stop-shop experience to subscribe and compose different Web delivered services. For the service operator, the platform offers service life cycle, multi-tenancy, security management as well as analytics capabilities to streamline and optimize the service delivery and operations. For the service developer, the platform introduces software engineering as services to leverage the Web as development, project management environment and tools.

Market Intelligence Portal (MIP) — Through this solution, an enterprise can utilize structure and unstructured data effectively and make information available to users in the proper form. The MIP framework can integrate various text collections, apply data-mining functions on the collections with a defined process flow, present a personalized browsing and searching interface, and help users in market intelligence information management.

IRMS (Identity Resolution & Matching Solution) — IRMS detects and identifies a single entity -- which could be a person, organization, inventory, or product -- from multiple sources, even if the data is insufficient, incorrect or fraudulent.

Virtual eHome — The solution is a family-centric virtual community based in 3D Internet. It will be a new channel of services and products delivery targeting the family as well as a driving force for new services.

Green Cloud — This exploratory system monitors comprehensive factors such as application workload, resource utilization and power consumption to intelligently schedule the workload migration and save unnecessary power consumption in a cloud computing environment. It demonstrates the key technologies for constructing the next generation of Green data centres.

Green SNOW (Supply Chain Network Optimization Workbench) — This is a supply chain modeling and optimization asset which supports decision-making across an entire supply chain including material supply, production of finish goods, and distribution. It is used to design supply chain strategies by optimizing service territory assignment, inventory deployment, and minimizing global tax exposure.

ROSS (Retail Optimized Site Solution) — This is a quantitative analysis and optimization asset to assist retailers making strategic decisions on store expansion and existing store optimization. Through multidimensional analysis of consumers, merchandise, trade areas and store performance data, ROSS provides store site optimization and transformation suggestions.

Scissorhands — It is tool that allows people to manipulate and extract anything on the Web and turns them into reusable components (Web content snippets, structured data or Web services). These components can then be used in a variety of business solutions. It also provides end users the easy-to-use solution to enhance their personal Web experience, or create their own personal sites.

Multi-channel Retail Platform — This enables online retailers to relate with their customers across all possible touch points. This platform integrates interaction channels including virtual world, mobile Web, SMS, MMS, IVR, and enables users to switch among the channels with information synchronized automatically.

Source:mb.com