NYU WinC Group Visit to IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne - 14 November 2008

About 33 students from NYU visited IBM Hawthorne on 14 November 2008. NYU alumni at IBM and some of the IBM Manhattan Technical Vitality Community (associated with the IBM Academy of Technology) attended the event - as well as the speakers. Here is the agenda for the day:

• 09:30-11:00am : Bus from NYU
  
• 11:00-11:50am : IBM Research Overview - Joanna Batstone
  
• 12:00-12:30pm : Services Research - Robert Morris
  
• 12:30-1:00pm : Stream Processing - Lisa Amini
  
• 01:00-2:30pm : Lunch with Alumni Visits to offices etc
  
• 02:30-3:00pm : The Promise, the Limits, and the Beauty of Software - Grady Booch in Second Life with help from David Levine
  
• 03:00-3:30pm : The Genographic Project - Laxmi Parida
  
• 03:30-5:00pm : Bus to NYU
  

Some Feedback from the Students

• Great to talk to IBM employees
  
• Lunch with NYU alumni was so great
  
• Nice to see how open the office is
  
• It would have been even better if we had some more time to do everything in detail and not rush.
  
• Great opportunity to meet up with NYU Alumni
  
• Interesting to see so many Macs
  
• Thank you so much to everyone at IBM and WinC - it has been excellent.
  
• Lunch was great, the interaction superb. (Coffee)
  
• More information on job hiring process would have been good.
  
• Thanks a lot. Excellent work. Interacting with the employees over lunch was so special and informative. A little more time would have been great.
  
• A great experience. It is really a privilege to have listened to people like Grady Booch and other accomplished employees of IBM.
  
• Thank you very much for organizing the IBM trip. It's really a fantastic experience of meeting those outstanding people and listening to their talks! WinC IS doing something unusual!
  

Lunch with the NYU Alumni

A small accident with the spaghetti :)

Speaker Bios

Joanna Batstone

Joanna L. Batstone, Ph.D. is the Director for Distributed Computing in IBM Research, with worldwide strategy responsibility for Distributed Computing. Previously she was the Program Director, Development, for IBM’s Sensors & Actuators business unit and a Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM Software Group. She spent 5 years as a Senior Manager for Solutions Development in IBM's Healthcare & Life Sciences Business Unit with development responsibilities for IBM's Life Sciences solutions for Pharma and Biotech. Under her leadership, IBM launched industry solutions for data integration, regulatory compliance, clinical trials management and information lifecycle management. Before joining the IBM Healthcare & Life Sciences team, Batstone spent 11 years in IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, in the Physical Sciences and Computer Sciences departments.



She has published over 80 papers and organized many industry conference symposia. Her professional activities include: BIO IT Coalition Advisory Board, Indiana University Science Informatics Advisory Board, invited speaker on "Turning Genomics into Medicine" at the 2003 MIT Emerging Technologies conference, sponsored by the Technology Review, featured speaker at the Bio IT World webcast - IT Solutions for Proteomics, (Nov ’02), scientific advisory board for the Cambridge Healthtech Institute’s Data Visualization and Interpretation Conference, (’03) and invited speaker in ’02, an invited speaker on "The Future of the Biotechnology Industry: Opportunities for Small Businesses", at the NY Solutions 2002 Conference.

Batstone received a B.Sc., in Chemical Physics and a Ph.D., in Physics from The University of Bristol, UK, followed by postdoctoral work at AT&T Bell Laboratories, NJ, and a Lectureship in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Liverpool, UK, before joining IBM Research. She received the ’95 Burton Medal from the Microscopy Society of America, the '91 Robert Lansing Hardy Gold Medal from The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society and the '89 Cosslett Award from the Microbeam Analysis Society.

Batstone takes a leadership role in promoting opportunities for Women in Technology with regular presentations on careers and survival skills. Batstone chaired the American Physical Society’s Committee on Careers and Professional Development and was an elected Member at Large on the Executive Committee for the Forum for Industrial and Applied Physics. She represents IBM at the New York Academy of Sciences Womens' Investigators Network Diversity Leadership Initiative, she was an invited Panelist at the 1st Annual Conference on Non-Traditional Careers, sponsored by Trendsetters Network, 21st Century Careers for Girls in NYC, a keynote speaker at the 14th Annual Conference on Women in Engineering, Kingston, Ontario and a keynote speaker for the Committee on the Status of Women in Physics, American Physical Society March meeting, in Montreal, Canada.

Robert Morris

Dr. Robert Morris is Vice President, Services Research, IBM Research, where he is responsible for IBM's worldwide research efforts in services. IBM's revenue is now more than 50% from services, and recently IBM Research has introduced this major new area of services research at labs in New York, California, Austin, Haifa, Zurich, Tokyo, Beijing, New Delhi and Bangalore. Representative projects include policy and risk management, human resource optimization, data systems management, business mining and insights, model-driven business designs, services software engineering, etc. IBM is also an early proponent of Services Science, Management and Engineering (SSME). SSME draws heavily on information and computer sciences, mathematics, management and social sciences, etc., and combines them in new ways to create global wealth and solve social problems.



From 2004-2006 he was VP, Assets Innovation, IBM Global Services. In this position his mission was to drive innovation in IBM's services through four main activities: the creation and commercialization of intellectual assets (typically technology) that can be used to improve service effectiveness; the creation and management of services methods and tools; knowledge management tools; and talent (professions, communities, etc).

From 1999-2004, he was the director of the IBM Almaden Research Center where he oversaw scientists and engineers doing exploratory and applied research in hardware and software areas such as nanotechnology, materials science, storage systems, data management, web technologies and user interfaces. Robert was also vice president for personal systems and storage research, managing this worldwide research work within IBM. During this period he managed the creation of variety of new initiatives, including a joint research institute with Stanford on spintronics, a startup business on webscale knowledge mining and discovery, new technologies for distributed storage and client management, and a focused “services science” research effort. Previously, Robert was a director at the IBM T.J. Watson Research lab in New York, where he led teams in personal systems research and was the executive responsible for the Deep Blue chess machine. He began his employment with IBM at Almaden working on storage and data management technologies. Originally from Australia, he began his career at Bell Laboratories where he was involved in developing a number of networking and computing technologies.

Robert was chairman of the Bay Area Science and Innovation Consortium (BASIC) from 2002-2005, an organization consisting of the heads of major research institutions in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. He represented IBM on the Government University Industry Research Roundtable (run by the National Academies) from 2001-2006. He has published more than fifty articles in computer science, electrical engineering, and mathematics literature and has received eleven patents. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, and a Fellow of the IEEE. He was an Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computers from 1986-1991 and is on a variety of advisory boards for leading universities.

Lisa Amini

Lisa Amini is a Distinguished Engineer and Senior Manager of the Exploratory Stream Processing Research Group at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center. She is the Engineering Lead for the System S project, led the design and development of its stream processing core, and is now architect for the recently announced InfoSphere Streams product, which is based on System S technology . Lisa has worked at IBM the areas of stream processing systems and algorithms, distributed systems, networking, and multimedia for over 15 years. Lisa received her PhD degree in Computer Science from Columbia University.

Grady Booch

Grady Booch's Bio

Laxmi Parida

Laxmi Parida's Bio

Laxmi Parida is a Research Staff Member of the Computational Biology Center at the IBM T, J. Watson and a visiting professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York. She received her Ph.D. in the area of Computational Genomics from New York University; she received the Janet Fabri Award for an outstanding thesis in computer science. She is also a recipient of the Sandra Blestein award for notable achievement in mathematical and computer science by a woman. She has authored over seventy-five research papers, and holds several patents related to her algorithmic work.

Some Group Photos

Final Farewells

Handy Links

• IBM Hawthorne: http://www.watson.ibm.com/general_info_haw.shtml
  
• NYU and IBM Activities: http://nyuibm.blogspot.com/
  
• The XML Challenge - Be an XML Superstar http://xmlchallenge.com/
  
• XQuery: Introduction, Tips, and Future Directions - Nov 17, 2008 2:00 p.m. Eastern / 11:00 a.m. Pacific (60 minutes) - The session will be Recorded : http://www.eseminarslive.com/c/a/Database/IBM111708/
  
• Two Internships available in IBM Toronto - Jan 2009 until April 2010 - Posting # is SWG-0186245 and available at: http://www-03.ibm.com/employment/ca/en/job_3.html
  
• Two graduate positions available in IBM Toronto - Posting # is SWG-0201281 and available at: http://www-03.ibm.com/employment/ca/en/job_2.html
  

NYU Contacts : Yi Ke, Christine Lee, Sana' Odeh,
IBM Contacts : Arcadia Kocybala, Susan Malaika

IBM Workshop at NYU - 12 October 2007

When: Friday, October 12th - 10am – 4pm
Where: Courant Room 109
The Schedule:

• Morning 10:00-12:30: SOA, DB2, XML, associated tools and industry usage – targeted towards undergraduates
  
• Lunchtime 12:30-13:25: Talk with Brenda Dietrich, IBM Fellow and Director of Mathematical Sciences Dept in IBM Research - and She's Got Their Number!
  
• Afternoon 13:30-15:45: Research topics – targeted towards graduate students
  

Summary of the Day
Everything went according to plan - Hurrah! About 40 students attended the sessions through the day - with a maximum of about 18-20 students at any one time. The attendees were mostly from NYU Courant, with one or two from the Stern Business School, from Columbia, from Rutgers, and from CUNY. About 8 students remained all day - and some came in for individual sessions, e.g., the approximation algorithms session. All the sessions were very well received. The students were divided between whether future events should be presented in one day - or on a weekly basis. The students who attended from other universities prefer the single day format. The Stern students said many more Stern students would be interested in the morning sessions - as well as Msis - Master of Science in Information Systems students.

Many thanks to the NYU hosts Shaila Musharoff, and others from the NYU WinC group. Special thanks also to Sana' Odeh of NYU - and of course all the IBM speakers.


The students are very interested in SOA and ask Steve Schaffer a lot of questions.








A student shows off a DB2 CD.




Brenda Dietrich tells us about research topics in mathematics.


Claudia Perlich listens to Brenda Dietrich before she presents - Claudia tells us about her entry to a NetFlix competion which won a prize.


Yuan-Chi Chang prepares to present.


Konstantin Makarychev tells us about approximation algorithms.




Rama Akkiraju tells us about Services Science.

THE AGENDA

Undergraduate Students Become part of a community, write articles, books, become DB2 certified, and become a student ambassador

10:00-10:45 SOA in 45 minutes
10:45-11:45 DB2, pureXML, Web Services and Web 2.0
11:45-12:15 Using DB2 in Business
12:15-12:30 Getting Lunch
12:30-13:25 Lunch and Talk with Brenda Dietrich and She's Got Their Number!

Graduate Students Get ideas of research topics suitable for Masters projects (or possibly part of your PhD) that may be of interest to IBM or to IBM customers

13:30-14:00 Research topics for Data Management
14:00-14:30 Research topics for KDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining)
14:30-15:00 Approximation Algorithms for Unique Games
15:00-15:30 Research topics for Service Science
15:30-15:45 Final Remarks

The Topics and their speakers

• Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): Steve Schaffer – Wall St SOA Architect, Certified SOA Solution Architect and Software IT Architect
• DB2, pureXML, Web Services and Web 2.0: Susan Malaika – Senior Technical Staff Member in IBM's Software Group
• Using DB2 in Business: Vernaliz Co
• Data Management: Yuan-Chi Chang - Chair of the IBM Data Management Professional Interest Community
• Knowledge Discovery: Claudia Perlich – Research Staff Member in the Data Analytics Research group
• Approximation Algorithms for Unique Games: Konstantin Makarychev – IBM Researcher whose area is in approximation algorithms
• Service Science: Rama Akkiraju - Senior Technical Staff Member; Chair of the Service Science Professional Interest Community

Also on the agenda…
- Lunch with Brenda Dietrich

- Meeting with Faculty at 4:15pm

Location: Warren Weaver Hall

Room 109
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
New York University
251 Mercer Street
New York, N.Y. 10012-1185

This is a large lecture hall on the ground floor which can has 190 seats, a podium at the front, and projector system with in-house support. Room is available from 9am for set up. Directions and map can be found here: http://cims.nyu.edu/direct.html

More Details of the Sessions

Services Oriented Architecture: This session provides an overview of the SOA concept, constructs and value as a Systems Integration strategy.
Speaker: Steve Schaffer is an Open Group Master IT Architect, Certified SOA Design Architect, and Designated Consulting SOA Architect to IBMs Wall Street Business Unit

DB2, pureXML, Web Services and Web 2.0 : This talk will introduce DB2 and its support for XML and will describe its uses in the industry. It will also outline how students can become DB2 certified.
Speaker: Susan Malaika is a senior technical staff member in IBM's Software Group. She specializes in XML and databases. She is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology.






Lunch with Brenda Dietrich

Data Management: This session will describe current research activities in the areas of XML, warehousing, integration, unstructured information management.
Speaker: Yuan-Chi Chang is the chair of the data management professional interest community in IBM Research and manages database research group at Watson Lab.

Knowledge Discovery: This session will provide a brief overview of a number of ongoing projects in the Data Analytics group and present in more detail the recent successful effort on modeling NETFLIX users in the KDD-CUP 2007.
Speaker: Claudia Perlich has received her Ph.D. in Information Systems from Stern School of Business, New York University. Claudia joined the Data Analytics Research group as a Research Staff Member in October 2004 and has been working on a number of research projects and customer engagements in the broad area of predictive modeling for business applications.

Approximation Algorithms for Unique Games: This talk will introduce the Unique Games Problem and Unique Games Conjecture. The Unique Games problem was introduced by Uriel Feige and Laszlo Lovasz. We are given a graph G, a set of labels [k] = {1,...,k}, and permutations pi_{uv} on the set [k] (for all edges (u,v)). Our goal is to find an assignment of labels to variables x(u) (for all vertices u) that maximizes the number of satisfied constraints x(v) = pi_{uv}(x(u)) (for edges (u,v)).
Given an instance where all constraints are satisfiable, it is easy to find such a satisfying assignment. However, if almost all constraints are satisfiable, the Unique Games Conjecture of Khot says, that it is hard to satisfy even a very small fraction of all constraints. This conjecture is interesting from the theoretical point of view, because it implies strong inapproximability results for many combinatorial optimization problems. Particularly, if the conjecture is true, many known approximation algorithms are optimal and cannot be improved.
The talk will describe SDP-based approximation algorithms for the Unique Games Problem and discuss their implications.
The talk is based on joint works with Moses Charikar, Eden Chlamtac and Yury Makarychev.
Speaker: Konstantin Makarychev is a researcher at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. His area of research is approximation algorithms. Konstantin graduated from Princeton University in 2007.

Service Science is becoming a strategic area of scientific study at IBM Research. Historically, IBM has been a leader in applying mathematics, statistics, and operations research to traditional manufacturing problems such as supply chain management, transportation optimization and logistics management. While these concerns continue to be of importance to manufacturing companies, the shift towards service-based economies in certain parts of the world are bringing new business concerns to focus. Industry leaders need guidance on how to innovate, manage, evaluate and optimize their service businesses.
IBM Research is actively working with the world-wide research and academic communities to help define research directions for Service Science. These activities include new academic initiatives such as Service Science Management and Engineering (SSME) and sponsoring several conferences in this area to stimulate research and cross-disciplinary collaboration. In this session, we will introduce our perspectives on service science and outline interesting research topics in this area.
Speaker: Rama Akkiraju is a Senior Technical Staff Member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY. She holds a masters degree in computer science and an MBA degree from Stern School of Business, New York University. Rama graduated at the top of the MBA class of 2004. Since joining IBM Research in 1995, she has worked on agent-based decision support systems, electronic market places and business process integration technologies. She is currently working on interesting problems such as valuation of business transformation projects, and business value networks. Rama is the chair of the Service Science Professional Interest Community for Watson Labs in New York.

Previous NYU IBM Day

See http://nyuibm.blogspot.com/2007/03/nyu-wic-group-visit-to-ibm-tj-watson.html

Testing : FpML (derivatives) Feed on a pureXML database

FpML Atom Feed from a pureXML database

The link above returns an atom feed exposed directly from FpML messages stored a pureXML database.

NYU WinC Group Visit to IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne - 30 March 2007

NYU Women in Computing Group Visit to IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne on 30 March 2007:
30 NYU students visited IBM including 9 PhD, 16 MS, and 12 BS students from Courant and Stern.

At the end of the sessions, we proposed the following:
- making the NYU visit to IBM an annual activity
- running a workshop on technical topics in the fall at NYU

Here is the agenda for the visit
- 11:00-11:50 Cathy Lasser (VP, Industry Solutions and Emerging Business) Research Overview
- 11:50-12:10 Susan Puglia (VP, Quality and Process Transformation Executive for Technical Career Paths Development and Technical Support)
- 12:10-12:35 Brenda Dietrich (Director, Mathematical Sciences) Mathematics at IBM
- 12:35-13:00 Anshu Kak (Executive IT Architect) Services-Oriented Architecture
- 13:00-14:00 Lunch with NYU Alumni, speakers, Charles Lickel (VP, Software),
- 14:00-14:45 Fran Allen (IBM Fellow Emerita, ACM Turing Award Recipient)Compiling a Career
- 14:45-15:15 Mahesh Viswanathan (Lead Architect, Information on Demand)Web 2.0: Challenging the Status Quo in Information Technology

Here are some comments from the students about the visit:

• Lectures were interesting and engaging! It would be great to have similar speakers on campus.
  
• Interesting and fun. Learned a lot.
  
• It was great!
  
• Inspiring and fun!
  
• Very informative and fun!
  
• It was very nice to hear from people who are experienced in the field I am interested in.
  
• Great to learn about IBM and how they fit into technological innovation. Exceptionally inspiring.
  
• Very interesting, would have liked to have seen the facility more.
  
• Very useful and practical advice. Also, fun. Great.
  
• Useful for my future -> Very diverse topics and great speakers!!
  
• Amazing set of speakers. Exciting topics. Very well-organized. I learnt a lot! Thanks a lot!
  One idea: have a 5-10 min break in between talks such that students can interact with the speaker informally - and rest-room break.
  
• I appreciate the support and encouragement from IBM's employees.
  
• Great, informative, educational day. Wonderful opportunity to listen to exemplary figure like Fran Allen and other amazing speakers from different departments of IBM.
  Suggestion: A little more detail regarding internship opportunities in different departments would have been useful and made a difference.
  Reply: Here is some information on the IBM Research internship program.
  
• Thanks a lot for the great trip!
  Suggestions: More technical content and more detailed description of ongoing research would be of interest, e.g., examples of specific research problems and approaches etc).
  
• Please provide the speakers contact information if possible.
  Reply: Can contact me initially if information not available above.
  
• Would like to have a trip inside the IBM Building
  
• It is great.
  
• Very informational, Gave me lots of insight to the company.
  

Community Maintained Artifacts and The Social Web

John Riedl, Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Minnesota
Friday, March 30, 10:30AM-noon
IBM Yorktown, Room 26-024
Host: David Cohn

Many online communities are emerging that, like Wikipedia, bring people together to build community-maintained artifacts of lasting
value (CALVs). Motivating people to contribute is a key problem because the quantity and quality of contributions ultimately determine
a CALV's value. We pose three related research questions: 1) How does intelligent task routing---matching people with work---affect the
quantity of contributions? 2) How does reviewing contributions before accepting them affect the quality of contributions? 3) How do
recommender systems affect the evolution of a shared tagging vocabulary among the contributors?


About the Speaker: Professor Riedl specializes in collaborative filtering, systems, and information filtering. He also often speaks as an expert on the topic of online social networks. In 2006, he was named a Senior Member of the IEEE and also won the Best Paper Award at the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) Conference. Riedl has also received the Commerce Technology Award, The MIT Sloan School Award for Innovation in E-Commerce, and at least half a dozen teaching awards. Riedl has served on many program committees and has authored more than 50 publications, including one book, journal and conference papers, short articles and book chapters. He is a member of the ACM and IEEE organizations, and an Editorial Board member for the Journal of Electronic Commerce Technologies.

Enabling Data Retrieval - by Ranking and Beyond

Title: Enabling Data Retrieval - by Ranking and Beyond
When: 29 March, 2007 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Where: IBM Hawthorne GN-K35
Speaker: Chengkai Li, Ph.D. Candidate, UIUC
Availability: Open


Database management systems (DBMSs) are facing challenges in supporting non-traditional data retrieval for emerging applications. We need retrieval systems over data, much like a "Google" for databases, parallel the well-established information retrieval over text. Such systems should allow users to use flexible and intuitive queries capturing their information needs, and to explore the databases
effectively. In the talk, I will discuss this exciting research area and introduce my work in this direction. In particular I will present RankSQL, a DBMS that provides a systematic and principled framework for ranking by extending relational algebra. I will further introduce our work on ranking aggregate queries. Effective data retrieval mechanisms go beyond just ranking. I will discuss our proposal of generalizing Group-By to clustering, parallel to the generalization from Order-By to
ranking, and combining the two constructs. Moreover, I will briefly mention our study of inverse ranking queries.

Recruiting and Internships in Technology Session Summary - Feb 1st

Women in Computing's (WinC) "Recruiting and Internships in Technology" event that was held on Thursday, February 1st was a great success! We had over 70 people show up, when we were expecting around 40.

Students looking for a full-time, part-time, or internship position came to meet our panel of extraordinary women technologists. A VP from Morgan Stanley and two IBM representatives came, one of which included Sandy Carter,the Vice President of SOA and WebSphere strategy, Channels and Marketing of IBM Corporation. They talked about their work, what exactly they do, what companies they work with, and what is in store for the future of technology. They shared their expert advice on how to manage and successfully execute the job hunt, and how they themselves reached the high level status in their own careers.

After the panel discussion,students got a chance to ask questions and enjoy refreshments (compliments to Patsy's Pizzeria). They also got the chance to talk to all three of our panelists, and to personally give them their resumes. This event was a fantastic networking opportunity to mingle with some very important, high power women.

This event's success is due to the hard work of the WinC team. However, we would like more people to get involved and help continue the burgeoning growth of Women in Computing. In order to serve our WInC members better, we strive to constantly hosts events and activities that will benefit you to the fullest extent. If you are interested in lending a helping hand, or have some idea/interest in a specific area and would like to pursue such, let us know! We would greatly appreciate it. Thanks to all that attended-Hope you took full advantage of a great opportunity!

The next WinC meeting
Monday, February 12th
8pm, Room 1314 Warren Weaver Hall

Hope to see you all there!
Below is a link to the blog of Sandy Carter, one of our speakers at the event :
Sandy Carter Blog

Christine Lee