It comes every year and there's something special when it comes.. the IBM Software Universe 2011 is here.. It is happening on 20 October 2011 at The Renaissance Convention Center, Powai, Mumbai.. The same place where it happens every year.
It was Guy Kawasaki who entertained the audiences with his charming talk on "The 10/20/30 rule of Powerpoint" a couple of years ago and I still remember one of the year we had Mumbai Dabbawallahs who kept the audiences amazed with their presentation on their success mantra. It was Dr. Chan Kim talking about his Blue Ocean Strategy one of the year and guess who it is in 2011...
It is going to be Martina Navratilova who is probably going to share her success (18 grand slam singles titles, 167 career singles titles and 175 doubles title) mantra. and then to keep the spirit alive, there's going to be some entertainment from "Sunidhi Chauhan" at the end of the day.
Here are the highlights
IT Manager Day – 20th October
•Superior Content
–Inspiring keynote sessions by IBM Executives and Client speakers
–Motivational dialogue by celebrity speaker – Martina Navratilova
–Talk show covering real life innovations, results with IBM Software in India
–7 tracks with over 30+ track sessions, with elaborate sessions around Software Capabilities
My last post on this subject was basically an overview of what we did as part of this Remote Mentoring project and in this post I plan to provide a little more insights into what and how we developed, some lessons learnt during the course..
At the inception of the project, I had a detailed discussion with the girls and their guide - Prof. Mengale about the possible use cases / scenarios for the project and agreed to implement
A Survey
A poll
A Calender / Time Table (lectures, practicals, holidays.. etc.)
An Election
Campus Placements
A Quiz
The objective was to understand the concepts of role based access to collaborative content during the various states of the use case - ie. CRUD (Create, Read (and Aggregate), Update, Delete) operations in collaborative applications.
For eg. a poll hardly needed any security or role based access and needed instantaneous aggregation of data while in case of an Election the data privacy and restricted access was of extreme importance and aggregation was required only at the end with access to aggregated data in a very structured manner (to announce the election results to general public)
The Time Table widget was the first widget that surfaced when the project idea came into existence, while poll, survey were very common applications that were not necessarily related to a campus / academic institution's requirement. Campus Placement is a very practical use case and deserves to be built as a standalone application - as a matter of fact could be a SaaS application (Software as a Service) which can benefit Academic Institutions and Companies across India - after a bit of research I figured out that there are already a couple of such companies which offers this application as a service for example
http://ecampusplacement.com/index.html
The Quiz was very similar to Surveys except for the fact that a Quiz required evaluation of the response from individual and declaring a winner while Surveys required aggregation and representation of the result set / data in a particular format.
The students found Lotus Widget Factory to be very unfriendly as the learning curve to understand builders was very steep. Nevertheless, myself and Amit helped them overcome the obstacles with resolutions that we learnt while we mentored them. To some problems they faced we did not have straightforward resolutions and only had workarounds. This is what we do in reality too when it comes implementing projects in real life- when it comes to taking a system to go-live, beyond a certain point we have to get the stakeholders to agree to work arounds and get the system operational...
Myself and my colleague Dr. Bhooshan Kelkar who now heads IBM University Relations in India were in Bangalore a couple of weeks ago to discuss the revamp of IBM University Relations Portal . The plan is to extend it to schools and colleges other than engineering.. In general use it for collaboration with any academic institution - not just universities and engineering colleges. The Corporate Citizenship Initiatives will be driving adoption of this portal with schools and non engineering colleges, going forward.
There was another reason why Bhooshan had traveled to Bangalore with me- he accompanied my friend and mentor, Amol Mahamuni to collect the Zinnov Award tha IBM UR bagged for its contribution in building the ecosystem. It was a moment of pride for all of us at UR team when the IBM University Relations bagged the Zinnov 2011 Award for "Eco-system Contribution"... Here's an extract of one of the report
Zinnov Management Consulting Pvt. Ltd, a leading management consulting firm, recently hosted a first-of-its-kind awards ceremony for the MNC R&D Industry in India, to recognize their contribution to the entire R&D ecosystem. Titled, 'Zinnov Awards & Recognition Program 2010', this event brought together important stakeholders from the global R&D community and recognized their contribution thereby facilitating peer-learning.
Award Category: Eco-system Contribution
In the category, 'Eco-system Contribution', IBM bagged the 'Ecosystem (University) Connect & Development Award', while NVIDIA won the 'Accelerated Ecosystem (University) Connect Award'. The two companies were recognized for their significant contribution in developing the R&D ecosystem in India, specifically through collaborations with universities. R&D Centers have realized that in order to deliver value from India it is imperative that they leverage the supporting ecosystem - i.e. Universities, Government, Service Providers and Start ups for the purpose of research.
The various dimensions used by Zinnov to assess MNC R&D centers across their interaction levels with tier-1 and tier-2 universities in India included: Awareness building initiatives at universities - fairs, seminars; Involvement initiatives at universities - curriculum influence, affiliate programs; Support to universities - grants, lab setups; Strategic Research with universities - specific research projects with a monetary value; assessment of whether the research domain is common or niche. Mr. Amol Mahamuni, Program Director IBM India University Relations, received this award on behalf of IBM India.
How is Indian Population going to come down as a result of introduction of 3G - As always amazing campaign idea by Idea Cellular to popularise the adoption of 3G in India...
Amazing content on the website too........ which was recently re-launched. With IBM WebSphere Portal and Web Content Management as the underlying technology..
Hats off to the Idea team who built the campaign, the content and the website !!
Yet another "smart" step from IBM to help enterprises understand, adopt Social Business by providing a tool to assess where they stand against standard industry practices. This is IBM demonstrating its thought leadership yet again, in this space.
IBM Rational is holding the Innovate Conference for Software Developers and interestingly there's a "Developer Rock Competition" as part of the event. Quite an unusual thing for a "developer conference" to host...
The event is opportunity for developers to
- Get more than 15 hours of studio time and get some music tips from Bangalore's best Rock band, "Thermal & a Quarter".
- Compose and record a song of their own.
- Play the recorded song in front of more than 1000 plus people at Innovate2011.
- There are some cool prizes and awards for the winners.
To know more : http://innovate2011.ocmail2.in/t/r/14921/6178/10/22
I got an invitation to join a CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) Networking event in Pune and I registered to join the event that is happening on 23rd July - to represent Green Hills Group. To my surprise, I got the tickets to the event online with Eventbrite - an Online Event Management Software (as a Service).. An interesting use case, wonder why such a thing was not made in past.. Or may be it was, just that I did not come across one.
A colleague of mine forwarded an email with a bunch of charts - humorous and tickled the brain.. The moment I read it, the first thing I wanted to do was forward it to my colleagues and personal network. A couple of things that can be derived from this-
What kind of person I am and what kind of content do I like the most. Of course there are people who forward everything they get where as there are some who seek relevance / appropriateness of the content and send it to their network..then there are some who rarely forward, lazy bones like me..
The quality of content - the content, that a person who normally does not forward and does the forwarding, is probably best of the content - of course other way to check the quality and relevance is purely measuring the number of times a content is forwarded or the number of nodes that the content has reached.
These forwards can also... interestingly, help derive a social network very easily, if analyzed one will probably detect strongest of the personal networks in an organization. Needless to say, it is not only emails, SMS OR Instant Messaging too will help detect these networks.
In my assessment, it will still leave large part of networks unearthed - for eg: my colleague who sits right next to me and not a great forwarding agent... but great friend of mine will never be spotted on the "forwarding" network.
BTW, Here are a couple of the several interesting graphs that my colleague forwarded...
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Opinion Mining
Opinion to a Machine is a Quintuple (an object made of 5 elements) - (O, f, SO, H, t)
O - the thing in question,
f - the feature of O,
SO the Opinion value,
h the opinion holder,
t the time at which the opinion is given.
Source : Bing Liu in NLP Manual (slide 9 of 21 on http://www.slideshare.net/mcjenkins/how-sentiment-analysis-works)
IBM University Relations runs a program called "Remote Mentoring" (Now called "Global Remote Mentoring") where an IBMer mentors a bunch of college students to complete their academic project. The name remote comes from the fact that the students do not come and work at IBM premises. They use their own personal / college computing resources to work on the project. The project is jointly mentored by a faculty at the college and one or more IBMer. Interestingly, the program runs round the year and the duration depends on number of students, scope of work, academic requirement and several other factors. The project statements most often come from the IBMer who acts as the mentor and intent is to produce something useful for IBM resulting in an asset, white-paper, developerWorks article, patent etc. etc. The IBM software that is required as part of the project is made available through the Academic Initiative website that allows the student / college to download the software from the IBM website.
I proposed a project last year along with my college Amit Kumar (more popular as Amit Kumar33, as his IBM ID is Amit Kumar33/India/IBM.......... :--) ) where we wanted to build a solution on top of Lotus Connections (now IBM Connections) which will accelerate the adoption of Social Software in an Academic Institution. As part of this effort the 5 students from Cummins College of Engineering, Pune developed widgets that had following use cases / functionality implemented
A Survey
A poll
A Calender / Time Table (lectures, practicals, holidays.. etc.)
An Election
Campus Placements
A Quiz
The students used the Lotus Widget Factory to develop the iWidgets and a VMImage with Lotus Connections installed to test their code. In the next post of the series of this article, I will elaborate a couple of use cases and also share some of the lessons we learnt during the course of this project.
" There comes a time when every enterprise must ask itself: What difference have we made? What impact have we had on the world? What have we changed?
In 2011, IBM reflects on 100 years of innovation, bold risks and transformative breakthroughs. We celebrate the big wins—and the mistakes we've overcome. We renew our purpose, unite in our legacy and define our aspirations for the future. Welcome to IBM at 100."
Celebration of Service is one of the expression of the centennial experience where IBMers world over go and serve communities - Pledge, Plan and Participate. At IBM Pune, the Celebration of Service event was launched on 15th June. It happened at IBM Premises - TPO Tower B Cafeteria. It was a showcase of the activities that have been started and/or carried out by IBMers in Pune under On-Demand Community initiatives or through their personal non-profit initiatives. The volunteers formed small groups and got the kids from various schools to prepare for cultural activities like skits, songs, a dance and a quiz. The students who performed came from various schools in Pune which are contributing towards education and upliftment of underprivileged children and where IBM On Demand Community has been active. The cultural activities were followed by the presentation on IBM Centennial and Celebration of Service followed by short presentations by NGO representatives (IBMers) who had participated. This was followed by Inauguration ceremony of lamp lighting and inspiring speeches by the Pune leadership - Rekha Garapati, Director Pune Labs and Debashish Chatterjee, Vice President and Sectors Leader – GBS GD. Finally it was time for a few more cultural activities performed by the kids and a Quiz competition amongst three teams who represented two schools where IBM ODC has been active. The program concluded with distribution of gifts to the kids who participated in the event.
I, one of my colleague in GBS Manisha Ghatpande and several other ODC volunteers coordinated the event. It was indeed a fulfilling day.,, as things went smooth and we got the word about Celebration of Service going amongst IBMers in Pune. While I drove back home from the event, I offered to drop the blind school kids to their hostel and it was fun listening to their conversations and understand how they take on life as differently abled...
Attended the 20th International World Wide Conference last week in Hyderabad. It was a unique and immersing experience for someone like me who never attended a research conference. When I got nominated, I was'nt really sure if I will stay interested for all the five days (except for the fact that I will get relishing food for all the five days). However as things unfolded each day, it got really interesting and here are some of things that I enjoyed, other than the great food at the Hotel Novotel / Hyderabad International Convention Center (HICC)
First !! About Hyderabad International Convention Center -HICC . I was amazed to see such a huge and plush facility built for conferences in India. This probably is the first of its kind, something that was missing for long time to be able to host an event of large size in India.
On Third day of the conference, it was India battling with Pakistan and interestingly, everyone watched it live on the huge screen in the auditorium. Most foreigners must have been amazed by the excitement and spirit that Indians showed towards the game..
Web for the next 1 Billion users - This was one of the hottest topic which was deliberated on each day in at least one of the sessions - it was all about connecting to the next billion users to the web. Some stats that I got to know ( and remember) as a result... There are more than 6 Billion humans on the earth (just found on wikipedia that is it 6.91 Billion, to which we in India contribute a lot). OF which more than 2 Billion are connected to the Internet/WWW. India contributes 1.21 billion people with 70% of them living in rural areas (600,000 villages) which translates to a potential of 800 million people living in villages and who most likely do not have access to internet. Most of them however have access to the mobile phones and hence Mobiles could be the (rather is the) mediaum to get these 800 million roped onto Internet / WWW.
The sessions that I found to be interesting in this context were
1. Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam's Keynote - scattered thoughts but all thoroughly thought provoking - makes one think hard. Most importantly, he proudly declared that his presentation is available on his website and it is indeed accessible out here. I still remember he announced the same (availability of his presentation on web) when he gave the speech at the IBM Townhall meet 4 years ago.
2. Tim Berner's Lee's Keynote - again scattered but very wise and thought provoking.. he talked about the twitter revolution in Egypt and "Right to Access Internet" and a basic human right that legislation of nations worldwide, should make provisions for... or at least start thinking about.
3. Agrocom - ForAuthoritative and Accurate Agricultural Information - a project founded in 2006 at IIT Bombay's Society for Innovation & Entrepreneurship Business Incubator.
Message is there is a lot of effort needed to get more non-english (indian language) content on the web and provide the means for common people to contribute through standard input devices and VOICE too...
4. Microsoft Research Project Wikibhasha - which has the goal of helping translate Wikipedia articles to Indian languages.. more the content in vernacular language, more people are likely to get glued on the net.
5. India Development Gateway Project for Department of IT and executed by CDAC. The objective of this project was to get web to serve the common folk. Bring information and various services at the doorsteps in the villages.
6. Spoken Web - The IBM Innovation - an attempt to get the next billion people having low end mobile handsets to connect and collaborate to offer and avail of services over phone(voicesites). Hatts-off to Arun Kumar from IBM for this lateral thinking and working on this project at IBM Research. This will make WWW on Internet obsolete for the next million, who probably do not need facebook, google and yahoo to take the advantage of the wisdom of crowds.
7. Mapunity - I still do not understand this company- I mean, their business model. They are doing amazing things for mankind using internet and technology- the best amongst the many things they do is help with traffic congestion in cities (Bangalore at the moment). The guy Ashwin Mahesh talked about some of the unbelievable things they have been doing in collaboration with the Traffic police and Public transport guys in Bangalore.. After what I listened in to and read on internet, I consider them to be an NGO that a for-profit organization - if they pay as well as industry does, I would love to work for them... :-)
8. Web Of Things - I get enthralled when think of a day when all important, expensive, traceable devices get hooked on to net and start interacting amongst themselves and / or with humans. for example, a packet to be shipped on a conveyor belt talked to the conveyor belt and the wagon in which it is placed. SensorLab was the company which talked about all the innovations happening in this space.
I attended several research papers too, and they were quite enlightening.. however as after thinking through, I think I enjoyed the industry tracks more..naturally, couldrelate to them directly..I am glad I attended the most.
On Internet, Sentiment Analysis allows businesses to analyze what people think about their product, service, an event or for that matter in the context of personal networks, analyze if people like your photo or a thought you share on your wall. Facebook has just one qualifier "like" and I think it is not allowing people to express the right sentiment - it also makes life difficult for businesses to analyze and make sense of the analyzed data. It is time we introduce more responses than "like" OR like we do now, have multiple interpretations of "like".
Talking of Smarter planet - this video lays down the vision for next decade when we expect devices start talking (and controlling) to each other without having humans to intervene - via Internet. There are countless examples and applications of how life will become easy and efficient if this turns into reality. For example,
a sensor to detect an aging railway track requiring service and about to breakdown if talks to the signalling system and get a railway to halt before it runs into an accident - can save hundreds of lives.
Instrument - Analyze-Connect-Act is the essence of the Smarter Planet.
IBM is hosting yet another Jam in public.. This time around it is crowd sourcing around the topic of how businesses today are exploring or will explore the value of Social Computing in business.Jam will continue until Friday, 11 February at 12:00PM U.S. Eastern Standard Time. Registration is open throughout the event,They can register athttp://ibm.co/joinsbjam or visit the Jam websiteto learn more
On the landing page, I found one poll - "Do you write a Blog ?" that I responded as "Yes, for both work and personal".. the results of this poll were interesting. I was amongst the 8% of the total population who responded.
Other interesting features of the Jam tool includes things such as, it offers a statistics/report of the jam activity and your personal activity. It also has a portlet that reports the total time remaining for the Jam to close in Hours, minutes, seconds...
Since October 2010, I have been leading the efforts of setting up the Mining Center Of Excellence and have been watching the mining business and news since then. One such news that flashed yesterday where three mining majors - BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Vale published their top priorities for business in near future. More than what there priorities are from business perspective, I got interested in the way they represented these priorities - simple yet very effective way to convey the message. The top ten priorities were put out on X and Y Axis which represented Urgency and Importance respectively. I remember the same lesson learnt in one of the time management courses at IBM in my early career. When it comes to prioritization of work, it is a good idea to plot it on these axis and while you work "Urgent" items, keep working hard on the "Important" items too at the same time. It will help bring down the "Urget" items over a period and hence the stress in your life significantly. A logical thought process and has worked (rather I have witnessed) a lot in practice for me...
The Service Jam hosted by IBM (summary below) has concluded and in collaboration with key partners, IBM has published "The Systems of Service", a white paper summarizing key findings from Service Jam. The document will help organizations leverage the knowledge generated by the Jam to innovate, design and improve service programs. Click here to access the White Paper
Service Jam Summary
Service Jam, held October 10-12, 2010 has now concluded. Over 15,000 individuals from 119 countries registered to participate in the Jam, which brought together a global mix of perspectives to discuss, debate and discover the possibilities of new solutions to long-standing societal challenges. Leaders from many sectors united to drive conversations on not only what is happening today, but also how we might improve service tomorrow. We hope that Service Jam provided you with insights, an opportunity to share your thoughts, and promising ideas.
IBM, in collaboration with key partners, will publish a white paper to summarize key findings and highlight creative ideas generated by Service Jam to share with participants. This document will reveal key trends in social innovation and will serve as a pragmatic guide to help organizations innovate, design and improve service programs
I wish visitors of this Blog a very Happy New Year. My post today is about a long pending item that I wanted to write about.. since nov, 2010.
In the year 2009, IBM India University Relations team launched a Portal to facilitate the collaboration between IBM and Indian Universities. Taking this portal from requirements to go live took close to 5-6 months (Mar-Aug) which involved not just technical work, but required working on vendor selection, financial planning, Legal / marketing clearances etc. etc. IBM Lotus Quickr was chosen as the plantform and CSS Corp as the vendor to host/maintain it. Obviously the first phase of this portal went live with minimal customizations to keep the services cost to minimum.
Post launch driving adoption was bigger challenge - convincing IBMers and educating them to use it for all their interactions with the Academia. One learning as a result of the year long adoption efforts - nothing works as good as a strong use case. In our case it was the "Remote Mentoring Program". The portal witnessed good adoption by the ibm mentors who used it for interaction with academia.
Late last year, I helped the University Relations team to put together all the outstanding requirements for the University Relations Collaboration Portal and one of them was revamping the existing UI - which was also a complaint from most of the Lotus brand members. The CSS GUI team has now put together an excellent interface.
