Honorable Mentions
Avatar
IBM Almaden Research Center
www.almaden.ibm.com/
More information: www.almaden.ibm.com/software/projects/avatar/
Team photo: Top row, from left to right: Huaiyu Zhu, Alexander Loeser, Sriram Raghavan and Shivakumar Vaithyanathan. Bottom row, from left to right: Eser Kandogan, Rajasekar Krishnamurthy and Ganesh Ramakrishnan
Avatar, a set of technologies invented by researchers at IBM's Almaden lab, leverages deep analytics, takes the ambiguity out of queries and explains results. It's able to extract concepts and understand metadata, enabling the discovery of information often buried in volumes of unstructured text such as e-mails and Web pages. Borrowing concepts from structured database research, Avatar's off-line processing uses Unstructured Information Management Architecture-compliant annotators to extract concepts and relationships from free-form text. Keywords are semantically interpreted in the context of a domain ontology along with the extracted concepts and are presented in an intuitive interface, resulting in a dialogue between the user and the system to determine the true user intent.
CA Mobile Device Management
CA Inc.
www.ca.com
The CA Mobile Device Management software will provide large organizations with enterprise-level device management tools for the most popular smart phone systems, such as those of Microsoft, Symbian Ltd. and Research In Motion Ltd. It will provide over-the-air management and security utilization, and where practical, Open Mobile Alliance Device Management standards components. The first release of CA Mobile Device Management will provide device-independent consolidated asset inventory, configuration management, policy compliance and security management, and an end-user self-service portal. Based on the CA Environmental IT Management modular architecture, it will be integrated into other CA solution suites or can operate as a stand-alone management product for smart phones.
Identity
Trusted Network Technologies Inc.
www.trustednetworktech.com
Identity embeds machine and user identity information into network packets, establishing pervasive identity across every user, workstation and application server in the enterprise. Customers can control access to valuable resources from the network up, as well as know who is accessing what resources when. They can produce comprehensive reports, confirm provisioning processes and automate identity-based audit information. The major components of an Identity deployment include the Identity Driver, which automatically and transparently embeds a unique user and machine identity within each session; the I-Gateway, which is a hardened in-line appliance placed between users and critical assets; and the I-Manager, which aggregates audit data from I-Gateways and acts as the policy management and distribution center.
Jena
HP Laboratories
www.hpl.hp.com
More information www.hpl.hp.com/semweb
Download site: http://jena.sourceforge.net
Team Photo: From left to right: Dave Reynolds, Andy Seaborne, Chris Dollin, Martin Merry, Ian Dickinson and Brian McBride (not pictured: Jeremy Carroll, from HP Labs Bristol, and Kevin Wilkinson, from HP Labs Palo Alto)
Jena, created at HP Labs, is an open-source Semantic Web tool kit to create applications that share, process and integrate information across disparate systems and geographies on the Web. The Semantic Web allows computers to find and integrate information from diverse sources so that it can be used for different purposes. With the use of Jena, more of the Web's content can be created in a machine-comprehensible form, allowing increasingly intelligent gathering, filtering and processing of knowledge.
Multimedia Fingerprinting Forensics for Traitors Tracing
University of Maryland Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, A. James Clark School of Engineering
www.ece.umd.edu
More information: www.ece.umd.edu/News/06_03_07_dig_fingerprint.html
Research brief: www.isr.umd.edu/ISR/research/researchbriefs/Wu_Digital_Fingerprinting.pdf (download PDF)
Faculty research page: www.ece.umd.edu/~minwu/research/ACC_fingerprint.html
Video links (download Zip files):
www.ece.umd.edu/research/spotlight/communications/wu/ACCFPdemo.zip
www.ece.umd.edu/research/spotlight/communications/wu/ECCFPdemo.zip
Team photo: Clark School faculty members Min Wu and K.J. Ray Liu
Clark School faculty members Min Wu and K.J. Ray Liu are developing multimedia forensics technologies that will protect digital resources and trace those who attempt to steal or misuse them through "collusion attacks," which occur when multiple users conspire to dilute or erase the original digital identification from the stolen multimedia content to avoid implication.
Wu and Liu's new, interdisciplinary digital fingerprinting technology includes anticollusion codes that protect multimedia content from unauthorized redistribution by embedding a unique ID that leaves a distinct fingerprint on each user's copy without compromising the quality of the multimedia product or inhibiting legitimate uses. This ID can identify which users have contributed to a piracy attack.
Neuromancer
Sun Microsystems Inc.
www.sun.com
More information: http://research.sun.com/projects/dashboard.php?id=142
Team Photo: From left to right, front row: Ann Wollrath, Bob Sproull, Tim Blackman and Jane Loizeaux. Back row: Karl Haberl, Jim Waldo and Michael Warres.
Photo credit: Heidi Peabody
Sun Labs is researching large-scale distributed telemetry with a focus on how a system could be created to gather, anonymize and assess vast amounts of health data from wide deployments of sensors. Neuromancer's goal is to enable the collection and use of information gathered from medical sensors deployed over the scope of a medical practice, a hospital, a metropolitan area or an entire population. These sensors will be deployed all the time, allowing constant data gathering of basic medical information. The information will also be kept for the lifetime of the patient, 80-plus years, meaning that the system itself will exist for a time scale not usually thought of in computer systems.
Small Programmable Object Technology, Project Sun SPOT
Sun Microsystems Inc.
www.sun.com
More information: www.sunspotworld.com/
Video: http://sunspotworld.com/media/
Team photo: Left to right, back row: Ron Goldman, Arshan Poursohi and Rob Tow. Middle row: Vipul Gupta, Michael Russo, Bob Alkire and Christian Puhringer. Seated: Randy Smith, Roger Meike and Pete St Pierre. Not shown: David Simmons
Image Credit: Joshua Uziel
Project Sun SPOT simplifies the process of developing wireless sensor and transducer applications, enabling developers to build wireless transducer applications in Java using a sensor board for I/O, an 802.15.4 radio for wireless communication and familiar Integrated Development Environments, such as NetBeans, to write code. The portability makes it simpler to migrate applications among platforms, enabling developers to build new wireless sensors devices using off-the-shelf hardware components.
SeeWhy
SeeWhy Software Ltd.
www.seewhy.com
More information: www.seewhy.com/content/view/71/140/
Team photo: From left to right, Paul Donaldson, Imad Rayman, Phil Wilkins, Mike Tinnion, Steve Brown, Paul Thomas, Dave Mortimer and Andrew Kurowski
SeeWhy uses event stream processing to analyze every transaction automatically, in real time, enabling companies to build more intelligent processes by comparing individual business events with past performance using forward-looking analytics. This real-time approach enables business intelligence capabilities to be built directly into business processes, where an exception can be automatically generated and sent to the relevant operations team, or as a closed loop system where the action is automated. The system is used for monitoring customer transactions on a Web site, shipments, systems performance, process compliance and individual item sales passing through a point of sale system.
VirtualIQ Enterprise
ToutVirtual Inc.
www.toutvirtual.com
More information: www.toutvirtual.com/solutions/viq/enterprise/
www.toutvirtual.com/solutions/viq/enterprise/preview.php
Team photo: Vipul Pabari, chief technology officer (left), and Bakul Mehta, chief strategy officer
VirtualIQ Enterprise manages virtual computing infrastructures -- cross-platform and multitiered -- allowing organizations to obtain a holistic view of their virtual infrastructure (server, applications and clients) and control it based on top-level business policy objectives to prolong product life, protect IT investments and maximize returns on investment. The suite includes global visibility and control of virtual infrastructures, workflow automation for provisioning and decommissioning of virtual machines, and host protection and resource optimization.
VMware Player
VMware
www.vmware.com
VMware's online network, VMTN: www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory
VMware Player lets users evaluate new or beta software contained in virtual machines (a software file containing an operating system and an application) without lengthy setup or system configuration. VMware Player installs like a standard desktop application. Once installed, it runs virtual machines in a separate window. It includes features that enable users to configure their machines for optimal performance and access to host PC devices.
Computerworld Horizon Awards 2006 Honorees
Stories in this report:
- Computerworld Horizon Awards 2006 Honorees
- VMware's VMware DRS
- Stanford University's Password Hash
- Altiris Software Virtualization
- Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Tycoon
- Splunk's Splunk
- SAP AG and Microsoft Corp.'s Duet: Glue for SAP And Office
- HyperOffice's HyperOffice
- BioPassword Inc.'s BioPassword
- University of Maryland's Oasys - Opinion Thermometer
- IBM Almaden Research Center's Business Insights Workbench
- How They Were Chosen
- R&D Resource Links