with global technology companies have been able to establish ... a nontraditional search engine that can provide business ... He et al. describe advanced methods to optimize electrical ... It combines text analytics with best practices and.
Preface: Technology from emerging-market countries For the past several centuries, the developing countries of the world have relied on technological innovation from leading well-developed countries in North America and Europe. However, in the last few decades, economic growth in Bemerging-market countries[ worldwide has been very strong. Initially, the technologies that established this growth came from the developed world. However, currently, in the leading emerging-market countries, many people working with global technology companies have been able to establish laboratories for research and development, and new technology companies are beginning to flourish. Innovation from emerging-market countries is beginning to be implemented worldwide. This issue features several papers from China, India, and the Middle East that illustrate in a small way the broad range of information technologies being developed in these countries. Some of these technologies will likely have a worldwide impact. In the first of four papers from China, Zhang et al. describe a nontraditional search engine that can provide business intelligence through data mining and text analytics. A novel feature of this technology is entity-oriented opinion mining, which enables enterprises to manage the reputations of their brands and to quickly respond to changes in the marketplace. A case study is provided of a financial investment company in China that uses this technology to search many data sources, provide alerts, and make business decisions. He et al. describe advanced methods to optimize electrical power grids. Smart grids are being constructed all over the world to deal with the new challenges placed on modern power systems by environmental and natural resource pressures. This paper describes the general architecture of smart grids and provides guidance for how smart grids can be defined and built. Two practices in China are presented to illustrate how electrical grids can become smarter, and both electrical power companies and customers can benefit. Spam has been the bane of the Internet and is increasingly becoming a serious problem for telecommunications companies providing mobile messaging service (SMS). Wang et al. describe an antispam system for telecommunications companies that combines behavior-based social network analysis and temporal analysis to detect message spammers with both high precision and recall. In the fourth paper from China, Huang et al. describe what they have learned in designing a framework for building a low-cost, secured, and scalable platform for Web-delivered business services. The platform consists of a common set of business and operational support services, such as
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1147/JRD.2010.2080070
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subscriptions management, massive multitenancy, federated identity management, application firewall, and data integration services. Three papers from India illustrate a breadth of technology development. Chenthamarakshan et al. have developed a decision support system to optimize the deployment of human resources when a large portfolio of projects is involved. This system utilizes structured and unstructured data to generate rank-ordered recommendations for practitioners with specific skills for specific open project positions. It combines text analytics with best practices and business rules. Access to the Internet is very difficult for visually impaired or illiterate people. A novel alternative to the visual computer-based Internet is a telecommunications-based Web that has been developed by Agarwal et al. In their paper, they describe a network of VoiceSites that can be created and accessed by voice interaction over an ordinary mobile phone. User studies show that visually impaired and illiterate people can easily learn to use such a system, thus opening a world of information to them. Identification and understanding of tight-knit communities in telecommunications-based social networks is the subject of the paper by Modani et al. They explore the influence of the community on the behavior of the individuals belonging to the community. Armed with this knowledge, telecommunications companies can improve group targeting and customer relationship management. While the economic growth rate has been higher in China and India, the countries of the Middle East also contribute to worldwide information technology research and development. The final four papers in this issue are from Egypt, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. Aimed at improving image quality for video displays on high-dynamic-range TV screens, digital camera images, and medical and seismic images, El-Mahdy and El-Shishiny have developed high-quality rendering technologies that allow real-time tone-mapping operations using a highly local operator. Their technology exploits variability and locality in tone-mapping computation using partial-convolution-engine and machine-learning techniques to rapidly provide high-dynamic-range images. There are no direct rail connections from Europe to Asia at Istanbul. To provide uninterrupted rail transportation, Turkey is building a tunnel under the Bosphorus in a key infrastructure project named the Marmaray Project. It is important to optimize the utilization of the rail tunnel using a special train system that carries highway vehicles on railway cars. The paper by Atalay et al. describes how layouts of facilities are obtained with a station layout improvement algorithm that determines the optimum number of loading and unloading platforms. The train-scheduling problem is then solved to provide an overall design and solution to this key aspect of the Marmaray Project.
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The final two papers show how the Cell Broadband EngineA (Cell/B.E.A) processor can be used to solve important problems. In the paper by Sibai and Kidwai, their work toward a 3-D oil reservoir simulator is described. A key component of such a simulator is a linear equation solver that computes the solution to a system of difference equations using the method of conjugate gradients. Because of the unique Cell/B.E. architecture, parallelization of the conjugate gradient method results in much shorter simulation times. A similar advantage is shown in the paper by Rabie et al. in dealing with a video-surveillance application. They discuss the parallelization, implementation, and performance of such an application. The performance with the eight synergic processor cores of the Cell/B.E. is 23 times faster than that with modern RISC processors due to the ability to process eight separate data streams in parallel. Xiaowei Shen Associate Director and Chief Technology Officer IBM Research, Beijing, China Manish Gupta Director IBM India Research Laboratory, New Delhi, India Hisham El-Shishiny Manager Advanced Technology and Center for Advanced Studies in Cairo Worldwide Leader of IBM Centers for Advanced Studies, Cairo, Egypt Guest Editors John J. Ritsko Editor-in-Chief IBM Journal of Research and Development Yorktown Heights, NY, USA
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IBM J. RES. & DEV.
VOL. 54
NO. 6
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NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2010
