SMARTER STRATEGIES

IBM Smart Planet Research Reaches Out to South America

R. Colin Johnson | Date: 06-16-10 | Comments

Smarter planet solutions to natural-resource management, energy, transportation and semiconductor devices will be the focus of IBM Research-Brazil, the company's ninth research lab worldwide and its first in South America.

IBM Research-Brazil will be a new permanent research lab that adds about 100 South American scientists to the 3,000 IBM scientists worldwide who are already dedicated to smarter planet solutions.

"We considered very carefully our next stage of globalization and have decided to establish our first new lab in 12 years in South America," says Robert Morris, vice president of Services Research at IBM. "Our approach to information technology�finding smarter solutions to the most important problems confronting our planet�resonates very, very well in Brazil."

Brazil has a huge population�nearly 200 million�that IBM will integrate into its worldwide network of think tanks in China, India, Israel, Japan, Switzerland, Austin (Texas), and T.J. Watson (N.Y.).

Since 2007, more people have lived in cities than anywhere else, and by 2050, 70 percent of the world�s population will be in cities.

"Each of our research labs is networked to each other and into the rest of IBM, which has 20,000 employees in Brazil and 400,000 worldwide, the majority of whom are technologists," Morris asserts.

The lab's first smarter planet project is already under way.

"Our first focus is smarter natural resource management,� he explains, �which is a problem in many if not most parts of the world regarding food, water and energy, but is of particular interest in Brazil."

Brazil has rich deposits of minerals, oil and gas, but recovering them in a sustainable way will be challenging because they are beneath a salt layer. Consequently, Brazil's reserves will require tremendous supercomputer power both to locate minerals and to devise strategies to safely bring them to the surface.

The second initial focus area for IBM Research-Brazil will be smarter human systems, which will draw on the company's current smart cities efforts to tame transportation, distribution and "people management" snarls.

"Smarter human systems is about clusters of humans, whether they be in cities or attending large events like the soccer World Cup or the Olympic Games, both of which are coming up in Brazil," says Morris.

IBM Research-Brazil hopes to demonstrate smarter transportation, smarter crowd control and smarter people-management technologies at both the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016.

"For the World Cup and Olympics, we will demonstrate collaboration and mobile technologies that address issues in transportation and crowd management, with smarter technologies that might also be useful at permanent gathering spots in cities, such as subways," Morris states.

The third area of focus at IBM Research-Brazil will be on smarter semiconductor devices that realize smarter planet ambitions, such as wireless sensor networks.

"Building on IBM's great history in semiconductors, we will be working in the area of sensing technologies, which will help solve our most important problems with energy, water and the environment," Morris concludes.

Other initiatives that IBM Research-Brazil may pursue include smarter transportation, smarter health care and smarter agribusiness.