Labs blog

And the winners are . . . HP Labs announces collaborative research awards

2008-08-14T18:17:00Z

Kae Nemoto at Japan's National Institute of Informatics is investigating new hybrid quantum devices that could one day help pave the way for quantum computers. At MIT, Erik Brynjolfsson is investigating how ideas spread among people in some of the most innovative places on the planet. And John Philip Collomosse at the UK's University of Bath wants to breathe life into home videos by providing easy ways to give them a professional sheen.

That's just a taste of some of the projects planned by the 41 winners of our Innovation Research Awards, a new program for funding collaborative research with universities. The winners -- professors from some of the best technical universities around -- were chosen from among 450 submissions from 200 universities worldwide. I've published a feature story on the program and some of the winners, but there's more out there than I could cover. (Plus, the blog lets me give my own spin on things, right?)

To my mind, some of the most interesting work is going on in nanophotonics, where scientists are trying to replace the copper connections in racks, blades and even inside chips with light. So what? Photonics interconnects can improve performance, solve bandwidth problems, and also operate at much lower power than conventional electrical switches. Copper, by contrast, is increasingly scare and expensive, and mining it can create environmental problems.

Here are just two of the photonics projects:

Signal Processing in On-Chip Optical DWDM Networks (Alan E. Willner, University of Southern California, Optical Communications Lab)
High-Speed, Low-Threshold Hybrid Silicon Evanescent Ring Resonator Lasers (John Bowers, University of California, Santa Barbara, Optoelectronics Research Group)

There's also a cluster of projects around cloud computing. (As you'll recall, HP Labs recently announced plans to set up a giant cloud computing test bed together with Intel, Yahoo! and several university and government partners). To address some of the challenges around making cloud computing real, Antonio Luis Pinto Ferreira de Sousa and his students at Portugal's University of Minho are developing dependable cloud computing management services, while the University of Michigan's Kang G. Shin is attacking the problem of resource allocation in large-scale virtual data centers.

Other interesting work is going on around new ways of communicating. One of the more intriguing projects is going on at the University of California at Berkeley, where Ruzena Bajcsy and her students are exploring new types of remote collaboration technologies that would, for example, let people dance together even if they're thousands of miles apart. There's a video (wmv format). They've also experimented with teaching Tai Chi virtually

You can see the full list of winning professors and projects here.

While I was gone: More Scoble videos

2008-08-11T23:10:00Z

As you know, I've been traveling in Israel for the past several weeks (work and vacation) and missed Robert Scoble's latest videos on HP Labs. If you haven't seen them, they're worth viewing.

The most recent is interview with Phil Kuekes, a computer architect in our Information and Quantum Systems Lab where, as he says "we make things atom by atom." Phil talks about memristor (you've already read quite a bit about this here) which could lead to a new type of computer memory that's nonvolatile, many times faster than Flash and may be able to replicate some of the synaptic functions of the human brain.

Of course, I'm biased, but this is a great interview. Phil's been at HP Labs for 17 years, and he's still . . . I think the best word is "effervescent."

I've had many questions about memristor here, and have tried my best to answer them. Phil provides greater technical depth than I've been able to, describing how memristor works and what it could mean for the future of computer memory.

He also provides a peek into the lab's photonics work, where scientists are trying to replace the copper connections in computers with light.

Why should you care? "If we can push that technology 8 or 10 years from now into every server, the world would save 21 Gigawatts," Phil says. "That's equivalent to 21 nuclear power plants we never have to build, or 21 giant coal-fired plans the world never has to build."

Phil's one of the reasons I work here. As he says, "this is a place where as you look around, you see people doing all kinds of interesting things."

By the way, all the videos start with a glimpse into the old offices of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. The offices about 50 feet from where I sit in Labs, and they're time capsules of what things looked like and felt like when the founders were still here. That was long before my time, but I like to walk in sometimes and imagine.

Blog with a view: More from HP Labs Israel

2008-07-23T13:49:00Z

I'm writing this post from the 10th floor terrace of my hotel in Haifa. They have a business center where there's food and drink and wireless access and – best of all – an amazing view. If you have to work when you'd rather play, this place (to borrow from Casablanca) "takes the sting out of being occupied."

It's nighttime. There's a warm breeze, an orange-slice moon and a big blanket of city lights spreading out over the broad, flat plain. Somewhere below, there's live opera from a party, children's voices, a distant horn honking.
So much for my golden prose. Why I'm here: HP Labs Israel. As I've said, this is a small group that has had a big impact (see "Shalom from HP Labs Israel").

The secret of its success?

"It all starts with the people," says Oren Ariel, who took over as lab director last November."You need to start with energetic, smart people who understand the business and the customer, and then you have to deploy them in a manner that's relevant to the business."

Ariel appears to have exactly that. Team members are ambitious and focused, and they appear to like their work – and each other – a lot. Everyone eats lunch together daily, sharing humus and salad and rice, and more importantly, their lives. On Thursdays, someone springs for breakfast, shared around the same horseshoe-shaped table.

"The lab has almost doubled since I came, but it's still small enough so you know everyone," says Ayelet Pnueli, a physicist who joined four years ago. "It's not the usual workplace. It's personal."

Another key: Two of the biggest HP business customers for HPL-I (as we say in acronym-happy HP) have major R&D faculties within a two-hour drive. This is a big deal because until HP's acquisition of digital-press maker Indigo in 2001, all of the Haifa group's business contacts were thousands of miles away.

The researchers like to quote Doron Shaked, one of the original three from 'in the beginning' in 1995, when Abraham Lempel (of Lempel-Ziv fame) founded the Haifa lab.

"HP bought Indigo for us," Doron likes to say. He's now leading a team working on automating print quality assurance, which is amazingly complicated and will have to be saved for a future article or post.

In 2006, HP purchased Mercury Interactive, with R&D facilities in Yehud, which gave the Haifa group a second business group nearby.

Ariel had worked at Mercury Interactive as chief architect and vice president of R&D for the Information Technology Service Management division before taking over the leadership of HPL-I after Lempel's retirement. Since then, the lab's relationships with Mercury (now part of HP Software) have expanded and deepened, as has its entrepreneurial spirit.

"I like my team to feel like they're running a startup and that there's a sense of urgency," he says. "When startups reach a certain value, they go on to the next round of funding. If they don’t, then you pull the plug."

Shalom from HP Labs Israel

2008-07-23T12:22:00Z

I'm on my first visit ever to HP Labs Israel in Haifa and have been eager to share some of it with you.

The lab, tucked away in a corner of the highly ranked Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, consists of a small team that has a big impact at HP. The group's research has gone into nearly every printer, scanner and Indigo digital press the company sells. And now they're working with HP Software as a result of HP's acquisition of Mercury Interactive.

Before I tell you more, let me show you something. Remember the photo-enhancement software I mentioned earlier this month? Much of the work was done here. It started as a project called HIPIE (HP Indigo Photo Enhancement Server) and it automatically improves photos selectively sharpening, improving contrast, brightening and darkening, reducing "noise" and artifacts and more. The technology is now available for some Indigo presses. You can use a simple version of the application for free at Snapfish Lab.

The Snapfish version is the one I'm using. I already published one example of how it works. Here's another, straight from Israel. I am no expert photographer, and I'm using a point-and-shoot camera.

The image is sunset on the Mediterranean Sea from Haifa's Hof Dado (Dado beach) on my first full day in Israel.

Before After

I guess you can tell I'm having a lot of fun with this tool. To see more samples, go to Snapfish Lab. If you want to try it on your own photos, you need to set up a free Snapfish account.

It's after 9 p.m. here in Haifa and I'm going to get a falafel. I'll try to get at least one more post out before I take some time off to see Israel.

Memristor in EE Times

2008-07-09T21:08:00Z

Check out R. Colin Johnson's excellent EE Times article today: Memristor Ready for Prime Time.

As you'll recall, HP Labs in April proved the existence of the Memristor as a fourth fundamental integrated circuit unit (the others are the resistor, the capacitor and the inductor). Last month, researchers demonstrated how to control the memristor material, which changes resistance in response to current flowing through it.That advance means that researchers can now actually build a device that delivers specific electrical performance.

What I didn't know until I read the EE Times article was that scientists expect to have commercial prototype chips ready sometime next year. The nonvolatile RRAM (resistive random-access memory) chips will be based on the crossbar architecture that has been the foundation of many of the lab's technical breakthroughs. Developed in 1999, crossbar architecture uses parallel wires crossed by a second set of wires to create a nanoscale electronic switch that can deliver memory, logic and integrated memory and logic functions.

Anyway, enough from me. Read Colin's piece. It provides answers to many of the technical questions that have come through this blog and from comments on the stories I've written on this topic.

p.s. I know I promised more photos today. But news takes priority.

Free, automatic photo enhancement

2008-07-08T23:39:00Z

Snapfish Lab has a new digital photo-fixing tool that I've been trying out. It's free, it's easy, and it enhances your photos in just one click.

The software uses seven proprietary algorithms to analyze each photo to determine exactly which enhancements, and how much of each one, a particular image needs.

In one pass, it can sharpen a picture, improve its contrast -- through adaptive lighting, brightening/darkening, contrast stretching and 3D boosting -- and reduce the ‘noise’ and artifacts in the picture caused by digital compression.

I used it on a few pictures from my own album. Some of these I had already tried to "enhance" by other means, but I am really not very good at fixing photos. The Snapfish Lab image-enhancement tool did a better job.

My examples are below. You can see how it works here. If you want to try it on your own photos, you have to sign up for a Snapfish account first, but it is free and they don't send you unwanted email.

To learn more about the software, check out the feature story I published a couple of hours ago. It's also available as an enhancement to HP Indigo 5000 and 5500 digital presses, where it goes under the incredibly sexy name of HP Indigo Photo Enhancement Server version 2.0.

My photos, only better

Hillside in Beatty, Nevada

Before After

It's getting late and I still haven't been to the gym! I'll upload more photos tomorrow.

Scoble visits Labs

2008-07-04T02:36:00Z

Robert Scoble, the well-known technology blogger, was here the other day and posted a trio of videos about what he saw.

Datacenter of the future: Scoble visits the HP Labs data center and finds that, unlike most, it isn't freezing inside, thanks to HP Labs cooling and power-management technologies that dramatically reduce energy demands. He also gets to meet our data center robot. interviews HP Fellow Chandrakant Patel, who is director of the Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab and has lead research into energy-efficient computing for more than a decade.
Bill and Dave's offices: Scoble sees the offices of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett, located in the HP Labs building, which have been preserved as the company founders left them. I've worked in this building nine years, and I still think those offices are cool.
Social computing lab: Scoble meets very briefly with Senior HP Fellow Bernardo Huberman, director of the Social Computing Lab and captures the video on his cell phone. He's filming a "real" video that will be posted in a few weeks. (If I were you, I'd wait for the feature).

Datacenter of the future

Bill and Dave's offices

Social computing lab

Mechanical engineers getting some respect

2008-06-18T00:02:00Z

The New York Times reports today that, after decades of being regarded "as little more than blue-collar workers in a high-tech world," mechanical engineers are finally in demand because of the booming growth in data centers and rising concerns about data center costs and energy use.

This is news to me because, not being an engineer, I've always thought to all engineers were pretty well-respected. Turns out, The Times says, it was the "charismatic marketing visionaries" and "software wizards" who were viewed as the big stars of high-tech.

In the past, "we were seen as sheet metal jockeys,” HP Labs' Chandrakant Patel told the newspaper. Patel, a mechanical engineer by training, now runs HP Labs' Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab. The lab has been in the spotlight lately because of a recent announcement that they aim to reduce data centers' carbon footprint of data centers by 75 percent within the next five years – all while maintaining performance, reliability and uptime requirements.

Chandrakant is one of my favorite people here at Labs, so it's good to see all this happening. Even more importantly, it's good to see that, at long last, people are paying attention to the fact that we simply cannot keep consuming energy and natural resources without thinking about the consequences.

Although Chandrakant is immediately focused on reducing IT's energy consumption, which amounts to about 2 percent of the total, his aim is to tackle the other 98 percent as well.

Personal note: When I was growing up, my dad used to walk around the house telling us to turn off lights we'd forgotten. Does anyone do that anymore?

Memristor, the sequel

2008-06-16T17:09:00Z

I just published a story on the latest memristor findings and a new paper now in the advance online edition of journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Yes, I know it's been in the news a lot lately -- but this is cool. The scientists have now engineered control over the memristor, meaning they can now determine how the device functions. That matters because you need to be able to control something if you're really going to use it; it's now possible to design memristors into integrated circuits.

Besides being many times faster and less expensive than Flash memory, the memristor could one day lead to analog computers that process information in a manner similar to the human brain and possibly even learn. Any learning you see in computers today is the result of software. In this case, the hardware itself could learn.

Anyway, read more here or, if you have a subscription, you can go right to the source and read the paper.

A new kind of "calculator" from HP Labs

2008-06-12T23:02:00Z

Every hear of a calculator for color? For the past month or so I've been playing around with the Color Calculator, a tool my colleague Nathan Moroney created as a way of choosing colors without names.

The calculator has nine color "buttons" and a larger square. It works like sort of an electronic artist's palette, and the square is where the colors get mixed. You start out with grey and the calculator shows the RGB (red-green-blue) and hex codes for that color. But when I clicked on one of the color buttons – say, yellow – the square turned more and more yellow and the RGB and hex numbers changed.

When I added pink, I got a golden-orangish sunset color. Then I added some blue and the square turned carmel-y. It's little like finger-painting. If you keep adding colors you get a dark and nondescript mess. (To reset it, hit "refresh.")

Nathan's earlier work had very much to do with words and using a color thesaurus he created to develop a common language for color (to avoid the need for RGB or Hex codes). This takes that in a very different direction.

The calculator is one of several fun Web-based experiments Nathan devised for his color research. This work recently earned Nathan the honor of being named a Fellow of the IS&T, the main professional group for the science and practice of image assessment).

You can see more fun tools on the Mostly Color Perception blog Nathan co-authors with Giordano Beretta.

Gathering around the virtual water cooler

2008-06-03T01:14:00Z

Most companies will tell you that their people and the knowledge they carry is a huge asset.

They'll also admit, if they're being honest, that getting at that expertise can be tough: Information is constantly being created, updated or lost. People shift jobs. And expertise isn't always where you'd expect to find it.

HP Labs' Mike Brzozowski recently showed me a possible solution to this problem. He calls it WaterCooler.

Mike saw how Web 2.0 services like del.icio.us , Digg and Facebook made it easy for people to find people with common interests and share information with them. He also saw how systems like knowledge bases can be too hard or take too much time for both contributors and users.

WaterCooler provides information aggregation plus social networking plus knowledge management.

It operates something like public social networking or community sites, but works inside an organization, integrating tools like the employee directory for organizational charts, geographics and job roles.

With WaterCooler, you can easily share expertise, news and opinions and conversations across geographies and organization boundaries. You can browse data by source, organization, workgroup, job junction, author, keyword or topic. Instead of spending your time searching information, you're tapping the expertise of your co-workers to get what you need faster.

I've been using it for the past month or so and am finding the "what's hot" feature (beta) particularly interesting because it lets you find out what people are talking about – a sort of organizational zeitgeist. A recent hot topic, for example, was HP's acquisition of EDS.

It even lets you see the most popular hobbies. The No. 1 hobby? What you're doing now: Reading.

Pushing the 'pause' button

2008-05-21T21:18:00Z

Beginning tomorrow, my blog will be hold for about a week because we're migrating to a new (better!) blog platform.

From May 23 until June 1, I won't be posting and cannot receive comments. Please hold your comments until June when our new site will be live and I'll be blogging again.

I'll have lots more news on HP Labs research when I start back up. I've been talking with lab directors about some of their new projects this week and will be able to report some of what I've learned in the weeks to come.

Building a better Internet?

2008-05-20T20:40:00Z

How we access the Internet, who provides the service and what services are available could change in the future as a result of actions by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft to deploy their own Wide Area Networks (WAN).

Rising cost pressures and the limitations of Internet Service Providers are driving these Internet giants to seek more control over the end-to-end delivery of their existing applications – and possibly deploy new applications that the current Internet cannot support, says HP Labs researcher Martin Arlitt in a recently honored paper.

Martin and his co-authors -- HP Labs intern Phillipa Gill and her advisors Zongpeng Li (University of Calgary) and Anirban Mahanti (IIT Delhi) -- discuss the reasons for this change and its implications for users, ISPs, content providers and network researchers.

The paper, "The Flattening Internet Topology," was named "best paper based on a new dataset" at the 9^th Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM 2008) in April and is now available as an HP Labs technical report.

"The assumption is that content providers leave it to ISPs to deliver services over the Internet," says Martin, a researcher in the Service Automation and Integration Lab. "We're showing that things are not what you think."

Photonics to the rescue

2008-05-19T19:03:00Z

I've written frequently on the HP Labs site about the problems of rising costs and energy consumption facing computer makers as they try to squeeze more performance out of the existing IT infrastructure.

One possible solution would be to replace the copper connections among blades, boards and chips with light. Why replace copper? It's not energy-efficient, is increasingly scare and expensive, and mining it can create environmental problems.

By contrast, photonic interconnects can improve performance, solve bandwidth problems, and also operate at much lower power than conventional electrical switches.

HP recently hosted its first annual Photonic Interconnect Forum to combine forces with scientists from universities and businesses to bring this technology to market, possibly even by next year. Potential partners include Intel, Avago, Lightwire and Corning.

This work could have tremendous impact, especially on the ongoing problem of IT energy consumption. HP Fellow Terry Morris says that shifting to servers using optical connections could cut power use annually by 40 percent worldwide by 2016 or 2017.

"We can make a substantial and measurable reduction to the amount of power consumed by servers as a result of our work on photonic interconnects," Morris says. "Rarely do you get an opportunity to speed up computers and save energy at the same time."

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend, but there's an excellent article in EE Times. Scott Jordan also has posted an interesting blog, with a particular emphasis on the importance of collaboration.

This is a key point for two reasons: As HP Labs Director Prith Banerjee says, "Not all the smart people work at HP." Why not partner with the best?

But for me, there's an even stronger argument for teamwork. If technology is going to benefit society – and isn't that what we should be doing? The only way we're all going to be successful is to work together. Goodness knows there are enough problems to solve.

Sustainable IT and the Digital Divide

2008-05-14T22:51:00Z

Chandrakant is a pioneer in what's now known as sustainable IT or "green computing". He founded HP Labs' thermal technology research program in the early 1990s, and has continued to push for (and develop) more energy-efficient IT solutions.

Environmental issues have long been important to me so Chandrakant's work is, in my opinion, some of the most exciting research we do at HP Labs.

One of his latest projects aims to reduce data center energy demand by using measurement and control to provision key compute, power, and cooling resources based on the needs of the user.

Reducing energy demand will lower costs -- and that, he says, will open up access to IT to more people in developing nations, allowing them to work and compete more effectively. But addressing the Digital Divide must be accompanied by what Chandrakant calls a "cradle to cradle" approach to IT.

In the Financial Times guest article, Chandrakant says we must take into account the entire IT lifecycle, from the energy required and materials extracted to build IT equipment to how it is manufactured and operated and even to how these same products and materials are reclaimed when they are no longer usable.

He also argues that IT can help address environmental problems by reducing the need for travel, for example, or allowing us to measure and compare the true impact of competing technologies.

It's refreshing to hear someone talk this way. It's one thing to cut energy use in the data center or even to find more sustainable sources of energy. But the only way we're going to truly make progress is to look at the whole picture -- beyond data centers, beyond IT -- and consider how we live our lives.

Chandrakant's work is, I think, a step in the right direction.