Innovation @ HP Labs articles

HP's innovation engine

srdjan_vejvoda — Wed, 15 May 2013 18:40:45 GMT

Every year a preselected group of engineers from across all of HP gathers at an undisclosed location to share the latest projects they're working on and more importantly to network. The gathering is called Tech Con. Many of HP's innovations had their starting point during this annual confab of HP's global engineering community.

In a post published on HP Next, Martin Fink, HP CTO and Director of HP Labs, gives his take on why this meeting is crucial to HP's innovation pipeline.

Meet HP intern Kyungyong Lee

Guest_Blogger — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 19:56:37 GMT

Contributed by Simon Firth, freelance technology journalist

Kyungyong Lee is two thirds of his way into a year-long internship in HP’s Systems Research Lab. A native of Busan, South Korea, Lee received his undergraduate degree from Sung Kyun Kwan University in Seoul, and then worked for Samsung as a software engineer for four years before deciding to pursue graduate studies. He is currently a PhD student in computer engineering at the University of Florida. After experiencing the flatlands of Florida, Lee’s enjoying being back in a region with some serious mountains. He hikes in the California foothills and Sierras when he can, and stays fit by cycling to work every day.

Alistair Veitch named HP’s newest HP Fellow

Guest_Blogger — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:47:33 GMT

Contributed by Simon Firth, freelance technology journalist

Storage expert Alistair Veitch is HP Labs’ newest HP Fellow, joining a select group of HP researchers recognized as leaders and technical pioneers in their respective fields.

The author of almost 40 peer-reviewed papers and the holder of over 25 patents, Veitch has wide-ranging research interests in computer science, with a particular interest in storage and distributed systems. He’s worked in areas as diverse as operating systems design, software engineering, database systems, storage systems management, and information management.

Since joining HP Labs in 1998, Veitch has led break-through research in storage systems management and design, including the first demonstrations of completely self-managing storage systems. He was the lead architect for the Federated Array of Bricks project, which demonstrated that it was possible to build enterprise-class disk arrays from distributed, commodity components.

3D mobile technology makes innovation real at HP Labs

Guest_Blogger — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 14:09:46 GMT

Contributed by E.G.Nadhan, HP Distinguished Technologist. Nadhan is an active blogger on the HP Services Journey through Enterprise IT Sevices blog. He has over 25 years of experience in the IT industry, has co-authored several books and is an astute observer of the services technology landscape.

Innovation is a regular phenomenon at HP Labs – I have discussed this in innovating the Planet by 2020, improving patient care in the Healthcare industry as well as flexible displays. So, it was no surprise to see the glasses-free, portable 3D display technology from HP Labs in the MIT Technology Review. However, innovation is not just about technical marvels – it becomes real when it improves our quality of life. This came up when I engaged in a discussion about innovation with my college-going niece, Kavita who was simply fascinated by this technology.

As an under-graduate in the field of commerce, Kavita brings an interesting non-technical perspective of the next generation of innovators.

We started with a baseline definition for innovation, which continued to evolve, based on her comments:

The path that led to HP Moonshot

srdjan_vejvoda — Wed, 01 May 2013 17:13:10 GMT

The emergence of cloud computing and Big Data back in 2006-2007 prompted a group of HP Labs researchers to look at new ways to optimize server efficiencies. Their approach was to rethink the entire data management infrastructure. In looking at the heavy workloads demanded by this new type of data-intensive computing, they proposed to use mobile processors to alleviate the energy and cost constraints imposed by traditional server infrastructures. From there they developed a blueprint which led to the development by HP's Enterprise group of the first generation of HP Moonshot servers in November of 2011 and then just recently to the launch of the second generation of HP Moonshot servers.

Parthasarathy Ranganathan, HP Fellow and member of the Systems Research Lab, was a key member of that group of HP Labs researchers. In a blog post published on HP Next, he describes the work that led to HP Moonshot, which represents a significant break from traditional server infrastructures.

April Slayden Mitchell proves that it’s cool to be a girl geek

martina_trucco — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 21:33:08 GMT

HP Software played host to Bay Area “girl geeks” on March 13 for an evening of food and drinks, along with a panel session that featured some of HP’s top female leaders, including HP Labs Principal Scientist April Slayden Mitchell. Those of you faithfully following us will probably recognize April from previous posts, as she has most recently led the team behind HP Labs Compass, an enterprise social collaboration service.

Pattern mining on a billion records

srdjan_vejvoda — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 04:54:33 GMT

Are you searching for patterns in Big Data? Do you want to determine trends from your customer data or even network event logs?

In a blog post published recently on the HP Vertica blog a team of HP Labs researchers from the Systems Research Lab show how the Vertica Analytics Platform can be used to find patterns from a billion records in a couple of minutes, about 9x faster than Hadoop.

HP Moonshot: the HP Labs team that did some of the groundbreaking research

srdjan_vejvoda — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 01:16:03 GMT

HP today announced the launch of the first commercially available HP Moonshot system, a new type of server that tackles head-on the challenges of space, energy, cost and complexity of today’s data centers and hyper-scale environments in general.

Today’s announcement represents a true paradigm shift and is the result of both HP’s industry-leading server intellectual property and ten years of deep, strong and sustained effort from a dedicated team of HP Labs researchers.

HP Labs Researcher David Fattal honored by MIT Technology Review

martina_trucco — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 20:59:24 GMT

HP Labs Researcher David Fattal has been selected by MIT Technology Review as one of the top innovators under 35 in France. If you read our previous post about our glasses-free 3D research, then you've already met David and some of his colleagues.

On Our Way to Glasses-Free 3D

Guest_Blogger — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 21:42:21 GMT

Contributed by David Fattal and Ray Beausoleil, HP Labs

In research released today in Nature Magazine, we’re excited to introduce a multi-directional diffractive backlight technology allowing the rendering of high resolution, full parallax 3D images in a zone up to 180° and up to one meter away.

In other words: glasses-free 3D for your mobile device.

HP Labs creates Echo, a powerful new tool for understanding opinions in context

Guest_Blogger — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 22:31:05 GMT

Contributed by Simon Firth, freelance technology journalist

It’s a common challenge in the Information Age: thanks to modern storage and search technology, we can easily acquire huge sets of documents that will likely be useful to us—but we then have to read through them all.

“You could be a doctor reading up on a new research field, a lawyer looking for legal precedents or a marketer gauging what people have been saying about your product. They’re all tasks typical of our information-rich, time-poor world,” suggests HP Labs researcher Joshua Hailpern.

In each case, Hailpern argues, it would be highly useful to know whether the opinions in a specific document are typical of the whole set, or outliers—and to have that information created automatically. It would help us research faster and more accurately, and fight back against information overload.

Last summer Hailpern and HP Senior Fellow Bernardo Huberman set out to create a tool that would do exactly that. The result is Echo – a software system that can take any set of documents, automatically register the opinions contained in each and then display the results via an interface that’s both powerful and intuitive to navigate.

HP supports ICT Pioneers competition

Guest_Blogger — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 18:25:44 GMT

Contributed by Lucy Feilen, Communications Manager HP Labs Bristol

The ICT Pioneers awards have been running for the past two years with the aim of finding an ICT Pioneer - in particular a PhD student whose research could be commercialized in the UK. The competition is open to all second and third year UK postgraduate research students in ICT-related subjects. The competition is organized by the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) and supported by HP Labs Bristol and other sponsors: BCS, Imagination Technologies, ARM, the Institution of Engineering and Technology, BT and the BBC.

HP Labs supports Lego Robotics Challenge

Guest_Blogger — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 00:48:38 GMT

Contributed by Lucy Feilen, Communications Manager at HP Labs Bristol

HP Labs hosted this year’s South West regional final of the Lego Robotics Challenge. The competition, held at HP Labs Bristol, was refereed by many HP Labs researchers and HP storage research and development staff. Local teams went head to head to build and program an autonomous Lego robot to complete a series of missions on a specialized field and to score as many points as possible.

The theme of this year’s challenge was senior solutions. Teams had to look at improving the quality of life for seniors by helping them continue to be independent, engaged, and connected in their communities. Teams explored the topic of ageing and how it may affect a person’s ability to maintain a healthy lifestyle – solving issues like getting around, keeping in touch, or staying fit. The teams researched obstacles and then suggested ways to improve the quality of life for the seniors affected.

30 minutes in 2020

srdjan_vejvoda — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 01:07:40 GMT

E.G.Nadhan, HP Distinguished Technologist, is an active blogger on the HP Services Journey through Enterprise IT Sevices blog. He has over 25 years of experience in the IT industry, has co-authored several books and is an especially astute observer of the services technology landscape.

He traveled last month to Frankfurt, Germany,for the second leg of HP Discover 2012. In Frankfurt, he was particularly inspired by the keynote given by HP Senior Fellow and HP Labs Chief Engineer Chandrakant Patel titled "30 minutes in 2020 – A glimpse into the future at HP Labs." Nadhan went on to produce two blog posts in which he elaborates on the concepts put forward by Patel in his talk. He writes: “People, Profit, Planet and Petadata. These were the intriguing words with which HP Senior Fellow, Chandrakant Patel ended his track keynote session at HP Discover in Frankfurt [...] I began to think about how those four words tied back to the content he shared."

Here are the two posts and a third post about the same keynote on the Enterprise CIO Forum blog:

30 minutes in 2020—People and Planet

30 minutes in 2020—Petadata and Profit

What can CIOs do to innovate the Planet by 2020?

Dejan Milojicic is 2013 President-Elect of the IEEE Computer Society

Guest_Blogger — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 22:15:28 GMT

January 1, 2013 saw HP Labs researcher Dejan Milojicic taking up his new role as president-elect of the IEEE Computer Society.

A widely-respected expert in distributed systems and high-performance computing in the cloud, Milojicic is a senior researcher and research manager in HP’s Intelligent Infrastructure Lab and managing director of the Open Cirrus testbed, a global consortium sponsored by HP, Intel, and Yahoo. In addition to his long association with the IEEE Computer Society, Milojicic is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Distinguished Engineer.

With some 75,000 members, the IEEE Computer Society is the world's leading computing membership organization and the largest of the 38 technical societies that make up the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). It is a major source of publications and technical information, and organizes numerous influential technical conferences in the field.

We spoke with Milojicic about his involvement with the IEEE CS, his new position, and how he’d like to see the society grow over the next few years.

2013 Predictions -- A Year of Expectation

Guest_Blogger — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 20:04:54 GMT

This post by HP Fellow and member of HP Labs Charlie Bess originally appeared on The Next Big Thing blog.

If 2011 was the year of transformation and 2012 was the year of disruption, I believe that 2013 will be a year of expectation – changing expectations in IT. A year when many of these trends I’ve posted about really hit home. I’ll use the links in this post to provide the background context for these predictions.

Security is shifting with more threats from more sources and the realization that everyone gets hacked. Organizations will have a higher expectations of security based on what everyone has experienced and learned.

The industry has been talking about mobile devices, sensors and using networks to pull data from the edge and so now they’ll look to do something with all this data.

The market has talked about having software defined networks to make communications as virtualized and flexible as the computing infrastructure, now this versatility will become an expectation.

HP Labs’ contributions to HP StoreAll, announced at HP Discover Frankfurt

Guest_Blogger — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:53:32 GMT

Editor’s note: HP Labs researchers Kim Keeton and Brad Morrey give us an in-depth view of how an HP Labs technology is developed, and then is transferred to HP’s products.

By Principal Researcher Kim Keeton and Senior Research Scientist Brad Morrey, Intelligent Infrastructure Lab

On December 4 at HP Discover in Frankfurt, HP announced HP StoreAll with Express Query, a new storage product for archive data and object storage. StoreAll provides great scale (up to 1024 nodes and 16 petabytes of data) and low cost of storage (as low as $0.91/GB). Express Query adds a scalable metadata database that was developed by HP Labs. Express Query is integrated with StoreAll, to automatically capture and store file system attributes, like file size and last modified time. Additionally, Express Query allows users to tag files with custom attributes – for example, an animation studio could add attributes according to the movie title or content of the file (“penguin”). Users can later find files that match custom or system attributes efficiently, using a RESTful API. This “organization by search” capability allows users the flexibility to manage space, backup or tiering policies based on metadata stored in Express Query.

HPL@Discover - Sharing a vision for smarter, faster enterprise-scale security

Guest_Blogger — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 00:50:50 GMT

Contributed by Simon Firth, freelance technology journalist

Over and over this week, a mysterious virus is mounting a sneak attack on an HP Labs server at the heart of HP Discover 2012 in Frankfurt, Germany.

Luckily, the malware is also being repeatedly detected, thanks to an innovation being showcased here at the HP Labs Pavilion.

“We’re simulating an attack by a previously unknown piece of malware – what’s usually referred to as a Zero Day attack,” explains HP Labs security expert Richard Brown. These are among the most dangerous of all security breaches, Brown notes, because of the damage they can do in the hours, days, and sometimes even weeks before software patches become available to shut them down.

In the HP Labs demo, however, the malware is detected as soon as it starts to exhibit symptoms, which would allow time for the system under attack to put extra defensive procedures in place.

It’s an example of a broad new security research effort underway at HP Labs, called Dynamic Defense, which moves away from the industry’s typically static approach to threat assessment, discovery and response towards one that adapts and responds as the threat environment itself changes.

HPL@Discover -- Immersive Operations, powered by HP Photon Engine

Guest_Blogger — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 00:35:49 GMT

Contributed by Simon Firth, freelance technology journalist

Pay a visit to the HP Labs Pavilion at the heart of HP Discover 2012 in Frankfurt, Germany this week, and you won’t miss an enormous projected display pulsing with data.

It’s one of four demonstrations of new HP Labs research being featured at the event. The screen itself is a major innovation –HP Photon Engine technology can turn almost any flat surface into an enormous and arbitrarily bright display using only standard components.

But equally crucial is what’s being shared on the screen: two examples of HP Labs’ comprehensive, end-to-end data visualization solution, the HP Labs Immersive Operations Center.

HPL@Discover – Demonstrating cloud-ready social analytics to make sense of your company’s knowledge

Guest_Blogger — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 05:44:55 GMT

Contributed by Simon Firth, freelance technology journalist

Modern companies generate, record and store enormous amounts of information that they can use to improve their operations and output – if only their employees could find that data in a timely and efficient way.

“Unfortunately, though, quickly discovering information relevant to what you're doing, and then engaging with and sharing that material, still relies on serendipity much more than it should,” says HP Labs informatics researcher and Director of HP Labs Israel, Ruth Bergman.

Bergman is part of a research effort underway at HP Labs that’s addressing this problem by combining enterprise search techniques with sophisticated social analytics – creating a new generation of hybrid tools that make it easier to both find and then share relevant information within an organization.