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.

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.

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.

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?

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.