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Accelerating The Discovery Of Insights From Data

Abstract

Today, businesses and scientists alike struggle to get to the value in their data. Their challenges include finding and gaining access to the data they need, “wrangling” the data into a form they can use, and setting up the systems and software to be used – all before even tackling the analysis. With no coordination, multiple groups may re-do the heavy lifting to ready the data for use, or struggle to figure out what data is already available. Further, the skills required to get from raw data to insight span a broad range from systems to data management, optimization, statistics, algorithms, story-telling and visualization. Rarely can you find such multi-disciplinary expertise in one team – it is typically scattered across multiple business units or departments.

The IBM Research Accelerated Discovery Lab is a unique, collaborative environment specifically designed to facilitate complex analytic projects by tackling these challenges. One of the key elements of the Lab is the notion of a data lake, accessed through an easy-to-use, collaborative tool called LabBook, which, together with new practices such as datastorming, helps bridge the gaps between experts from different disciplines. We will highlight some successful applications of these technologies, from diverse fields such as medical research, food safety, social media analytics and predictive equipment maintenance.

Bio

Laura Haas is an IBM Fellow and Director of IBM Research’s Accelerated Discovery Lab. She was Director of Computer Science at IBM’s Almaden Research Center from 2005 to 2011, and had worldwide responsibility for IBM Research’s exploratory science program from 2009 through 2013. From 2001-2005, she led the Information Integration Solutions architecture and development teams in IBM's Software Group. Previously, Dr. Haas was a research staff member and manager at Almaden. She is best known for her work on the Starburst query processor, from which DB2 LUW was developed, on Garlic, a system which allowed integration of heterogeneous data sources, and on Clio, the first semi-automatic tool for heterogeneous schema mapping. She has received several IBM awards for Outstanding Innovation and Technical Achievement, an IBM Corporate Award for information integration technology, the Anita Borg Institute Technical Leadership Award, and the ACM SIGMOD Codd Innovation Award. Dr. Haas was Vice President of the VLDB Endowment Board of Trustees from 2004-2009, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the IBM Academy of Technology, an ACM Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Vice Chair of the board of the Computing Research Association.