Recent News
A Translator Tool With a Human Touch
New York Times
Nearly 100 IBM researchers are working on n.Fluent, a project to create an automatic translation tool that is fast and accurate enough to be used in instant-messaging between speakers using two different languages. The n.Fluent project aims to teach the computer terminology that is specific to IBM's business and allow the computer to learn where it went wrong in previous translation efforts. Thee researchers are extracting and organizing contributions from IBM's 400,000-member workforce, which is distributed across more than 170 countries. IBM recently issued a "worldwide translation challenge" to its employees, in which about 6,000 IBM employees made improvements in 11 languages to more than 2 million words of text translated by n.Fluent. The submitted data was used to update the translation models. The n.Fluent project is an example of IBM's use of social networking and employee crowdsourcing, which also has been applied to IBM's version of Wikipedia, called Bluepedia, which has contributions from 1,300 employees. Another internal IBM social networking tool is Dogear, which is modeled after Delicious and enables employees to share links and tagged items from the Internet and the company's intranet. Dogear has become more popular than IBM's own internal search engine, says the IBM Center for Social Software's Irene Greif.
From "A Translator Tool With a Human Touch "
New York Times (11/22/09) Cohen, Noam
View Full Article
SDSC, UC San Diego, LBNL Team Wins SC09 'Storage Challenge' Award
UCSD News
A research team from the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego and the University of California's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory won the Storage Challenge competition at the recent SC09 supercomputing conference. The winning submission was based on the architecture of SDSC's recently announced Dash high-performance compute system. The hypothesis presented for the challenge stated that solid state drives based on NAND flash technology are reliable and inexpensive enough to improve input/output density (I/O) by more than an order of magnitude. "The current data storage I/O rate is far lower than the ever-increasing rate of enthusiasm among researchers and scientists, who are now drowning in a sea of data because of this differential," says SDSC's Arun Jagatheesan. "With the SC09 Storage Challenge, our team demonstrated the prototype of a data-intensive supercomputer that can bridge this gap." The Dash system presented in the challenge is a prototype for a significantly larger flash-memory high-performance computing (HPC) system called Gordon, which is scheduled to go online in mid-2011. Both Dash and Gordon are designed to accelerate research in a variety of data-intensive science problems by providing cost-effective data performance that is more than 10 times faster than most other HPC systems currently in use.
From "SDSC, UC San Diego, LBNL Team Wins SC09 'Storage Challenge' Award "
UCSD News (11/20/09) Zverina, Jan
View Full Article