Product Lifecycle Management Industry Newsletter

I won't always pass these along, but just had to refer to the September PLM Industry Newsletter.  Interesting topics are covered in an capability we used in the enterprise.
" ... CIMdata is the leading independent global strategic management consulting and research authority focused exclusively on the PLM market. We are dedicated to maximizing our clients' ability to design and deliver innovative products and services through the application of PLM.  ... " 

PLM and Internet of Things

Interesting area of application.

Read what CIMdata's President Peter Bilello has to say about PLM, the IoT, and metalworking equipment innovation in the July/Aug edition of Asia Pacific Metalworking Equipment News (eAPMEN). Article. 

Discussion: in Linkedin: 

PLM Industry Summary

From CIMdata:   News and  I am reviewing this technology area.  As it relates to the PLM (Product Lifecycle Management)  Economy.  I am reviewing this technology as it connects to both innovation and data architecture choices. More to follow.  See Tags below for more.

Talk on the Digital Age

Recent talk by my colleague Suna Polat from CimData on innovation in a digital age.   As it relates to PLM.   Slides and audio. Nicely done.  Also some interesting details about how P&G worked in this area.  They write about the Webinar:

" ... Many companies are still struggling to make innovation a repeatable, systemic process that leads to consistent business growth. Besides critical human aspects, such as leadership and culture, systemic innovation requires the implementation and use of strategic business platforms. An innovation platform is a business platform designed to enable an enterprise’s innovation processes. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is evolving to become a strategic product innovation platform. Another trend started in early 2000’s, now widely adopted, is "Open Innovation." This strategic direction led to new approaches to innovation, such as crowdsourcing and co-creation that CIMdata collectively calls "Collaborative Innovation." Through Collaborative Innovation (CI), an organization can reach to diverse internal and external networks to address its critical innovation needs. Companies that practice CI typically use solutions that are outside those provided by traditional PLM solution providers.

In this webinar, through a systemic innovation case study from P&G, we will describe use cases appropriate for PLM and CI. We will also describe how PLM and CI solution providers have an opportunity to connect and collaborate to expand their markets by developing consistent terminology and communication around innovation and clarifying how their offerings complement each other and fit into the solution architecture of their clients with clear benefits. With such clarity more companies should be willing to invest in these solutions.  ...  "

Cognitive Agents in the Wild... the Jeopardy Experience

Excellent CSIG talk today: Slides here.   " ... Our speaker for this week is Eric Nyberg from Carnegie Mellon University, who will present " From Jeopardy! To Cognitive Agents: Effective Learning in the Wild". ... "  They have made considerable progress since we worked with them in the 90s.

Eric Nyberg's home page, with many more links.

PLM News

A nicely done overview of industry news about Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), put out by the CIMdata group. Subscribe.   Have started to cover PLM news as it relates to my own technology innovation interests.   Pass along anything you would like covered.

Can Collaborative Innovation and Technology Accelerate and Lower the Cost of Innovation?

In CIMdata's Linkedin Group:  My former colleague writes.

CIMdata's Dr. Suna Polat asks the question, Can Collaborative Innovation and Technology Accelerate and Lower the Cost of Innovation?”

I experienced a strategic “innovation” transformation when I worked in Procter & Gamble’s (P&G) diaper business between 1996 and 2007. In my first assignment the name of the business was “Diaper Category,” later it became “Baby Care.” This was an indication of a significant change in the business strategy—the focus was no longer only on the product (the diaper) but also on the job-to-be done (caring for the baby.) ...   "     (Read the rest for detail and discussion).

Innovation in the Digital Age Webinar

Colleague Suna Polat points me to a free seminar she will be part of.  Link to register.

CIMdata to Host Free Webinar on Innovation in the Digital Age
Free educational webinar, focused on how to make innovation a systemic capability within the organization, will take place on June 25, 2015

 .... CIMdata, Inc., the leading global PLM strategic management consulting and research firm, announces an upcoming free educational webinar, “Innovation in the Digital Age.” The webinar will take place on June 25, 2015 at 11:00 a.m. (EDT).

Using a systemic innovation case study from Procter & Gamble, the webinar will describe use cases appropriate for PLM and Collaborative Innovation (CI). The webinar will also show how PLM and CI solution providers have an opportunity to connect and collaborate to expand their markets by developing a consistent terminology and communication around innovation and clarifying how their offerings complement each other and fit into the solution architecture of their clients.

Dr. Suna Polat, CIMdata’s Director of Collaborative Innovation & Social Product Development Consulting Practice, will host the webinar. Dr. Polat has 25+ years of experience in technology development, product development, innovation management, implementation of strategic innovation capabilities—including modeling and simulation (M&S), open innovation, knowledge management—social technologies and social product development, and driving change and adoption. This wide range of expertise was gained through her career at Procter & Gamble and more recently through her experience at CIMdata, which she joined in June 2014.    .....    "

Long Range Iris Scanning

We examined iris scanning for security applications.  You had to place your face on the reader, and it thus created a sanitary issue.  Also, some people could not be scanned because of face-eye structure. Now in the Atlantic:  " ...   Long-Range Iris Scanning Is Here ... An engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon says he’s invented technology that can identify someone from across the room with the precision of a fingerprint. ... "

How Enterprises Use AI

In CWorld:   Good overview of the expansion of the use of cognitive, AI and links to Machine learning.  Based on learnings at the recent AAAI meeting.   My experience and connections, have led to getting lots of queries about where to start.

" .... While A.I. is being used in smartphones and self-driving cars, it's also working its way into the enterprise to filter spam out of email, handle complicated scheduling or detecting fraud in big data deployments.

"I think IT probably needs artificial intelligence," said Stephen Smith, a professor who specializes in robotics and A.I. at Carnegie Mellon University. "There are increasing cyberattacks we're dealing with. We have bigger, more complex problems with all the issues arising out of the explosion of the Web and all of our big data. We're already using A.I. It's already there. I think A.I. in the enterprise is going to start to cascade." ... " 

Memex is Searching the Dark Web

Those who follow the history of knowledge and the Web will remember the Memex system.   Now the term points to an effort by DARPA that looks at the Dark Web.  From ITWorld:

" ... A “Dark Web” search engine developed by U.S. defense researchers is in the spotlight this week for its use in combating human-trafficking activities, but it could play a role in business, too. 

“There’s huge potential,” said Jeff Schneider, a research professor within the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. Earlier this year, Carnegie Mellon was awarded a $3.6 million contract to collaborate on the project at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is known as Memex.

The Memex program—a three-year research initiative to develop software for domain-specific indexing of open, public Web content and domain-specific search capabilities—was highlighted on Sunday by a segment on 60 Minutes and an article in Scientific American. ... "    

Robots Need to Ask for Your Help

Thinking of Robots collaboratively, even at the simplest level.
Researching indoor service robots.   A Carnegie Mellon researcher shows that designing robots to ask for human assistance can make them a lot more useful.

Live, Free Microsoft Research Summit

I plan to tune in for a part of this:

Microsoft Research Faculty Summit to Be Streamed Live July 14

Join us for a broadcast of the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit streamed live from Redmond, Washington on Monday, July 14, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. PDT (12:00 to 8:30 p.m. EDT). This free online event offers keynotes and demo presentations from the Faculty Summit as well as lively discussions with leading scientific and academic researchers about their investigations into future trends in computer science research. The event will feature such luminaries as:

- Leslie Lamport, 2013 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient and principal researcher at Microsoft
- Harry Shum, executive vice president of Microsoft's Technology and Research Group
- Mary Gray, senior researcher at Microsoft
- Chris Harrison, assistant professor, Carnegie Mellon University
- Jeannette M. Wing, corporate vice president, Microsoft Research and ACM Fellow

Machine Learning Removes Boring Parts

We also mused about how to do this with long retail behavioral videos. CMU reports on an interesting method.   It is dangerous though to just disregard  'uninteresting' things. Have seen that blatantly done in research situations.   " ... Smartphones, GoPro cameras and Google Glass are making it easy for anyone to shoot video anywhere. But, they do not make it any easier to watch the tedious videos that can result. Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists, however, have invented a video highlighting technique that can automatically pick out the good parts. ... "  

Watson Cognitive to be Included in University Curricula

Press release:  " ...  In Fall, 2014, New Courses Will Inspire University Students to Build Apps Infused with Watson's Intelligence While Gaining the Entrepreneurial Vision to Deliver Their Innovations Into the Marketplace  ... Announcement Marks the Newest Step in IBM's Strategy to Fuel an Ecosystem of Innovators Who Will Make Cognitive Computing the New Worldwide Standard of Computing ... " 

As I have mentioned here before, there is opportunity to integrate cognitive intelligence with analytical intelligence.  Where better to do that than via research in a university?   Hope to have more details to report here as this progresses.

" ... For the first time, enrollment is now open for fall 2014 cognitive computing courses at Carnegie Mellon University, New York University (NYU), The Ohio State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan and the University of Texas in Austin. ... " 

Seeking Touchy Data Visualization

From Carnegie Mellon:   " ... Two researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are exploring how touch devices, such as Apple's iPad, can be used in data analysis and visualization. Jeffrey Rzeszotarski, a Ph.D. student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and Aniket Kittur, an assistant professor at the Institute have developed Kinetica, a proof-of-concept app that converts tabular data such as the kind usually found in spreadsheets into a format that can be manipulated on a touchscreen. ... "  

What's Watson for Midsize Companies?

Back on January 9th I attended the IBM announcement of its group for Watson applications.  I tweeted the announcement at @FranzD #IBMWatson.  Full announcement here.  The Watson group ecosystem site. It had been expected for some time, but I was surprised by its scale.  A billion dollars, a  location in NYC, a couple of thousand people. Partners in a number of big contexts, like health care. A very big investment.  I have some former colleagues there and hope to get an insider 'tour'.

At the big enterprise we were not unaware of their progress in this area.  In the late 1980s we had our own artificial intelligence / expert systems efforts underway.  How do we leverage massive enterprise expertise?  While Baby boomers retire?  Premature, but producing very real value.  At that time we talked to IBM and got the impression that they had made good  progress.  The science was already there, pioneered by academics at MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon.   The science was there but the connection to real computing systems and data had just begun to mature.  IBM made that happen in the coming years.  Watson provided a demonstration.  We waited.

So now it seems, based on this investment, that we are ready to proceed.  But the midsize company is not an enterprise, and cannot spend millions of dollars promoting these approaches.   But these methods, anchored in the cloud, help companies because it can allow access to both the methods and the large and volatile databases required to drive these systems.  The systems also need access to unstructured language models (ontologies), volatile big data sets, and publicly available data bases to drive the models that will form the bedrock of any intelligence.  Sounds like Big Data.  Without this data you cannot leverage intelligence.

IBM is setting the stage with this ecosystem. making the right steps to move forward.  I look forward to being involved in making this available to the midsized company.  I will follow with more impressions in this space as this work evolves.

More on Watson in this blog.


This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines  of a smarter planet. More here.  

Robotics Future is Quickly Approaching

Communications of the ACM, quoting a WSJ article:  " ... The technology itself may not be as challenging as the emerging social, ethical, and economic issues, says Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor Illah R. Nourbakhsh, whose new book, "Robot Futures," discusses a future in which people share the planet with superhuman robots. "I think we need a serious public discussion...about the relationship between people and robots, which is like a new species that we are inventing," Nourbakhsh says. ... "    Founder of the CREATE Lab at CMU.

NEIL Learns from Images

I was involved with a startup system that used image recognition and categorization called Photrade several years ago.  There I got an appreciation of how difficult this problem was.   Also how closely it matched to the process of 'learning' we had mimicked using AI methods in the enterprise years before.  What we did was very primitive compared to what is underway at Carnegie Mellon University with The Never Ending Image Learner (NEIL) program.  This also sounds like it should be directly connected to the work at Cyc we also explored.  Will continue to watch.

In  BBC Technology: 

" ... The work is being funded by the US Department of Defense's Office of Naval Research and Google. Since July, the NEIL program has looked at three million images. As a result it has managed to identify 1,500 objects in half a million images and 1,200 scenes in hundreds of thousands of images as well as making 2,500 associations ... The team working on the project hopes that NEIL will learn relationships between different items without being taught. Computer programs can already identify and label objects using computer vision, which models what humans can see using hardware and software, but the researchers hope that NEIL can bring extra analysis to the data. ... " 

Randy Pausch Design Lessons

Collaborative design lesson from Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon  Particularly interested in the nature of collaborative design:  " ... This week will mark the fifth anniverary of Randy Pausch’s death. Randy was a passionate educator and mentor, and in his final years, he gained worldwide recognition for “The Last Lecture,” as well as for the bravery he publicly displayed facing a terminal illness. ... I was one of many graduate students he taught at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center (the ETC), which he co-founded. His lessons about the role of collaboration in design – and more, about how to collaborate effectively – have profoundly influenced my career and work as a designer, including my work with startups. Here are three of Randy’s lessons that I think are essential for anyone who hopes to build products for a living. ... '