Jeffrey Kreulen emphasized the question “What is the business problem that you have to solve?” and noted that IBM likes to hire “T-shaped people,” with breadth and depth and also with experience in business as well as technology. Kreulen showed several interesting examples of the work of his group at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. One example involved corporate brand and reputation analysis implemented in a system called COBRA. The system is used by IBM’s global professional services group and parts of it will be included in Cognos. The system uses sentiment analysis and taxonomies and text analytics plus influence analysis to listen to how people are talking about brands.
Another example involved applications of analytics to the US Patents database. Search was made available on the database by IBM on the web earlier but now they are doing analytics on this database with some customers for example to find which strategic areas competitors are investing R&D into.
Jeffrey’s talk is available at dyyno.com.