Speaker: Paul Maglio
IBM Almaden Research Center
Monday, January 9, 2006
11:00 am - 12:00 pm
EBU3b 1202

ABSTRACT
This talk will provide a brief overview of IBM Research and then detail our efforts to help establish academic programs that focus on Services Sciences, Management, and Engineering (SSME -- see ). We define SSME as the application of scientific, management, and engineering disciplines to tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another ("services").

There are many reasons for focusing on services and interdisciplinary approaches to it. First, the economies of most developed countries are dominated by services (70% of the labor, GDP, etc.). Second, even traditional manufacturing companies such as GE (70% services revenue) and IBM (50% services revenue) need to add high values services to grow their businesses. Third, information services and business services are two of the fastest growing segments of the service economy -- the rise of web services, service oriented architectures, and self-service systems suggest a strong relationship between the emerging disciplines related to service science and the more established discipline of computer science. Finally, improving productivity often required combining technical, social, and business innovations and effective combinations of these often develop naturally together. In the end, our goal is to encourage research aimed at solving unique problems of services business and to encourage development of courses and programs aimed at producing graduates who are ready to work in the service sector, particularly in areas of knowledge-intensive business services.

BIO
Paul Maglio is senior manager of Service Systems Research at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. His group encompasses social, cognitive, computer and business sciences, and aims at creating a foundation for basic and applied research in how people work and create value --- both mechanisms of individual and group behavior as well as processes, practices and technologies developed to support specific business goals. This work is meant to be informed by, and have an impact on, people- and information-intensive businesses, such as IBM Global Services. Since joining IBM Research in 1995, Maglio has worked on programmable Web intermediaries, attentive user interaces, multimodal human-computer interaction and human aspects of autonomic computing. He holds twelve patents and has published more than 60 scientific papers in various areas of computer science and cognitive science. He holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering from MIT and a Ph.D. in cognitive science from the University of California at San Diego.