Information management
Research opportunities and challenges
Today, exabytes of digital information are created, captured and replicated, and it is complex and time-consuming to manage and exploit information at this massive scale. Enterprise customers are demanding information management technologies that deliver speed, agility, competitive differentiation and compliance. Knowledge workers expect to be able not only to access relevant information quickly, but also to extract business insights from rich information resources.
Two significant components comprise Information Management. The first is managing information, which includes not only acquiring and storing data, but also organizing, auditing, policy enforcement and security. The second is exploiting information: the ability to efficiently mine vast landscapes of formal (structured) and ad hoc (unstructured) content resources and repositories for valuable, actionable business insights. Technologies and services that support the ability to manage and exploit information across the enterprise include information integration, business intelligence (large-scale and real-time), content analysis, and information storage and processing platforms.
Three large projects comprise our Information Management portfolio:
Taming the Information Explosion
Within information lies insight, defined as the contextualized sum of facts, events and relationships obtained through algorithmic analysis of text and data from within and outside the enterprise, to infer relevant and potentially non-obvious patterns and implications. We are creating a suite of innovative insight-generation services, integrated into platforms for harnessing the entire gamut of unstructured information types, at the scale of global enterprises and information providers. Research problems include coping with vast scale, navigability between related information, and determining importance.
Live Business Intelligence
Our research mission is to create a unified data and analytics platform, which we call “Live Business Intelligence (BI)” that shifts BI from the traditional back-office, report-generation orientation, to an enabler for delivering data-intensive analytics that transform operational business processes and customer interactions. The LiveBI Platform leverages data management technology and fuses it with new paradigms for analytics development and execution; supports declarative models for computation conducive to massively parallel processing; and integrates analytics over both streaming and historical data.
IT Informatics
HP’s Business Technology Optimization tools create a unified store containing the organization’s resources, and aggregation of data with reference to resources into useful summaries and visualizations that assist management. Our research dramatically expands these capabilities through using more data sources to automatically create knowledge from the organization’s data, sharing IT knowledge throughout the organization and transforming IT knowledge into IT automation. We focus on semantic automation, data and sequence mining, information association and quality, and program analysis.