Education a big focus for us in India. We see huge opportunity: Sriram Raghavan

Director, IBM Research Labs

Global computer services major IBM’s research lab in India is working on solutions that could potentially help improve cancer care, agricultural produce, education and assist organisations to comply with regulations. It relies on the global computing expertise, software and tools it has for the translational research and find applications that can be taken to the market by the company, says Sriram Raghavan, director at IBM Research in India. Excerpts from an interview with Ayan Pramanik & Raghu Krishnan:

Tell us about your next big innovation at IBM Research.

We can do a lot in the agriculture space in India through IoT (Internet of Things) sensing. One area that we’re looking at is providing better information about the crop or the trends during a particular season. If one has a big land, the person can invest in one piece for the instrument cost. After combining the global weather data available (IBM owns Weather Channel) and IoT sensed information from the instrument, we can give information like discolouration of the crop etc. This process will ensure accuracy for the rest of the crops and help in getting data precision with a small amount of cost in instrumentation. We also have an advantage of access to a lot of global data, and there is a lot of publicly available data that the US National Institute puts out.

We are looking at Industry 4.0, which is going to be a marriage between cognitive and IoT. The information comes from both the activities. We have also started looking at financial compliance and we recognise this as a huge opportunity globally, considering the increased investment by businesses in this area.

What is going to happen in India?

Education is a big focus for us in India. We see huge opportunity. As we see it, it has to be public-private partnerships for scaling up. Delivery mechanisms are digitised, but we have different languages and we have to offer cost-effective technology. A lot of the work we do is around content. You can guide people on which professional course will be appropriate them; career advisers can be replaced with automated career advisers. The other area is financial services. We have seen a lot of positive steps from the government. The third area is health care. One can get a second opinion on cancer treatment for Rs 10,000 using IBM Watson technology (recently installed at Manipal Hospital, Bengaluru).

How do you think government policies will change?

There have been some discussions. Privacy is one of the areas where we have seen a lot of activity. There is going to be a market for privacy management. Once data go out, there is no control. There is a need for regulations. Intelligent conversational systems are going to be the user interface of the future. It is going to go beyond the consumer space. Enterprises are going to adopt it for customer service. In a manufacturing firm, a worker needs to converse on daily basis for physical maintenance and reporting. In the consumer space, the context is what machine you are using. It is different for enterprises.

Will organisations move out of proprietary ownership to share data?

It’ll be more subtle than that. There will be parts of data you will never reveal. There will be data sets that you want to share as a secondary source. For example, we know the telecom companies have a lot of mobility data. They understand how the city moves. We can imagine that data being used by city traffic planners and public policy planners. How are telcos going about enabling that – feeding the data, providing a platform or subscription model? The larger view is that we are going to have data-sharing ecosystems. That is also one of the reasons why block-chain technology could be dramatically different. I expect security to become a board-room C-suite level concern – be it mobile, cloud or use of IoT.