In the 21st century, the service industry is at the center of the industrial structure. The service industry, however, has not had an academic discipline that corresponds to engineering in the manufacturing industry. In 2003, IBM proposed to create a new discipline called services sciences, management and engineering (SSME). This is a multidisciplinary area in which information sciences, operations research (OR), management engineering, social sciences, and other areas overlap. IBM Research - Tokyo is leading this new, exciting field as a pioneer in services sciences in Japan.
Competency fields
Customer Insights
Innovations in data collection sometimes lead to advanced analyses and deep insights. We are working on experimental activities in marketing, including integrated data analysis of POS data and the tracks of customer movements in stores collected by using RFID tags attached to shopping carts.
Social Analytics
Various communication tools such as social network systems (SNSs) and blogs are actively used even in companies. To analyze these tools, a new methodology considering both the content (text) and network structure (person-to-person relationships) is needed. We are working on developing a suitable analytic framework and on creating advanced applications (such as content recommendation systems and advertisements).
Services Software Engineering
Services Software Engineering (SSE) promotes the use of innovative software engineering practices for the creation of large and complex IT services. By utilizing data and text analytics methods, the symptoms of project problems and their defect patterns are visualized. Our research projects include analysis methods for project artifacts and management information, how to prevent project problems by more quickly recognizing the symptoms of troubled projects, and ways to recommend appropriate recovery actions based on the diagnostic results from project artifacts (such as documentation and source code).
Service Software Engineering (SSE)
Systems Management and Service Management
The purpose of the project is to study and develop new software for systems and service management for large enterprise IT systems that consists of computers, storage, and wide area networks. The management software can be used for efficient IT operations. We have a new method to define a multiple-layer architecture for IT management workflows on distributed servers. The workflows can usually be divided into a standard workflow and localized extension workflows. The runtime and tool for IT management allow the workflows to to remain in consistent states as they are executed in datacenters with distributed locations.
Social Simulation
Our project seeks to develop simulation methodologies and technologies to solve social problems such as traffic congestion and air pollution. While we are working on elementary simulation technologies such as massively agent simulation technology, human behavior modeling methodology, and super-real-time simulation technology, we also focus on ways to apply these technologies to problems in the real world. As a first step, traffic flow in the city of Kyoto was analyzed by leveraging the large-scale multi-agent traffic simulator developed in this project. Some of this work was performed in collaboration with the Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University with the support of the "Strategic Information and Communications R&D Promotion Programme" of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Japan.
