IBM’s Emerging Technologies Department at the Hursley Laboratory has been working on leading-edge applications of IT for several years  on such projects as pay-as-you-go car car insurance; early stage grid/cloud solutions to support the processing of mammogram x-rays, data mining – for fraud detection and retail support; on the real-time processing of information from multiple sources and for multiple users; and extraction of information from unstructured data sources such as web pages, new reports, and marketing materials.
             More recently this last area has been of absorbing interest as sources and volumes of data have continued to increase substantially. A substantial amount of the departments work has concentrated on sensors, data federation, information extraction/presentation.
             This work has gone alongside IBM’s focus on “intelligent services”  for “a smarter planet”, in which wide-ranging problems, such as resource shortages, organ-isational efficiency, water provision, climate change and traffic congestion are addressed by a blend of systems thinking, technological innovation and computing power.