Cyber-criminals probe databases in ways that can be predicted and detected. That's the basis of newly patented IBM software that monitors access to databases for suspicious activity and then locks down critical data.

Burglars often act in predictable ways: they lurk in overgrown bushes, come to your door pretending to be service people, or check for unlocked doors. If you witness this kind of behavior outside your house, you’re likely to check  your locks  and perhaps arm your security system before calling the police.

Cyber-criminals are the same as physical ones, says IBM’s Dave Kaminsky. They probe databases in ways that can be predicted and detected. That’s the basis of U.S. patent no. 7,827,608: software that monitors access to databases for suspicious activity and then locks down critical data, preventing it from being downloaded. It is intended for use at banks, mortgage companies, and other companies that might keep your social security number or other private information in their databases.

Importantly, the software monitors realtime events, acting only if an intrusion appears to be imminent. As Kaminsky says, it would be counterproductive to forestall legitimate attempts to access information (such as for a credit check), just as you don’t want to overreact when someone comes to your house to clean your gutters.

Kaminsky is IBM’s Chief Patent Innovation Architect. Based at RTP, he is not only a frequently patented inventor, but he helps other inventors in the company navigate the “Alice in Wonderland” world of the patent process and contributes to decision-making about which innovations the company should patent. That last is important, because even though IBM received 5,896 patents in 2010, more than any other company, Kaminksy says just a fraction of the company’s eligible innovations go forward in the patent process.

IBM’s RTP site generated 570 patents, and those, combined with patents from Charlotte, made IBM the leading recipient of patents in the state, ahead of Cree, Red Hat, and the leading universities. Most of the patents from RTP are in software. They include a program that routes phone calls to either internet or traditional phone lines to incur cost savings (patent no. 7,710,946, Jim Silwa) and a GPS add-on that gives drivers of hybrid, electric, or other alt-fuel vehicles routing that will lead them to charging stations, thereby reducing their fossil fuel usage (patent no. 7,860,808, Mark Peters). Then there are hundreds more inventions that may not resonate with consumers, like a new caching algorithm, Kaminsky says, but that make our lives easier nonetheless.

Almost 100 years ago, IBM received its first patent. In 2010, it received 5,896, more than any other company

IBM encourages staff members to generate patentable ideas, Kaminsky says, through a financial incentive program and through career advancement: people who contribute to the intellectual property of the organization are likely to advance.

Contrary to the stereotype of the inventor as a lonely figure, most patents achieved at IBM come from ad hoc groups. Kaminsky led a team of four software engineers on the online security project, which took less than six months to complete but almost four years to patent. Ideas come from clients and from the inventors themselves, sometimes through conversations with collaborators and sometimes through “Aha” moments when people think of ways in which technology could solve a problem.

This was the 18th consecutive year that IBM has led the list of U.S. patents received. According to a company press release, “more than 7,000 IBM inventors residing in 46 different U.S. states and 29 countries generated the company’s record-breaking 2010 patent tally.”

The world is becoming a more complicated place – but that’s OK with people like Phaedra Boinodiris.

As the gaming and marketing manager at IBM, Boinodiris said she sees the potential for video games to help everyone from citizens to political decision-makers understand issues by breaking them down into simpler elements. By showing the interactions between those pieces, Boinodiris said games can be effective at educating the public.

“It’s hard to capture any other way,” Boinodiris said. “We’re living in a more complex world.”

Boinodiris and her team at IBM wanted to break down that complexity about six months ago when they began working on a game to detail the company’s work with “smart cities.”  The result was CityOne, a free city-building simulation developed with Center Line Digital in Raleigh, N.C., and released in early October.

Players begin the game as the manager of a drab, grayscale city facing serious infrastructure and industry problems. Using a limited set of resources and input from a group of advisers, players choose how they should invest in solutions like alternative energy and supply chain management. Winning the game, and creating a more vibrant city, depends on the player’s ability to effectively improve everything from water distribution to business climate.

“The initial inspiration for it was looking for ways to explain system solutions and its impact on the market and in the industry,” Boinodiris said.

Aside from the education component, Boinodiris said the game is out to communicate what IBM can do.

“There is no press release, no white paper, no spokesperson that can explain these concepts like a serious game can,” she  said.

Daren Brabham, a professor of public relations at UNC-Chapel Hill, agrees. Through his research on crowdsourcing, he said he’s learned the power of interactive marketing and its ability to show the simple connections in a big system.

“With games, all they really do is teach us how to problem solve,” Brabham said. “The question is: What should the problem be?”

The interactivity doesn’t even have to be complicated to be effective.

The Next Stop Design project crowdsourced bus stop designs for Salt Lake City, eventually selecting the “Sugarhouse Lounge” concept by Aaron Basil Nelson.

In 2009, Brabham began a research project to crowdsource a design for a better bus stop in Salt Lake City. After initially planning a Web-based interface that would have allowed users to allocate resources in the planning of a 3-D model, Brabham abandoned the approach in favor of a more open submission system that just required applicants to send in sketches and plans. All of those designs were posted online, where users could rate and comment on them.

With that $5,000 site, Brabham said users submitted 260 designs. And two-thirds of them had never participated in a planning process before.

“To be honest, traditional methods of engaging stakeholders at a meeting really could only tackle one thing at a time,” he said. “[The crowdsourced method] would be a lot more of a democratic process than the 10 people who show up to the planning meeting and yell at each other.”

Boinodiris said she’s seen that need to participate among the public. She said people want to know what it would take for a city like Raleigh to support a smart grid, electric vehicles or other sustainable solutions. To participate, they also need good information about how to move forward and what those actions would mean.

“I think people are asking those questions: Why aren’t we there yet?” she said. “[CityOne] tries to show those building blocks and the affects of those missteps.”

So far, Boinodiris said thousands of people worldwide from several different industries have already played CityOne.

And gamers want more. She said she’s already gotten requests to expand the game with more SimCity-style gameplay, effectively allowing players to build cities from scratch. Players even suggested integrating real-time city data to add to the challenge of preparing municipalities for the future.

“They’re really putting the gauntlet down,” Boinodiris said.

Although she said this was the company’s “very first small steps” into a city simulation, she didn’t leave out the possibility for future editions, pointing out that it’s “inevitable” that corporations will pursue this type of marketing to get their messages across.

“It’s not a ‘what if?’ or ‘will it happen?’” she said. “It’s already happening.”

But businesses aren’t the only ones interested. Game designers like Jane McGonigal, who delivered a speech at a TED conference in 2010, believe gaming’s ability to harness a player’s problem-solving ability will be useful when tackling complicated issues.

“We’ve evolved technology to a point where we can do some good,” Brabham said.

Brabham even imagines the potential for groups like the Republican and Democratic national committees to create games allowing voters to explore the long-term impacts on the country if candidates are elected. Ideas like this, he said, can be an effective way to hear through the chatter.

“[Gaming] really holds a lot of democratic potential,” Brabham said. “It’s such a productive way to get a lot of people engaged.”

Tyler Dukes is a freelance reporter and journalism adviser at N.C. State University. Follow him on Twitter as @mtdukes.

Phaedra Boinodiris says the Wii prompted a radical shift in traditional gaming industry marketing.

Women represent a huge portion of the market for the $10.5 billion video game industry. According to the Entertainment Software Association, females account for 40 percent of all players. At 33 percent of the gaming population, adult women even outnumber boys age 17 or younger. But despite those statistics, the male-dominated industry is still widely criticized for its portrayal of women.

But some female gamers, like IBM Gaming and Interactive Manager Phaedra Boinodiris, are working to change that portrayal – and get more women interest and playing and creating games. Science in the Triangle spoke with Boinodiris, the co-creator of WomenGamers.com, about the state of the industry and how it’s changing when it comes to women.

How did you first get into gaming?

My sister and I have been playing forever, ever since the days of Pong. I know that completely dates me – it’s scary. We knew we played and our friends played and our cousins played, but we’d open up most gaming magazines and look at gaming websites and they were targeted toward young men. So we decided to start a company, WomenGamers.com. That’s how we got the site of the ground.

How long did it take you when you were younger to notice how slanted the gaming industry is toward men?

It was gradual. I don’t know if you recall the first advertisements on television for the Atari or for ColecoVision, but if you take a look at what those looked like, you’d always see families playing together. Then there was this subtle shift in the kind of marketing that gaming companies were doing to focus more and more on a predominantly male audience. It was very interesting to us to note this shift.

So one day we were invited to a marketing to women online conference — this was back in the late 90s – and there was a panel on women in gaming. There was so much interest from big companies. Mattel, at the time, was really investing in that space. There was a lot of conversation about where this was going and how it was untapped. We just walked away thinking there was a lot of opportunity here to showcase this untapped market and really provide service.

Given the statistics about women gamers and gaming parents, why do you think the industry fails to market to women appropriately?

Because they have very few women working for them. If there were more women game designers, for example, if there were more women who were on staff working within these companies, you would see a bigger shift.

It wasn’t until Nintendo decided to make a play in that space to go after the more casual gamer that you would see huge changes in marketing and advertising. I remember before the Nintendo Wii, you would go to conferences like E3 – you would never see a poster of a woman actually playing a game. If you saw a woman, if she was depicted at all, she was typically in a chain mail bikini. But once the Nintendo Wii came out, there was a big push toward showing women playing.

They were on the frontier, and obviously they scored big with that. It wasn’t until after Nintendo made that big play that people started to wake up to this notion of the casual gamer and going after new blood. So you have more social games, like Farmville, mobile games, going after a bigger and bigger audience.

In Epic Games' upcoming Gears of War 3, communications officer Anya Stroud will hit the frontlines as a soldier. | Photo courtesy of Epic Games

Do you think the industry’s lack of female roles and often misogynistic overtones turn off female gamers who would otherwise want to play?

Absolutely. It perpetuates a stigma of what working within the game industry is like. It’s a shame because if women consider it as a boy’s club that’s really exclusionary, why would they ever try to, as their career, work there?

We really have a job to do to make sure the gaming industry itself is considered more inclusive so we can include more women who work there. This isn’t just to benefit women, by the way. You include women as game designers, you’re going to get whole new genres of games that don’t exist. I’m noticing with my daughter, she approaches certain games in a very different way. I’ve spoken with professors who teach game design and development classes who also remark upon the fact that the female students they have in their classes end up creating things that are really different from the status quo out on the market.

It will mean a lot more diversity in the market of games out there. Also, it means some serious profit for these game studios because they’re going after a larger and larger audience.

Intelligence officer Kat is second in command of Halo: Reach's Noble Team. | Photo courtesy Bungie/Microsoft Studios

In hardcore games, the female role does seem to be changing. We have female soldiers in the new Gears of War and Halo titles. Mass Effect 2 also has very prominent females as major players in the game. Are gaming companies starting to realize they need to put more females in these larger roles?

Actually, for the titles you mentioned, I don’t think they’re doing that to attract women necessarily. I think they’re primary reason for including women is for the men.

We’ve done a lot of studies and we’ve seen that a lot of the male game players prefer to play females, especially in [massively multiplayer online role playing games]. You ask them why, and they say, “Well they’re nicer to look at.” Secondly, they’ve found that when they’re playing a female character, a female avatar, others within the game will assume they’re a female playing. They’ve said they actually get a lot of free stuff – weaponry, swords, all kinds of things! It’s interesting to see the dynamic there in terms of the men choosing to play the female avatars.

Do you think one part of the solution here is sparking the interest of young women in math and science early on?

Absolutely, and my sister and I have done a lot of talks at elementary schools and middle schools about this subject. There’s been a huge drop in the number of women in math and science ever since the Bush era. One of the ways that we purport to be able to encourage women back into these fields is to encourage them to design games, early.

If you think about it, from my personal experience, the way that I got interested in math and science was absolutely because of games. It is a fun pursuit, especially the idea of designing your own. It’s play, if you will. What better way to get enthusiastic about subject matter than by playing in it to begin with? The idea is that you encourage young women, young girls to play these games, to design their own games, so hopefully they’ll be able to see why having a field in computer science or math or physics would be interesting.

Do universities have a role to play when it comes to encouraging women in science, technology, engineering and math fields?

Absolutely, but I think it’s a challenge. From an even earlier age than college, why is it that they’re being turned away from math and science? That question needs to be answered.

Whether it’s [creating] a game or a software application, it takes a lot more than programming. It takes good writing skills, good scripting, texture design, art, sound. In my case, for serious games, it takes a lot of business acumen and knowledge of complex systems.

For those women who think, “Programming is not really my thing,” that should not deter them from looking into this space anyway.

Was there a moment for you at some point in your childhood that you knew going into a science- or math-related field was for you?

It wasn’t a sudden thing. Both of my parents were retired IBMers and we had computers all the time in our house. They were very big on education and very big on math and science. It was something we always enjoyed and something we always loved and embraced. No one ever scared us off of that.

We were lucky to grow up in an environment that was very nurturing for us to like those fields and not feel like we’re eating our Brussels sprouts.

Looking forward, is there something that gives you hope about the future of the role of female gamers?

Everything I see. Look at the big push toward mobile gaming and casual gaming and what’s happening with the Nintendo Wii and how they’re outpacing everybody. It’s a huge wake-up call to companies. They’re really saying, “Gee, we really missed the boat. We really need to refocus on what we’re doing here. ”They’re looking at their staff and saying, “Who here knows how to target women? Who here knows how to make a gender inclusive game?”

They really are trying to learn at this point, not for good karma or altruistic feelings, but because it makes sense for the bottom line.

Tyler Dukes is a freelance reporter and journalism adviser at N.C. State University. Follow him on Twitter as @mtdukes.

I first saw Phaedra Boinodiris speak as the opening speaker at TEDxRTP (my review) back in March, but this was a different kind of talk, geared more towards scientists and science communicators.

I remember playing Pong when it first came out. I remember spending many hours back in 1980 or so playing The Hobbit on Sinclair ZX Spectrum. And I played many games at arcades (still not knowing which games started out as arcade games adapted to computers and which the other way round). Then I quit playing games for a couple of decades until my kids were ready for them. I loved Zoombinis – an amazing game of logic and a brilliant preparation for taking IQ tests! I loved Richard Scarry’s Busytown – the one and only game I know about infrastructure, where players build stuff and deliver it to others for the good of the town – from baking bread to paving roads – learning along the way how those things are done.

And sure, Phaedra Boinodiris started with a slide depicting Pong (to the chuckle of the audience) but soon got into the real stuff – the serious gaming and the story of how she got involved in developing such games, as well as about studies of gaming and how different kinds of games help develop different real-work skills, from eye-hand coordination to leadership to cooperation. Her first game – INNOV8 – was developed as a prototype, a proof of concept, in only three months and instantly became a huge hit. It is used by businesses and business schools around the world to teach Business Process Management. It is essentially a first person shooter game (without guns) in which the player is brought as an outside consultant into a company where s/he has to figure out the flow, the bottlenecks, etc. (including by interviewing employees, as well as data-sheets) and experiment in making it more efficient. The 2.0 version came soon after, adding such problems as traffic, customer service and supply chains.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The next game, recently announced and coming out in October 2010, will be a Sim-City-like serious game CityOne, designed to help city planners, town councils, citizens, and engineers plan better, more efficient infrastructure for their cities. Put in your city’s specs and start building new infrastructure, see how much it will cost, see what problems will arise, see what solutions are available – probably something you could not have thought of yourself and may be surprised.

As I am currently reading ‘On The Grid’ it occured to me that the developers of CityOne should read that book, and that Scott Huler should be given a test-run of the game, perhaps for him to review for Charlotte Observer and Raleigh News&Observer and the local NPR station. And for Science In The Triangle, of course.

PHOTO BY TODD SUMLIN – tsumlin@charlotteobserver.com: Northwest Cabarrus High student Brendon Schaumburg, left, works on his senior project with technology facilitator Julie LaChance.

Teens across the country are starting to play computer games in school – and their teachers encourage them.

It’s called three-dimensional learning, and it has little in common with the 1980s video arcades parents remember.

In North Carolina, high school students who take an elective called “Computer Applications 2″ get introduced to Second Life or ReactionGrid, 3-D virtual worlds in which each player has an avatar – like a digital sock puppet that the user controls. In at least one school district, middle school students sit down at computers to play 3-D games in math and language arts classes.

3-D learning makes immediate sense to anybody born after 1985, because the advances in computer technology that stripped video games of their less-than-wholesome image also made the Internet an integral part of everyday life. For teens growing up in a world of Twitter and Facebook and game consoles such as PlayStation and Xbox, it’s no stretch to slip into an avatar and learn about prime numbers, creative writing or citizenship.

“Everybody knows about technology; 3-year-olds can navigate a laptop,” said Brendon Schaumburg, a senior at Northwest Cabarrus High School in Concord who has played video games since he can remember.

To test ideas for his senior project – an aquaponic greenhouse in a 40-gallon fish tank – Schaumburg logs on to Second Life, where his avatar, Brendon Bilavio, can tinker on a virtual prototype of the greenhouse.

Simulated environments that are colorful, nuanced and lifelike require powerful and fast computers, but they are a key to 3-D learning. Students who enter these environments find themselves on islands, in castles or underwater. They encounter healers, dragons, magicians or a guy with a mohawk. Playing requires taking on different roles, solving puzzles or going on a quest with other players who sit in front of their computers in the same room or thousands of miles away. Sometimes there’s even money to be made that can be spent in-world or converted into U.S. dollars.

Immersion in the game blurs the line between virtual world and real life, and students become apprentices who gain hands-on experience. Mistakes are teachable moments without leaving behind real-life messes.

“The generation that’s coming up is totally absorbed in (the virtual world),” said Julie LaChance, who is charged with integrating technology into classrooms in Cabarrus County schools. “The kids just pick it up. To them it is common, whereas when I talk to a 40-year-old teacher about having an avatar, they look at me like I’m crazy.”

Crazy maybe, but effective.

3-D learning works up to 63 percent better than lectures and allows students to improve their math, science and language skills, according to a report the Kansas City, Mo.-based Kauffman Foundation published last year. Students using computer-generated games to learn algebra were on average able to raise their test results by one grade.

The military, the government and large corporations such as IBM also have adopted 3-D learning. It has been used successfully with students who are deaf or autistic. This year, the New Media Consortium, which lists hundreds of universities, museums and research institutes among its members, identified computer games as one of a handful of emerging technologies that will affect learning, teaching, research and creative expression over the next three years.

3-D learning also has support in the White House. First lady Michelle Obama recently challenged software developers to design video games that teach children about nutritious foods.

“The immersive Internet is the next wave of the net,” said Tony O’Driscoll, a 3-D learning expert at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business who practices what he preaches.

O’Driscoll co-authored the book “Learning in 3D” (Pfeiffer, 2010) with Karl Kapp, a professor of instructional technology at Bloomsburg University in Bloomsburg, Pa. The authors discussed it at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference in March – a conference that took place on 20 virtual islands in Second Life. More than 2,000 educators from 69 countries attended. Like the other participants, O’Driscoll came in the body of a voice-activated avatar: Wada Tripp looks like O’Driscoll but has no specks of gray in his black hair.

What makes 3-D learning stick is a student’s ability to manipulate dials and interact with others in a computer game, said Phaedra Boinodiris, serious games program manager at IBM in Research Triangle Park. “It’s doing versus passive learning.”

Boinodiris, who’s a longtime gamer herself, is behind Innov8, an IBM computer game used by more than 1,000 business schools and companies nationwide. They include Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC Chapel Hill and Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.

The game teaches teams of students how to overcome hurdles that can cause bottlenecks or other delays at a company. One version requires the team to collect information and solve puzzles based on real-life events, such as the situation a plywood supplier faces when a hurricane approaches. The students have to figure out, for example, how much plywood the supplier should stock to meet customers’ demands and be profitable.

Logan, a female consultant in a call center, is the Innov8 avatar in whose skin each team has to slip to walk around the company, interview employees and collect clues in the game.

Boinodiris’ group has also created a game called CityOne, which doesn’t have an avatar. CityOne, which will be available in the fall, teaches how industries, such as banking and retail, are connected with city utilities and city government. To create the game, Boinodiris said, her team relied on subject matter experts worldwide. “It takes an army to make a game like this,” she said.

Games aimed at high school and middle school students are created to work in a similar fashion, but they pursue different goals.

In Pender County, a school district north of Wilmington, teams of sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders who struggled with state algebra tests played a 3-D game called DimensionM during the 2008-2009 school year. Each team came up with an avatar and researched strange disasters on an island. They needed math to solve the mysteries. This school year, seventh graders played a game called Sims to explore elements of fiction writing. Sims simulates daily activities of one or more characters in a suburban household and results of the Pender County creative writing project are posted on a wiki, a Web site with links to other sites on the Internet.

“The experience is embedded in the story line,” said Lucas Gillispie, the instructional technology coordinator for Pender County schools. “Games are powerful learning tools. A player takes a role in the story, which is a multi-sensory experience. By doing, you hit on a wider variety of learning styles.”

Gillispie also introduced World of Warcraft, with about 10 million players per year the most popular 3-D game worldwide, to Pender County schools. A longtime WoW player himself, he offers the game for two hours after school to struggling, at-risk middle school students. The students must learn online manners, work together in guilds and develop leadership skills to go on the fantastical quests. They must also read game instructions, figure out how much gold they have in the WoW bank and write messages to each other.

The students presented Gillispie’s WoW project at the same VWBPE conference where O’Driscoll and Kapp talked about their 3-D learning book. When the students realized that they were about to take educators from around the world on a virtual tour of WoW, Gillispie wrote in his blog, Edurealms.com, “they very quickly went from silliness to seriousness. In fact, in my 10+ years as an educator, I’ve never seen such an abrupt transformation among students. In their minds, they were beginning to take ownership of the idea and realizing that they, in fact, would be the experts teaching the teachers.”

Schaumburg, the Northwest Cabarrus High School senior, got hooked on Second Life because the virtual world was a place where he could test his idea of ending world hunger by using solar energy and sustainable farming methods. With the help of LaChance, his mentor and the owner of the EDTECH Retreat island in Second Life, he built a virtual four-story greenhouse with the same 1-acre footprint as the Empire State Building in New York.

The Second Life prototype allowed Schaumburg to test his business model for growing organic food in water that is fertilized by fish. He figured that his aquaponic method could produce 18 times as many tomatoes per acre than conventional agriculture.

To finish his project, Schaumburg has only one task left to do. Equipped with data from the Second Life prototype, research he did in botanical gardens and greenhouses in the Charlotte area and expert advice from gardeners, engineers and biologists, he will build a real-world greenhouse in his fish tank.

Like the other attendees, O’Driscoll and Ward didn’t travel to VWBPE in person. They sat in front of a computer and had their voice-activated avatars teleport to one of 20 specially constructed virtual islands, where the conference took place over 48 continuous hours. Some of the islands resembled the Guilin mountains in China, an Irish seaside cottage and Stonehenge, the famous English prehistoric monument.

Brent Werber

Wada Tripp, O’Driscoll’s avatar, gave a presentation on 3-D learning, which requires students to interact in simulated, or virtual, environments. Brent Werber, Ward’s avatar, moderated a panel at the conference.

O’Driscoll is a professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and Ward provides RTI researchers technical assistance as the research institute’s director of commercialization. Both are professionals holding positions of responsibility, but neither thinks twice about slipping into his “digital sockpuppet,” a computer-generated persona that lives in Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world maintained by Linden Lab of San Francisco.

Wada Tripp

“We’re members of a community who is waiting for the rest of the world to commit to the obvious,” Wada Tripp, a younger looking version of O’Driscoll that speaks with his voice, said at the beginning of the VWBPE presentation. “The immersive Internet is the next wave of the Net,” O’Driscoll himself later added in a phone interview.

How much life is there in virtual worlds?

More and more people around the world are committing to the obvious. The population in virtual worlds such as Second Life has grown to tens of millions in the past decade, which should come as no surprise to those 35 or younger, technology nerds of all ages and anybody who can no longer imagine making a living without the Internet.

Virtual worlds are the product of the same advances in computer technology that brought us Google, eBay and Craigslist. They offer similar benefits: Fast and convenient access to ever more sophisticated information. They come with similar, built-in hurdles: You have to have a computer powerful enough to run the software and you need to adapt to new rules. And they raise similar questions: What should be public and free? What is proprietary and needs to be private and secured behind a firewall?

What’s different about virtual worlds is the out-of-body experience that defies the laws of nature.

Avatars walk, talk, fly and teleport. Some are lookalikes of their real-life counterparts, others are plants, animals or fantasy creatures. They socialize and drink virtual beer, ski on virtual snow and relax on a virtual beach. They meet in virtual conference centers that may look like castles or a moon base. They spend and earn virtual money in virtual economies.

Their virtual worlds are called There, World of Warcraft, Vivaty and Entropia Universe. They use virtual currency such as Therebucks, World of Warcraft gold and Linden dollars that can be converted to real-life currencies like U.S. dollars or euros. Some of the virtual worlds are more game, with guidelines set for role playing. Others are more social world, where avatars are free to be what they want to be.

Launched in 2003, Second Life is one of the most popular virtual worlds.

User-to-user transactions in Second Life topped $500 million in 2009. Its virtual real estate totals about 500,000 acres. Real-life people have full-time jobs in Second Life and some have even become real-life millionaires.

Last month, the Second Life community counted more than 1 million residents – that’s what Linden Lab calls real-life people who go inworld, which means they log in to activate their avatars. More than 1,400 corporations, universities, government agencies and the U.S. military own virtual property in Second Life.

“They’ve got the best game in town right now, if you care about innovation, collaboration, education and community,” Ward said.

Global Research Park

What sets Second Life apart is the ability to build and create content.

RTP goes virtual

Half a year ago, RTI bought some land from Linden Lab and built an island called Global Research Park. The shape of the island mirrors the real-life shape of RTP. Towers rise up in three points of the island to represent Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and N.C. State University. Other structures on the island include buildings for RTI and the Research Triangle Foundation.

Avatars can take a lofty ride in the Wright flyer, complete a real-life survey in the RTI building or teleport to the Story Quest, an island dedicated to HIV/AIDS education.

Marty Snowpaw

Story Quest takes you into the house of Uncle D, where you can listen to his phone messages, read his journal or watch his videos. You can record your reactions and use Facebook, Twitter or Flickr to make these recordings part of the story. Story Quest is the brainchild of Jena Ball, a Los Angeles-based storyteller better known as her avatar, Jenaia Moraine, and Marty Keltz, a former English teacher who co-founded the company that produces the Magic School Bus.

In Second Life, Keltz becomes Marty Snowpaw.

Entering a virtual world as an avatar “sounds so alien,” Keltz said. “But when you do it the worlds become porous. You get a sense of participation. You’re co-creating.”

Lynda Aiman-Smith, an associate professor in NCSU’s College of Management, holds office hours and discusses projects with her MBA students in Second Life. In her management and technology class, she has used it as an educational tool for three years.

DrLAS Emmons

DrLAS Emmons, her avatar, recently took the class on a field trip to the virtual IBM Green Data Center, which sits on one of the Second Life islands in the IBM archipelago. The center is open to the public and staffed 24 hours a day, five days a week. Visiting avatars can learn about energy efficient technologies, solve problems and design solutions for energy and cooling challenges in a data center.

“This wasn’t a computer game,” Aiman-Smith said about the Second Life field trip to the data center. “They were conducting business.”

Duke’s School of Nursing has a presence in Second Life, where students who don’t live in the RTP area can attend class with the help of their avatars. The UNC Center for AIDS Research records HIV 101, a spring course that attracts 400 to 500 students, and provides access to the recordings on Second Life.

Vanie MacBeth

“My hope was to reach a population I wasn’t able to reach otherwise,” said Vanessa White, who manages the community outreach for the UNC Center for AIDS Research. “Second Life was the perfect medium to erase the stigma associated with learning more about HIV/AIDS, because it provides a platform for anonymity.”

White, who is Vanie MacBeth in Second Life, wants to send all HIV 101 students on the Story Quest next year, but the UNC information technology department has to first unblock access to Second Life on campus.

Virtual bothers

Access limitations can be justified despite the rules of conduct that exist in Second Life. There’s a red-light district and even Main Street can be a bit trashy in appearance sometimes.

Also, Second Life isn’t free from bothers, some of them virtual. Just ask Michael Rowe, a gamer who works for IBM Software in RTP.

Big Blue, which has one of the largest corporate presences inworld, got into Second Life in 2006. Rowe was part of a now-dissolved group that tested how well virtual worlds are suited for business and collaboration. One of the projects he worked on was to establish a virtual store for retailer Sears in Second Life.

Ultravox Freeman

As a manager in the group, Rowe made presentations to customers and IBM colleagues in Second Life. During one such virtual presentation a nude avatar suddenly appeared next to Rowe’s avatar, Ultravox Freeman, greeted him and stayed for a while.

“Can you imagine this happening while you’re meeting with a customer?” Rowe said. Luckily, only IBM colleagues attended his presentation, he remembered.

Second Life offered corporations private spaces, sort of like gated communities, in an otherwise public virtual world. Many companies used those private spaces to build virtual prototypes of products. But the privacy didn’t always keep prying eyes away, Rowe said. In a world where the possibilities are only matched by the residents’ creativity, avatars that are locked out of a gated community can detach their eyes and use them as hovering cameras.

“There’s a lot of stuff that still has to be worked on to make virtual worlds Fortune 500 friendly,” Rowe said.

In November, Linden Lab came up with a solution to privacy problems. It launched SL Enterprise, a behind-the-firewall world that cannot be accessed from Second Life. Pricing starts at $55,000, compared to an initial set-up cost of $1,000 to establish a presence in Second Life.

At the launch of SL Enterprise, 14 companies had signed up, including IBM, Case Western Reserve University and The New Media Consortium, an international consortium of universities, museums and companies that are exploring new media as learning tools.

At least one Linden Lab competitor has had a similar idea.

The American Research Institute, a Morrisville software company that employs about 30, came out with its own virtual world learning tool six months ago. It’s secure, custom-built, scenario-based and can be used for meetings and training. The customer determines the ratio of game to social interaction, said Richard Kristoff, chief executive of the American Research Institute.

“It’s not an open, wild Wild West,” Kristoff said. “I didn’t want to create another situation where you had thousands of users and you had out-of-control behavior.”

When the product launched, the American Research Institute didn’t have to explain much. Potential customers had already gained an understanding of virtual worlds from Second Life.

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

GSK eyes more cuts in R&D

The cutbacks at large drugmakers have been a steady drumbeat for more than two years. In 2008, the industry shed about 44,000 jobs, followed by 59,000 last year, according to industry publication FiercePharma. This year, the cuts continue – AstraZeneca plans to shed 8,000 over four years, Novartis wants to reduce headcount by 2,500 this year and GSK is expected to eliminate 3,000 to 4,000 jobs worldwide.

Sales jobs were hit hardest when the industry-wide restructuring began in 2007, but R&D is now becoming the focus of the cost cutting. Nearly half of the cuts AstraZeneca announced last week will be in R&D and R&D jobs are expected to also account for nearly half of GSK’s cutbacks. On Thursday, GSK announced it is targeting R&D expenses but not which research centers will be affected or how many jobs are at risk.

First clues that the cuts may hit European GSK sites, where the company does much of its work on pain and depression, here. Researchers at GSK’s site in RTP focus on HIV/AIDS and infectious diseases.

In RTP and at its Zebulon manufacturing plant, GSK employs about 5,000 in sales, marketing, research and production.

Increasing competition from cheaper generic drugs and drugmakers’ inability to replace the lost sales are fueling the upheaval in the pharmaceutical industry in the U.S. and Europe. Meanwhile, countries with significantly lower labor costs, such as China, India and Brazil, are benefiting. For example, GSK has invested heavily to establish an R&D center with about 1,500 employees in China.

IBM unveils cloud computing center

IBM unveiled a $360 million data center on its RTP campus. The center will support cloud computing services for customers.

The data center is one of several efforts in the RTP area to scale up the ability to store and crunch increasing amounts of data.

Interest in cloud computing, which taps existing computing capacity like utilities tap electricity from a grid according to demand, is particularly keen among researchers and organizations working in the public health arena.

More information about cloud computing efforts in RTP here.

Durham startup snags cash and a deal

CancerGuide Diagnostics, a Durham startup, raised $10.5 million in venture capital and signed a deal with LabCorp, the medical testing giant based in Burlington.

The startup will be working on tests that allow oncologists to pick treatments best for each cancer patient. LabCorp will support CancerGuide Diagnostics in its efforts and own a stake in the startup, which is headed by Dr. Myla Lai-Goldman, LabCorp’s former chief medical officer.

Other investors were Intersouth Partners and Hatteras Venture Partners, two Durham venture capital firms.