Now I know the answer: Zurich. As in Switzerland. Banerjee is going to be the Chief Technology Officer of the Swiss industrial-tech giant ABB.

What is ABB? I don’t know very much about it, either. But it has popped up on my radar screen in the past. In 2010, when I wrote this Bloomberg Businessweek story about the Stuxnet worm that targeted computers involved in the control of industrial equipment, I learned that several companies make programmable logic controllers and other gear that might in theory be attacked by a Stuxnet-like worm. ABB is one of them.

That’s not exactly a headline for what the company does. It’s actually pretty big. It has 134,000 employees around the world, and has been in existence for almost 130 years. It specializes in heavy power-management gear and automation equipment that is used in industrial settings.

ABB announced the news in a press release that hit the wires overnight, and which I have shared below:

ABB appoints Prith Banerjee to Executive Committee as Chief Technology Officer

Banerjee to join ABB from Hewlett Packard, to start new role midyear 2012

Zurich, Switzerland, April 5, 2012 – ABB, the leading power and automation technology group, has appointed Prith Banerjee to its Executive Committee in the role of Chief Technology Officer. Banerjee, 51, will start midyear 2012 and will be based in Zurich.

He joins ABB from Hewlett Packard, where he was Senior Vice President of Research and Director of HP Labs. Prior to that, Banerjee was Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, as well as Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Banerjee has also held senior positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at Northwestern University. In 2000, he founded AccelChip, Inc., a developer of products and services for electronic design automation that was acquired by Xilinx in 2006. He succeeds Peter Terwiesch, who became head of ABB in Germany and manager of ABB’s Central Europe region in July 2011.

“Prith is a creative and entrepreneurial researcher and executive with a wealth of experience in the business and academic worlds,” said Joe Hogan, ABB’s chief executive officer. “He is well placed to help ABB build on its heritage of technology innovation and leadership.”

Banerjee has a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and a Master’s degree and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana.

ABB (www.abb.com) is a leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve their performance while lowering environmental impact. The ABB Group of companies operates in around 100 countries and employs about 135,000 people.

Chandrakant Patel, an HP Senior Fellow, director of its Sustainable Ecosystems Research Group and 21 25-year company veteran, will head up HP Labs while a search for Banerjee’s replacement is conducted. Patel first joined HP Labs in 1991.

HP Labs forms the backbone of the company’s research and development efforts, on which HP spent $3.3 billion in its 2011 fiscal year, or about 2.5 percent of sales. That’s up from $2.8 billion in 2009.

A source familiar with the matter says that CEO Meg Whitman is looking for a greater focus at HP Labs on innovations that can more readily be spun into products that can be brought to market. The most prominent innovation to come out of HP Labs in recent years has been the development of the memristor, a type of circuit that allows the creation of memory chips that are fast, like conventional DRAM memory, but also hold information when they lose their power supply, like flash memory. HP disclosed that it had proven the memristor’s existence in 2008 — it had before that time been only theoretical — but four years later there are as yet no products based around it.

After taking over as CEO last year, Whitman ordered HP Labs to report directly to her. Previously, the unit had reported up through the chief strategy officer.

Banerjee, who I interviewed last May as part of my ongoing Seven Questions series with AllThingsD, had led HP Labs since 2007 during the years Mark Hurd was CEO. He gained a reputation for adjusting HP’s research focus and placing bigger bets on fewer projects.

Before HP, Banerjee had taken leave from the academic world to build a chip start-up called AccelChip, which he sold to Xilinx in 2006. Before that he had been dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In that post, he oversaw a faculty of 115 in six engineering departments, with 1,550 undergraduate and 900 graduate students, and $21 million in annual research funding.

The memo from Whitman to HP employees announcing the change is below.

HP Confidential
TO/ HP Technologists
SUBJECT/ Leadership Announcement

I am writing to share the news that Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of research and director of HP Labs, is leaving HP effective April 15, 2012. He will be assuming a role outside the company, which will be announced at a later date. I am pleased to announce that Chandrakant Patel, senior fellow and director of the Sustainable Ecosystems Research Group, will serve as the interim director of HP Labs until a permanent successor is identified.

Prith has been a strong contributor to HP’s product innovation and has substantially increased the visibility of Labs within the business. He’s led breakthrough research, including data de- duplication, flexible displays, the memristor and nano-technology sensors (CeNSE). Prith has a passion for innovation I know you all share – a passion that will continue to flourish at HP Labs. I wish Prith well in the future.

We’re extremely fortunate to have someone of Chandrakant’s talent and experience ready to step into Prith’s shoes. As you all know, Chandrakant is an HP veteran who has been with the company for 25 years. His team has taken numerous technologies to market, including innovations that span servers to data centers, such as the current research in sustainable data centers which is being transferred to our enterprise business. He will continue to drive Labs forward during this transition, and I couldn’t be more pleased that he has agreed to assume this interim role.

Innovation is core to HP. HP Labs generates the research that turns ideas into products. As you have heard me say, one of our goals is to improve the connection between Labs and the business, so we can accelerate the path to market and translate innovation into business results. This, in turn, will help to generate growth and enable continued investment.

Please join me in thanking Prith for his service and in supporting Chandrakant with his new responsibilities.

Best,
Meg

Now we call them blade servers, and today they account for about 15 percent of the world’s servers, with vendors as varied as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle and Fujitsu.

But the fundamental problems facing those who buy servers in large quantities remain the same: Technology demands more computing cycles, which servers with ever more powerful chips can certainly deliver, but companies have limited space to put them, limited power resources to run them and cool them, and limited ability to pay for it all.

Today Hewlett-Packard aims to change the discussion about the future of servers with something it calls Project Moonshot. The idea is pretty straightforward: Cram 2,800 servers into a single rack that would today house a few dozen, or at most 128, blade servers. Make them all share the same internal networking, cooling and power supplies and generally boost the number of servers that can fit into a defined space. One way or another, more efficiency is badly needed, and as Parthasarathy Ranganathan, a Fellow at HP Research I talked to yesterday, told me, the time has come to stop trying to squeeze “blood from a stone” in order to get it, but rather do something more radical.

The headline that everyone is paying attention to is that HP has selected an ARM-based chip from a Texas-based start-up called Calxeda as the chip it will use in its development platform, called Redstone. ARM, as you know, is a flavor of chip technology designed by the British firm ARM Holdings that’s widely used in mobile phones because it is very power efficient. ARM has recently started to make some inroads into general-use personal computing against the Intel- and AMD-based world of x86 computing.

But it’s less important to focus on the chips that HP is using here than on the fundamental shift that HP is trying to create. “We’re not trying to start a new chip war,” Glenn Keels, HP’s director of marketing for HP’s Hyperscale business, told me. There’s no reason that Intel’s Atom chips couldn’t one day be just as suitable for this. Make no mistake, though: ARM chips are coming to servers, one way or another.

Aside from the Redstone development platform, HP also aims to let potential customers kick the tires of the Redstone-style servers by running their applications on them and seeing how they perform versus traditional servers in a series of development labs that the company will open around the world. The first will be in Houston, and it will open in January. More will follow next year in Europe and Asia.

HP also named a handful of partners that are participating in the Moonshot project by contributing hardware, software and technical expertise. Among them are AMD; Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu flavor of Linux; and Red Hat, the enterprise Linux company. It all looks very interesting, and if HP can nudge the industry in a direction where millions of servers packed into data centers can consume significantly less energy than they do now, everyone should be happier. The benefits would be the increased availability of computing power at a lower cost, with less relative energy consumption and therefore less impact on the environment. It’s hard to argue with any of that.

Here’s an HP video explaining what Project Moonshot is all about.

(Image is the cover of an extremely inaccurate 1959 children’s book imagining what a routine flight to the moon might be like for a 6-year-old boy.)

This research paper was produced by two social-computing researchers at HP Labs: Bernardo Huberman and Sitaram Asur. It’s titled “Predicting the Future With Social Media” [PDF here], and it looks at Twitter as a means of predicting the box-office success of newly release films based on the number of people tweeting about them and the sentiments contained in those tweets.

They argued that Twitter was a far better predictor of box-office success than the motion picture industry’s “tracking” reports that studios have used for years. In fact, the two researchers said at the time that Twitter could predict with nearly 98 percent accuracy whether a movie would be a hit or a flop in its first weekend of release. For the study, they mined nearly three million tweets referring to 24 different movies over a time period of three months.

Fflick does some sentiment analysis of its own, but uses that data to help Twitter users decide whether they are going to buy a ticket to a movie based on whether their Twitter friends liked it. Could it be that Google wants to mine that same sentiment data to help movie studios predict box-office sales?

As I said, this is only a theory–one that I admit I’m stretching to the max. I can’t find any connection between the two researchers and Ffflick’s four founders, or its investors, which includes the Founders Fund, though there needn’t be one for my theory to be close to the mark. Fflick was started in August of last year, about five months after the paper was published. And the paper itself was widely covered at the time, in particular by the Los Angeles Times.

Since neither Google nor Fflick is commenting on this deal, which is supposedly still pending, I thought it was worth suggesting as a possible motivation on Google’s part.

Electronista thinks it may have something to do with forecasting popularity on Google’s forthcoming YouTube movie project and the need to predict.

I did check in with the paper’s principal author, Huberman, by email to ask what he thought. His reply: “Sentiment analysis of tweets is great for marketing studies and Google wants to go there since they have search going on with Twitter.” Time will tell if this is what Google has on its mind.

Two years later, Palm no longer has a share price, having been acquired by Hewlett-Packard, and Rubinstein, no longer its CEO, runs HP’s new mobile devices unit. But with the iconic Silicon Valley company backing it and “doubling down on webOS” and a new tablet based on the OS headed to market, its future is perhaps equally as promising, if not more so.

2:57 pm:
The session kicks off with video of a previous interview with Rubinstein in which he–the “father of the iPod”–claimed never to have used an iPhone.

So, have you touched an iPhone yet? Kara asks.

Rubinstein laughs. “Oh, we’re going to go through this again? Have I used one as my own device? No. Have I touched one? Yes.”

2:58 pm: Rubinstein continues: For me personally, we have lots of people who use iPhones and we have competitive analysis groups who review competing products, but I don’t want to be tainted by another experience. I want to come at this with a fresh perspective and I think what we’re seeing now in this industry is that everyone is copying the iPhone.

3:00 pm: Sorry, we’re having some connectivity issues here….

Moving on now to Palm and its ultimate acquisition by HP.

I think we did have many of the elements to be successful. We had a great team, a great product, a great product pipeline….But I think the market moved too fast and when we looked forward we saw a very clear way to where we could get the company to profitability, but we didn’t see a way to get it to scale….We could have been a small, successful company, but I don’t think that’s long-term sustainable in this business.”

So it was an issue of scale and not the “creepy lady marketing?” Kara asks.

Rubinstein says no, though he concedes the Palm Pre could have been marketed better.

3:04 pm: Ultimately, says, Rubinstein, we just ran out of runway…. We looked at a variety of different alternatives, and at the end of the day we decided that the best thing to do was to hook up with a partner that could get webOS to scale….The most expeditious outcome was to partner with HP.

3:05 pm: What other companies were interested in acquiring you? Kara asks. Rubinstein won’t say. What he will say is that the one that made the most sense was HP. “They didn’t have a great mobile strategy, but they had the means to get webOS to scale….A company like HP needs to be in control of its own strategy….This is not ‘game over.”

3:07 pm: How badly did HP need Palm? “Look,” says Rubinstein, “HP is the largest computer company in the world…it needs a mobile strategy. And it needs a mobile OS of its own….They needed to be in this space, and now they’re very jazzed about webOS.

3:08 pm: How about the Mark Hurd scandal? Was it much of a distraction for Palm? Rubinstein says it wasn’t. Palm was relatively new to the company when it occurred and was thus unaffected. “There was some turmoil for a few days,” he says. “That’s about it.”

3:10 pm: Moving on now to Palm’s role within HP. “What we chose to do as part of the acquistion was to integrate part of Palm into HP and keep part of it separate….The engineering team is essentially separate…things like HR and finance are handled by HP….From my perspective, what we were planning on doing and what HP wanted to do were very well aligned.”

Post acquisition, says Rubinstein, as soon as we aligned our road maps, we were off and running. He notes that internal relationships with divisions like HP Labs have been quite helpful.

Will the Palm name continue? asks Kara.

[Sorry, more connectivity problems.]
Rubinstein: That’s something we’re debating. What do you think we should do?

Kara: Get rid of it.

Rubinstein: Okay [jokingly]….I don’t really have much of a connection to the Palm brand.

3:16 pm: What’s Rubinstein’s view on the competitive environment? “Look, this is a huge market. The growth is phenomenal. If we roll back three years to when I started this Palm adventure, mobile was the place to be. And it still is today. I think we still have the chance to become a major player if we do the right things.”

3:20 pm: What’s the more important device, the phone or the tablet? asks Kara. Rubinstein says he doesn’t think people will have just one device. “It used to be that people shared a device. These days, people have multiple devices. So the new question is how do these devices interact so there’s a seemless user experience across devices….The ability to have a unified experience on all your devices is very important.”

3:21 pm: The conversation moves on to carrier relationships. Rubinstein observes that AT&T is doing pretty well in the Bay Area. “Just for you,” quips Kara.

3:23 pm: And on to the Q&A. First question from Engadget’s Josh Topolsky. What’s the Palm story that’s going to make people buy your phones? How do you convince a consumer to buy your stuff when you’re competing with the likes of Google and Apple?

Rubinstein: We really do have a unique experience compared to everyone else….The other concept around this is the connected device strategy. We’re in this transition now where we’re integrating into HP, so we’re still ramping up.

3:25 pm: Kara circles back, asks about differentiation and how HP can break through all the marketing noise. Where do you think the next radical change in the mobile market is going to come from? she asks.

I think it’s going to be incremental change, not a radical. I think it’s all about bringing this vision of a more connected world to our users.

Kara asks about forthcoming webOS devices.

Rubinstein gives the standard answer: “Stay tuned.” But he added, “This will be a very different conversation next year.”

3:25 pm: And that’s it.

This week: We had a Skype visit with, asked some questions of and gathered a few pertinent stats about Leslie Fine and Crowdcast, an uber-geeky business intelligence tool that helps decision makers tap into the collective knowledge of employees.

In other words: No one person knows the future, but all of us together might.

Who: Leslie Fine

What: Chief Scientist, Crowdcast

Why: Crowdcast blends ex-Caltech statistical analysis chops with a simple wagering interface to create a game played among employees. At its most basic, it provides a way for businesses to download all the experience and knowledge possessed by their employees about an arena or pending decision.

Where: crowdcast.com (Web site); @lesliefine (Twitter); San Francisco (analog place)

Who else: Inkling also provides predictive tools, but isn’t as consulting-oriented.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in Her Facebook Profile

When Did You Catch the Geek Bug?: When I was at Caltech, my adviser, John Ledyard, was amazing at making very complex analysis problems very folksy. He was very good at telling stories.

Has a Geek Crush On: Are dead people okay? If so, his name is Leo Hurwicz; he won the Nobel Prize in mechanism design a few years ago.

What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?: I have to grow up?

Wishes There Was an App for: Oh yeah, it’s actually my Plan B. I call it Seat Sniper. You tell it about your seating preferences (window, front, exit row) and in the 72 hours before a flight when seats are moving around, it continually pings the airlines Web site to see if there are any maximizing moves to me made. Then, it does it for you.

Fails At: I’m terrible at delegating, and that’s something I am having to learn here.

Bio in 140 Characters

Wesleyan, then to CalTech. She joined HP Labs; wasn’t ready to retire. Became chief scientist for Crowdcast, so she could tell the future.

The Five Questions

Crowdcast seems super technical. Break it down for us.

Crowdcast is an enterprise software platform that helps companies make better forecasts by tapping the knowledge stored in their employees. People you hire are the best informed to help businesses understand their own targets. For lack of a better term, we ask them to place bets on things that we then tie back to real incentives when bets are made accurately. The software plays like a stock market or betting game. It is like duck on a pond. It seems simple on top, but underneath there are lots of moving parts at work.

What kinds of questions is Crowdcast good at answering?

We spent a lot of time in our first year as a new company debating that because prediction markets can, in theory, solve any kind of problem. Where we’ve seen the most traction are in a couple areas.

Questions whose outcomes will be knowable in three months to a year and where there is very dispersed knowledge in your organization tend to do well. An example would be bringing a new product to market, where there are many silos involved and lots of funky incentives. We nail questions like, “When will it [a new product] come out?” and “How good will it be?” and “How much will it cost to do so?”

How do you handle outliers? They might be telling you something you need to know, and they might just be way off.

Yeah, that’s a good question. We pay close attention to game players whose predictions are one standard deviation or more away from the average guess. They get a little light box pop-up that asks them why they’ve bid that way, so that we can gather any potential special intelligence.

What’s your ah-ha technology moment, when you realized you were living in the future?

We had this little app at HP Labs called Zoomgraph–this is in 2000–where you could look at all the data flows in your computer.

There’s like a million free Facebook apps that do that today, but, in 2000, it was showing back to me, on a screen, a map of my world. It was very navel-gazing, which we did a lot of at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) Labs. It was amazing in a passive way.

You work on developing games intended to tell the future. Are you competitive about this stuff?

Ha ha. Yeah, we use our product internally to predict all kinds of stuff–some business related, some just fun. I’m very competitive with it. We keep track of points here and I think I’m 4x above the nearest competitor. I bought most of my Christmas presents with Amazon (AMZN) gift cards I won that way.

The In Living Color Interview