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Guest in
Today IBM announced a three year Research investment to help medical practitioners and insurance companies provide high-quality, evidence-based care to patients and reduce costs. As part of this initiative, IBM is hiring medical doctors to work alongside its researchers to develop new technologies, scientific advancements, and business processes for healthcare and insurance providers.
Robert Sorrentino, M.D., is one of our new physicians, who has joined IBM Research to bring new insight to how technology can make healthcare smarter. Following is a guest post from Dr. Sorrentino:
A career ER physician, Chief Medical Officer, and healthcare executive in a hospital and HMO, I recently joined IBM as part of its healthcare transformation research group at IBM Research – Watson in New York. While this may seem an unusual move to some, I see it as the culmination of a number of factors finally coming together to improve the quality of patient care on a grand scale. The possibilities are thrilling — and the reason I’m here.
Posted by
Lou Lazarus in
Slideshow: IBMer Michele Grieshaber shares her team's Corporate Service Corps adventure in Ho Chi Minh City.
Ten million hours is a lot of time. 1,141 years, actually. So it is somewhat amazing to learn that that’s the total amount of time IBMers have spent volunteering through IBM’s On Demand Community initiative over the last five years.
Over a millennium of cumulative volunteer service in communities around the world; that’s a remarkable milestone in our journey to build a smarter planet.
That it is just one of the interesting pieces of information you’ll find in IBM’s latest Corporate Responsibility Report. The report provides an annual update on IBM’s strategies, activities and results in the areas of governance, supply chain, the environment, employment practices and community partnerships. You can access this interactive version that will let you dive into specific content and learn about how IBMers are making the planet healthier, more sustainable and smarter.
Posted by
Jack Mason in
For the first time, IBM’s biennial CEO Study (which launched in May) included interviews with more than 3600 graduate and undergraduate students. Their perspectives on the future of business and leadership in the smarter planet era is the subject of another first: a “v-panel” discussion with four people joining by webcams. The group will discuss two of the key findings that young adults cited as the most important issues shaping their careers: globalization and sustainability.
The panelists
- Ragna Bell, associate partner IBM Global Business Services and the global lead for Strategy & Change at the IBM Institute for Business Value
- Christopher Adkins is director of the Undergraduate Business Program at the College of William & Mary (Mason School of Business)
- Jeff Hittner, Carnegie New Leader at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs
- Emily Goodson, Assistant Director, MA Career Counseling, Wake Forest University Schools of Business
The Webcast
Tune in at 4pm 
on Tuesday, July 13th to the IBM New Intelligence Channel on Livestream. You can post questions via the live chat or share your thoughts with the Twitter hashtag #smarterleaders. The VPanel approach, by the way, is the handiwork of IBM alumni Paul Trout and his team at Shift Worldwide.
The Study
You are welcome to download the report: Inheriting a Complex World: Future Leaders Envision Sharing the Planet (pdf).
For more on the Smarter Leaders initiative, the IBM Institute for Business Value project focused on c-level research as well as the next generation of leaders, see:
- Smarter Leaders | Tumblr
- @smarterleaders on Twitter
- Smarter Leaders on Facebook
- Smarter Leaders Mobile (iPhone, Android, Blackberry and other devices)
Posted by
vineeta durani in
This year alone, more than 1200 exabytes of digital information will be created. And with just one exabyte equal to one trillion novels, companies are faced with the challenge of getting their arms around massive amounts of data. Data that is being generated by their internal business applications, their IT systems, social networks and various other external sources such as the nearly 1 trillion internet-connected devices.
While some organizations struggle with this deluge of data, others are turning it into opportunity. Today, IBM is launching a new series of client success stories, shining a light on how businesses and governments from around the world are turning mountains of data into concrete opportunities to better serve their clients, improve citizen service and innovate in ways that have never been possible. And with more than 250,000 organizations around the world using IBM analytics, this is just the beginning.
Analyze This: DC Water
How do you monitor a water system that in part dates back to the mid 1800s? How do emergency responders know that the fire hydrant next to a burning building will work?
The answer doesn’t lie in expensive infrastructure projects or overhauling of water management systems — it lies in connecting the dots with relevant data. Predictive analytics is helping DC Water analyze enormous amount of data on weather conditions, maintenance and hundreds of other variables to uncover usage patterns and spot problems, like water main breaks, before they occur.
To learn more, visit the new IBM business analytics channel on You Tube: www.youtube.com/user/ibmbusinessanalytics
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jamesmathewson in
Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Dave Turek, vice president, IBM Deep Computing. IBM is well known for dominating the Top500 lists of supercomputers. Less well known is the Green500 List, which ranks supercomputers not only on feeds and speeds, but energy consumption. This year, IBM dominated that list with 17 out of the top 20 machines on the list. This blog post highlights the significance of this achievement for Smarter Planet.
Energy efficiency is quickly becoming one of the most important metrics of supercomputing value. Just a few short years ago high performance computing (HPC) clients were concerned primarily with performance, and the cost of performance. The conversation has shifted dramatically. HPC clients are now equally concerned about power consumption and cooling requirements. For good reason, the cost to power an HPC environment today is nearly as much as the hardware.
Fifty percent of the energy consumed in today’s average data center goes toward cooling the systems and preventing overheating. Overheating, in turn, leads to reduced reliability. In fact, Wu-Chun Feng of Virginia Tech, one of the founders of the Green500 List of energy-efficient supercomputers believes that for every 10 degree Celsius increase in temperature the system failure rate doubles.
Posted by
jamesmathewson in
Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Wayne Balta, vice president, environmental affairs and product safety at IBM. It emphasizes that sustainability is not a new concept for IBM, nor is it a short-term commitment. Sustainability is woven into the fabric of IBM’s business.
IBM just issued its 20th environmental report–an annual tradition that began in 1990, long before most companies climbed on the “green” bandwagon or became transparent about their environmental activities. In addition to climate change and energy efficiency, IBM reports on pollution prevention, waste management, material selection and water stewardship to capture the full scope of its environmental impact.
In 2009, IBM’s energy conservation projects across the company delivered savings equal to 5.4 percent of our total energy use (exceeding our goal of 3.5%). These conservation projects also saved almost $27 million in energy expense.
From the way IBM runs its business, to the products and solutions we sell, to the way we manage our supplier relationships, IBM uses its expertise, global reach, innovation and technology in our commitment to protect the environment. Sustainability is systemic to IBM’s business along with technology and services that promote the company’s vision for a smarter planet.
The company looks to design energy-efficient offerings to help provide clients with products that protect the environment. Consider data centers. Toyota Motor’s 20, 000 square foot data in California uses a high-tech system of sensors developed by IBM to detect wasted energy on the manufacturing floor. The sensors deliver a color-coded 3D view of where heat is being produced. This same system helped IBM cut its 2009 energy consumption and has saved nearly 350,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions for clients.
IBM is partnering with companies around the world on thermal management, virtualization, consolidation, software, and even construction to improve data center energy efficiency. And the Green500 just put out its 2010 list of the most energy efficient supercomputers; IBM dominates the list with 17 of the top 20.
Our sustainability also stretches to the realm of patents. The Eco-Patent Commons creates a free exchange of intellectual property to solve environmental challenges. Since the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and IBM launched the Eco-Patent Commons in 2008, 12 companies have joined the effort, contributing more than 100 patents to protect the environment, and we strongly encourage other companies to contribute.
For some companies, corporate responsibility is merely an adjunct; a set of activities disconnected from the core business. At IBM, the company’s strategic business priorities are tightly aligned with our social responsibility efforts. This shared ambition is to enable the systems that make life on this planet more efficient, accessible and sustainable.
Wayne Balta is vice president, environmental affairs and product safety, IBM
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
Ever since the release in 1995 of Pixar’s Toy Story, the first completely computer animated film, there has been an arms race to bring ever more vivid animations to the silver screen–culminating this year in a series of 3-D movies, including Avatar, Toy Story 3, and opening tomorrow, Despicable Me. Each escalation of visual richness puts huge new demands on the computers that are used to create and render the images into a full-length film.
In recent years, movie studios have used huge server farms to provide the data-crunching power required for rendering the imagery, but a series of breakthroughs by IBM is bringing down the cost and energy requirements. For Illumination Entertainment, the three-year-old developer and producer of Despicable Me, IBM technologists assembled a single, refrigerator-size computer–think of it as a rendering farm in a box. They packed 6,500 processor cores into the server, a density never before achieved with Intel’s x86 processors.
Normally, putting that many processors into such a small space could have resulted in a literal meltdown of the equipment. Engineers sidestepped that issue by using IBM’s Rear Door Heat eXchanger, a water-cooled door that allows the system to run without external air conditioning. “In the past, you could only pack so many servers in a rack. Not only does this device not require air conditioning, it actually sucks heat out of the room,” says Steve Canepa, general manager, IBM Media & Entertainment industry.
The energy savings are substantial. According to our calculations, it takes about 4,000 kilowatt hours of electricity to render a typical 3-D animated film. This approach slices 40% off the energy requirement.
Another plus: This more affordable approach to computing helps feisty upstarts like Illumination Entertainment compete with Hollywood’s giants.
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
When communities set out on massive, multidimensional civic improvement projects, a necessary first step is gaining agreement from the principle players in government, business, and the non-profit sphere on what they want the city or region to be–its brand, if you will. This is a conclusion IBM executives have drawn from dozens of Smarter Cities engagements in communities scattered all over the globe.
That ambition is more easily stated than accomplished, but some of the work IBM is doing in Poland points to lessons that could help community leaders elsewhere.
Katowice, with a population of about 300,000, is the unofficial capital of the Silesa region in southern Poland, which is known for its coal mining, steel making, and other heavy industries. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the region has suffered economically. Its coal mines, in particular, became less competitive, resulting in a loss of tens of thousands of mining jobs.
Fortunately, the city and the region have some inspired and energetic leaders, among them Katowice Mayor Piotr Uszok. The goal is to shift to high-tech and service industries–supported by improvements in the transportation system. Uszok asked IBM for help in devising an economic renewal plan, and, as a first step, we sent in a five-person team from our Corporate Service Corps to help size up the situation.
The CSC, which has been called a “business” version of the Peace Corps, sends small groups of IBMers with diverse talents into countries or cities to help them craft economic development strategies, beef up government services, and improve systems such as transportation, health, and water. Some of the teams, such as the one that went to Poland, are made up entirely of executives–bringing a higher level of expertise and management skills to the projects.
Visiting Katowice this spring, the team engaged with a group of community leaders who have been jointly developing regional strategies for several years. At the same time, they’re open to new ideas, particularly along the themes of attracting foreign investors to create new jobs, improving the quality of life, and updating the transportation system.
The team members met with about 200 people from government, academia, and businesses. From these conversations they drafted a set of recommendations, which they presented to mayor Uszok in a marathon five-hour meeting. (The mayor demonstrated his commitment to strategic planning by continuing the meeting even though the city was under a severe flood threat.)
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
This is the way innovation sometimes happens: Two people who work for the same organization but have different areas of expertise meet by chance, start talking, and come up with an idea that has the potential to make a big difference in the world.
In this case, the people are Gustavo Stolovitzky and Stanislav Polonsky, two scientists at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York. Gustavo’s specialty is genomics and Stas’ is semiconductors. Three years ago they met in a corridor at the lab and began talking about some of the challenges in biology. Gustavo said great things could be accomplished in medical science if researchers had the ability to sequence an individual’s entire genome quickly and inexpensively. The two discussed the possibility of using semiconductor technology to help create a quick and inexpensive gene sequencing machine. Within a few weeks they came up with the idea for what we now call DNA Transistor–a new way of sequencing the genome.
That bold concept came a major step closer to the marketplace today when Roche and IBM announced a partnership to develop a gene sequencer based on the DNA Transistor that the companies hope will directly read and decode DNA quickly and efficiently. “The big potential payoff from such technology is the ability to do things cheaper, faster, and better,” says Ajay Royyuru, the senior manager at IBM Research’s computational biology center.
Cheaper, faster, and better could make a big difference in the effort to draw knowledge from genomic research that will dramatically improve physicians’ abilities to correctly diagnose and treat diseases. It required $3 billion in research spending to sequence the first individual genome, in the US-funded Human Genome Project, and, so far, only a handful of people worldwide have had their entire genomes read. As a result, the great promise of genomics research has yet to be realized. A June 12 article in the New York Times marking the 10-year anniversary of the first draft of the Human Genome Project concluded that “medicine has yet to see any large part of the promised benefits.” Roche and IBM hope that their joint research make it possible to analyze an individual’s genome for a cost of between $100 and $1,000. A cost that low would make it practical to sequence the entire genomes of many individuals–enough to draw reliable conclusions. Roche and IBM will jointly develop the technology and hope to produce a working prototype in three years.
