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Basit Chaudhry, MD, PhD
Medical Scientist, IBM Research
The U.S. healthcare system is capable of producing breathtaking innovations that drive progress forward. New frontiers open up on an almost regular basis. This is the “miracle of medicine.” At the same time, however, advancements made at the leading edge of science are slow to diffuse through the system and enormous inefficiencies exist in how scarce resources are used. Our ability to generate new scientific knowledge and develop advanced medical technologies has never been greater. Our ability to apply those innovations rationally in practice has not kept pace, unfortunately. Continue Reading »
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By Paulo Albuquerque, Asst. Professor of Marketing, University of Rochester, Simon Graduate School of Business
Give a college student a question and you’ll get an answer. Give them an answer, and you’ll get a lot of questions. The right questions can trigger responses that represent an entirely new way to look at solutions to today’s most pressing societal and business challenges.
This is exactly what happened at the Simon Graduate School of Business where I teach business students to take an analytical approach to marketing. Instead of the usual case competition where students are asked to develop a strategy to address a specific business challenge, this time the university collaborated with IBM and regional business leaders to look at ways IBM’s Watson technology could be applied to a variety of industries. Continue Reading »
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In graduate schools these days, marketing isn’t for dilettantes.
Want proof? Two teams made up entirely of masters-of-marketing candidates placed first and second in last week’s Watson competition at the University of Rochester’s Simon School of Business. They beat five teams made up of traditional MBA candidates.
Their apparent edge: Simon School’s marketing program concentrates on quantitative analysis—the art of turning data into valuable insights. “We didn’t have a lot of background information, so we had to find a lot of data,” says Christian Beck, a 25-year-old from Hannover, Germany, who was on the winning team. “This reinforces my belief in the power of data.”
The seven teams spent two weeks preparing for the competition. Their task was to choose applications within specific industries that they believe will be fertile ground for IBM’s Watson, which last year defeated two former grand-champions at the TV quiz show Jeopardy! After that, they presented their proposals before a panel of judges including Simon School faculty members, a Rochester-area business CEO and two IBM executives. It was the first of a series of such competitions, which are aimed at getting top business students excited about the potential for data analytics.
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Michael Zerbs
Vice President, IBM Risk Analytics
Four years after the worldwide financial crisis began, the recent elections and their aftermaths in Greece and France are fresh reminders that the global financial system and the global economy itself are still fragile. They also teach a powerful lesson about the importance of managing risk.
For many years, investors and regulators viewed government bonds as practically risk-free investments. We now understand how wrong a lot of smart people can be.
Risk exists in all the domains of human endeavor, and, as the financial crisis illustrates, it’s vital for people and organizations to adopt strategies for either reducing risks or understanding them better. This goes for governments, banks, investors and other business leaders alike
In this world of ever-more-complex systems, what is needed is the ability to go beyond the known and explore the unknown. By using technology it’s possible to adopt a holistic view of systems, everything from banking to maritime shipping to retail supply chains, and from that information create realistic scenarios of possible future outcomes of the decisions we make individually and collectively. These scenarios, or models, are the language of risk.
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By Dr. John E. Kelly III
IBM Senior Vice President and Director of IBM Research
When I was a child, my father worked at General Electric’s research lab in Niskayuna, N.Y. I would visit and watch him tinker with vacuum tubes—light bulb-like devices that were used to direct electrical current in all sorts of gizmos, from radios and TVs to radar and computers. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what he was doing, but those visits inspired me to study science and, ultimately, to get degrees in physics and materials engineering.
I later came to understand that I had witnessed one of the great transitions in the history of technology. While my dad was showing me vacuum tubes, other engineers at GE’s lab were experimenting with the vacuum tube’s successor, the transistor, which ultimately ushered in modern electronics and personal computing. Those core technologies enabled computers that could be programmed to perform a wide variety of tasks.
Today, we are at the dawn of another epochal shift in the evolution of technology. At IBM Research, we call it the era of cognitive systems.
This is a big deal. The changes that are coming over the next 10 to 20 years—building on IBM’s Watson technology–will transform the way we live, work and learn, just as programmable computing has transformed the human landscape over the past 60+ years. You could even call this the post-computing era.
Multiple sclerosis is a cruel disease. It typically strikes young adults. The body’s own immune system attacks the brain and spinal cord, resulting in physical disabilities, cognitive problems and a host of other chronic symptoms. The cause isn’t known. There is no cure. Fortunately, the amount of biomedical and clinical data related to MS has exploded over the past decade, and, at the same time, new research methods make it possible to assess environmental factors and hundreds of thousands of genetic variations taken from single samples.
Researchers at The State University of New York at Buffalo are using a new approach to computing in an attempt to identify the causes and promising therapies. We’re conducting a TweetChat on Thursday, May 10, from 12 to 1 p.m. ET at Twitter hashtag #IBMDataChat. Please join the conversation about using technology to help defeat MS.
Participants:
· Shawn Dolley, IBM VP of Big Data Healthcare & Life Sciences (Moderator), @shawndolley
· Dr. Murali Ramanathan, SUNY Buffalo Professor Pharmaceutical Sciences and Neurology, Director of Graduate Studies & Co-Director, Data Intensive Discovery Initiative, @M_Ramanathan
· David Smith, Revolution Analytics R Evangelist & VP of Marketing, @revodavid
· Tim Coetzee, National MS Society Chief Research Officer, @tim_coetzee
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Like many serial inventors, mathematician Dimitri Kanevsky looks for solutions for problems that he faces in his own life. In his case, some of his biggest challenges are related to the fact that he has been deaf since age 3.
Dimitri Kanevsky demonstrates an Internet-based system for capturing real-time transcripts of teleconferences.
Kanevsky, a member of the speech and language algorithms department at IBM Research, has invented a long string of hearing- and speech-related technologies. They include a system for helping people improve the effectiveness of lip-reading, a method that enables deaf people to converse on the telephone and an Internet-based system for capturing real-time transcripts of phone conferences. “I like to solve challenging problems, and I get a thrill from creating novel math concepts and making discoveries,” he says.
Today, Kanevsky will get another kind of thrill–when he’s honored with a Champion of Change award at the White House. The award recognizes individuals who make a positive impact on science, technology, engineering and math for people with disabilities. Here’s a livestream video link for the event.
While Kanevsky has a long record of achievements as an inventor, including 152 US patents, it’s clear from talking to him that some of his most important inventions may come in the future.
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Editor’s note: Please join a Tweet chat featuring Dr. Murali Ramanathan and other healthcare and data analytics experts May 10 from noon to 1 p.m. Eastern Time at #IBMdatachat.
Multiple sclerosis is a cruel disease. It typically strikes young adults. The body’s own immune system attacks the brain and spinal cord, resulting in physical disabilities, cognitive problems and a host of other chronic symptoms. The cause isn’t known. There is no cure.
Fortunately, the amount of biomedical and clinical data related to MS has exploded over the past decade, and, at the same time, new research methods make it possible to assess environmental factors and hundreds of thousands of genetic variations taken from single samples.
Researchers at The State University of New York at Buffalo are using a new approach to computing in an attempt to identify the causes and promising therapies. “The eventual goal is to help develop a cure or prevention for MS,” says Dr. Murali Ramanathan, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences and neurology at SUNY Buffalo. “The ability to do this kind of computational analysis is a great complement to basic science and clinical research.”
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by Yuchun Lee, Vice President and General Manager, IBM Enterprise Marketing Management Group
Chief marketing officers (CMO) are under the gun. Exhibit A: Customers are more empowered and fueling an era where smartphones and tablets have replaced PCs. Exhibit B: Social networks have usurped ads and Sunday fliers as the resource for brand information. Exhibit C: Consumers are learning about brands quickly, forming opinions even faster and reacting before you’ve even finished your morning coffee. For CMOs, even the smallest blind spot or misstep could spark a behavioral change capable of fracturing the customer relationship.
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Banks are practically drowning in data, but most haven’t figured out how to manage it and derive insights about their businesses and their customers. That was the primary takeaway from today’s Forbes magazine panel, The Power of Advanced Analytics for Smarter Banking. For quotes and context, visit #ForbesAnalytics on Twitter. IBMers Boxley Llewellyn and Duke Chang were on the panel. Here’s Boxley talking about the opportunity for banks:
