China is fast emerging as a pioneer of data-centric healthcare. IBM’s collaboration with Guangdong Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, featured in this video, was one of the examples called out in a piece in today’s Wall Street Journal about advances in healthcare in China. The Guangdong solution is being designed to help doctors identify treatment plans combining Western and traditional Chinese medicine from statistics drawn from patient records. IBM’s Healthcare Solutions Lab, which is working with Guangdong Hospital, is one of 12 finalists in the newspaper’s annual Asian Innovation Awards contest.
But Guangdong isn’t the only place where IBM is pushing the technology envelope in Chinese healthcare. IBM Research is working with Peking University People’s Hospital to build an evidence-based patient care system that will consolidate patient records and make it easier for clinicians to discover and share best practices in diagnosis and treatment. It’s one of those First-of-a-Kind projects that Research engages in with clients. The hospital expects to roll out the system to selected hospital and community clinics starting early next year.
Salmonella, Source: NIH
The world’s research universities are crucibles of innovation, yet universities face significant challenges when it comes to shepherding their research breakthroughs into the marketplace. It’s a painstaking process–akin to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. Until now, that is. By harnessing the power of Big Data, North Carolina State University and IBM have collaborated to create a highly automated system for matching university-invented technologies to potential business opportunities.
Here’s how it works: NC State officials identify promising inventions that are contained in their research database. Then they launch a search of the Web for pages containing pertinent information–clues that could lead the university to companies that might be interested in licensing its technology and taking it to market. The program uses a handful of sophisticated IBM software tools that were created to handle so-called Big Data challenges–data sets with millions of pieces of information drawn from multiple sources. BigSheets, a specialized search engine, makes it possible to get insights from very large data sets easily and quickly. IBM Cognos Content Analytics focuses on unstructured data, the kind that isn’t stored in formal data bases. And IBM LanguageWare is a text analytics tool that understands the context around words, and is capable of decoding scientific jargon.
The university ran a couple of pilot projects to test the system. One involved new strains of Salmonella that faculty researchers are developing for use in vaccines. It took less than one week to search 1.4 million Web sites, including blogs, social networks, and sites containing scientific papers, and come up with a short list of potential business partners. Using manual search methods, the investigation would likely have taken months–and might not have uncovered some promising leads. “The kind of searches we do are very difficult to to replicate with people,” says Chris Spencer, an emerging technologies strategist in IBM Software Group.
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Back in the dot-com era, Netscape co-founder Jim Clark, frustrated with the fact that his medical records were scattered all over the place, started a company called Healtheon to address the problem. It was a great idea, but premature. Now, more than a decade later, the US government the healthcare industry seem determined at last to bring the full benefits of digitization and connectivity to healthcare in the US. At the same time, the maturation of cloud computing makes it possible to pull together an individual’s health information from a wide variety of sources and place it at the finger tips of healthcare providers.
That’s the backdrop for a significant new service announcement today by IBM and ActiveHealth Management, a subsidiary of Aetna. Collaborative Care, a new cloud service, gives physicians and patients access to the information they need to improve the quality of care without requiring healthcare organizations to invest in owning new technology. Using Collaborative Care, hospitals and physicians can access, share, and analyze a wide range of clinical and administrative information; automate the measurement and reporting of treatment outcomes; and improve patient care by using Aetna’s decision-support system. In addition, patients can be more actively involved in their care through a Web portal. “This partnership puts in place a new model that can drastically improve the way care is delivered,” says Robert Merkel, vice president and healthcare industry leader, IBM Global Business Services.
Think of the service as a virtual healthcare system located in the computing cloud.
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IBM briefed a dozen top tech bloggers on our Smarter Planet strategy today at headquarters in Armonk, New York. Mike Rhodin, senior vice-president, IBM Software Solutions Group, explains here how we’re leveraging decades of corporate IT experience to add intelligence to the world’s physical infrastructure.
Some of the initial blog postings from the event: From Larry Dignan of ZDNet, here and here; from Mike Vizard of ITBusinessEdge, here; from Alex Williams of ReadWrite Enterprise, here; and from Salvatore Salamone of Ziff Davis Enterprise’s SmarterTechnology blog, here.
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Just a quick editor’s note before the close of the day. Tomorrow is an exciting day for us here at IBM CHQ as we’ll be hosting a great group of business and technology bloggers in Armonk, NY for a number of focused discussions around Smarter Planet and the role analytics plays in realizing that vision.
A few of the highlights of the day include:
- * conversations with Fred Balboni and Rod Smith about analytics and emerging technologies;
- * an analytics roundtable discussion with venture capitalist Evangelos Simoudis, the New York Tax department and the Beacon Institute (using analytics to predict water conditions of the Hudson River);
- * and a road trip to our research lab in Yorktown Heights to to test out Watson, the question and answer computing system being developed to compete on Jeopardy!
Sadly, the world can’t join us in person tomorrow, (if we only had large enough conference rooms) but we’ll do our best to share insights via @smarterplanet on Twitter. You can also follow along other participants’ perspectives using the #smarterplanet hashtag. Our own Steve Hamm will provide a more lengthy recap of the day here on the Smarter Planet blog tomorrow afternoon. Finally, we’ll also do our best to share links to the recaps from the other participants’ posts as they come in. Stay tuned.
California fruit grower Sun World International isn’t among the giants of agribusiness, but it punches above its weight class in global markets thanks in part to its use of business intelligence software. In fact, the Bakersfield, California-based company is one of the most pervasive users of data analytics that we’re aware of–in everything from farm operations and finance to sales and marketing. It’s also got an executive dashboard for tracking key performance metrics. “The notion of pervasive performance management is held up as an ideal, but there are few companies that actually do it. This is one of them,” says Tony Levy, a product marketing director in IBM’s Cognos business unit. Sun World International’s main suppliers of business intelligence software are IBM and Applied Analytix.
The company’s heavy reliance on data began five years ago after it was purchased by a private equity firm that brought in new management and insisted on improved performance. “These days, we ask questions, understand the numbers, and, most importantly, do something,” says Gordon Robertson, vice-president of sales and marketing.
From its 12,000 acres of land in California, Sun World International sells table grapes, stone fruit, peppers, and water melons worldwide. It also breeds its own varieties of plants and licenses its genetic intellectual property to other growers. Its brands including Superior Seedless grapes, Black Diamond plums, and Honeycot apricots. It employs about 7,000 people in the fields.
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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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Editor’s Note: Following is an essay co-authored by Bob Sutor, vice president of open source and Linux for IBM, and Jean Staten Healy, director of cross-IBM Linux strategy for IBM. It describes the central place Linux plays in building a smarter planet, and builds on a presentation about the role of Linux in Smarter Systems, which the two IBM executives gave at the recent Red Hat Summit.
What do you think about when you read or hear the word “smart” when it is applied to computers? How about a supercomputer? If any machine is smart, a supercomputer is, right?. According to a study released by the University of California at Berkeley in May, 2010, 470 of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world run Linux, the open source operating system. That’s 91%. Evidently the people who decided to use Linux for these computers were pretty smart too.
As we think about all the ways where we can work together to create a Smarter Planet, Linux has a very natural role. First, Linux runs on more kinds of hardware than any other operating system. So if we are talking about tying together disparate systems to deliver better, more accurate, and more predictive health care, Linux can power the hardware and software to maintain the information repositories, do the data mining, and perform the analytics. That is, Linux can help provide the intelligence we will need and expect in our complex and sophisticated 21st century systems.
Linux runs on the smallest devices all the way up to the fastest supercomputers, as noted above. Linux today powers smart phones, Netbooks, laptops, desktops, and servers in datacenters, but also home automation and many embedded systems. Linux will be at the heart of smart electrical grids that allow utilities to reduce waste, remotely manage and monitor use, and help reduce costs to consumers. Linux will increasingly be part of the instrumentation that provides the data we will use to tune and optimize not just our electrical grids, but also our water systems, supply chains, and factories, to name a few examples.
As the data is collected from the sensors, Linux can help ensure that it goes where it needs to go to do the most good. In order to reduce pollution, cars need to be inspected and kept off the roads until they are compliant with emission standards. Linux can power websites where citizens can pay fees and schedule inspection appointments in a low friction manner. Then once the inspections are complete, Linux systems can push the data to local and regional authorities, but also to repositories and software that measure not only compliance but perform data analysis. This will yield important information to further improve the system, and reduce pollution even more. Our systems need to be more interconnected, and Linux can help them be so.
Linux is global and supports many languages and locales. The tools needed to create a Smarter Planet must run in the heterogeneous environments that we have today. Linux is a big part of how we instrument, interconnect, and derive intelligence from the information around us. As we optimize the systems we have today and develop entirely new ones to solve problems in better ways, don’t be surprised to see Linux inside.
Dr. Robert S. Sutor: Vice President, Open Source and Linux, IBM Software Group
Jean Staten Healy: Director, Cross-IBM Linux Strategy, IBM Systems and Technology Group
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IBM isn’t the only organization that thinks cities could be a lot “smarter.” For six years, students and faculty members at MIT’s SENSEable City Lab have been investigating the potential for digital technologies to improve the experience of living in cities. They’ve completed dozens of projects around the world. The Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, a non-profit in San Francisco focused on the intersection of digital art and social progress, recently opened a show, senseable cities, highlighting 15 of the Lab’s projects. Very cool stuff.
The concept behind these projects is simple. Gather data about city life from a wide variety of sources, crunch it, and display it in visual forms–so it has maximum impact. One of the projects, Trash Track, uses cellular GPS tags attached to a variety of different kinds of refuse to follow its path from the dumpster to its ultimate resting place. Another, Copenhagen Wheel, captures traffic and pollution data gathered from bicycles. A third, Real Time Rome, uses mobile phone use patterns to show the movement of people after sporting events in the city.
I saw the show last week along with a handful of IBMers and creative agency colleagues. Our guide was Peter Hirshberg, a former Apple executive and serial entrepreneur who is on the foundation’s board of directors. He told us that bringing together data, analysis, and visualization “puts the science back in social science. You can begin acting on this stuff.”
One of the most empowering aspects of the projects is that citizens don’t just see their world mapped out in new ways, they participate in the mapping–which increases their commitment to making change happen in their communities.
The Gray Area gallery is located in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, the city’s longtime Red Light district–a gritty area with a high poverty rate and a lot of homeless people. In fact, the gallery is housed in a former porn video parlor, and still has the funky “Arts Theatres” marquee out front.
One of the foundation’s goals is to improve the neighborhood. In connection with the senseable cities show, it teamed with a local public television station (KQED) and other community organizations to sponsor an event called CITYCENTERED, a symposium, workshops, and neighborhood walk aimed at getting people engaged in the community. One piece, for example, Urban Remix, was a participatory media project that uses mobile phones as a platform for capturing the sounds and images of city neighborhoods–useful for documenting noise pollution and other obnoxious messes.
For people like me, who love cities but wish they were a bit more livable, this stuff is exciting. If you want to learn more or get involved, the show runs until Aug. 11 at the Gray Area gallery, 55 Taylor Street. But if you can’t see the show there, it will be traveling to San Jose and Amsterdam later this year and to New York, Tokyo, and other places next year.
Following is a guest post from David Miller, DePaul University.
In preparing for our launch of the new DePaul University Center for Data Mining and Predictive Analytics , I did a simple Google search and typed in the word, “data.” Thanks to Google’s suggestion capability, I didn’t even have to finish typing before the first suggestion popped up as “Data Mining.”
You see data mining is incredibly important, you don’t have to take my word for it. And, whether we like it or not, analytics is in our future.
This year alone, there will be 1,200 exabytes of data generated from sensors, electronic forms, audio and video clips, e-mail, blogs, social networks, web searches and financial transactions. Data is streaming at us, and from us, in all directions. Business and governments alike are grappling with the challenge of making sense of this data deluge to turn it into new opportunities, increased performance and faster, better decision-making.
The power of analytics is transforming this information into a strategic asset. Although, having the best, most complete and up-to-date information is useless if you can’t make sense of it. I’ve always said that data unanalyzed, is data wasted. Therefore, businesses and governments need two very important things to make this happen: the right technology and employees with the right expertise and skillsets.
To help organizations tackle these challenges and give the next-generation of knowledge-workers the competencies they need, DePaul University, in collaboration with IBM, has launched a new Center for Data Mining and Predictive Analytics, as well as a Masters in Predictive Analytics program. Opening in September 2010, this applied research center will train future leaders on data mining and predictive analytics, and meet increasing demands for experts who can apply this technology to problems such as traffic management, energy management, public health planning and city services.
The Center represents a central point of contact between industry and academia, preparing students for future jobs, enabling collaboration between researchers and spreading the gospel, so to speak, about the value and benefit of predictive analytics.
DePaul University is on the cutting-edge of creating a needed supply of incredibly intelligent professionals fluent in computational and analytical skills, with the business knowledge necessary to enhance business processes — from customer acquisition in a marketing department or fraud detection in an insurance company, among the myriad of business problems to solve.
Today’s young people who master this area will be in high demand. In fact, they already are. And, thanks to the participation from leading technology companies such as IBM which is donating resources in the form of guest lecturers, This collaboration is poised to give students a highly marketable skill and the rare opportunity to acquire real-world knowledge that should benefit them — and society — for years to come.
David Miller, Dean of College of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul University.
