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Drug counterfeiting is a significant public health threat in Africa and other developing countries. This is a big problem for drug companies — and an even bigger problem for patients, whose lives may depend on these medications.
But technology can be a powerful asset in the fight against counterfeiting. And the good news is Sproxil and IBM are showing the way.
Click on the image below to open the slideshow version.
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By Ashifi Gogo
CEO, Sproxil
In the U.S., large scale drug counterfeiting is rare, but in some parts of the world, particularly in developing nations, it’s rampant. This makes fighting treatable diseases like malaria – which kills a million people every year — extremely difficult. According to the World Health Organization, about 200,000 of the world’s malaria deaths alone can be linked to ineffective treatment resulting from counterfeit anti-malarials.
Pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors globally are now experimenting with ways to combat counterfeiting by creating a smarter pharmaceutical supply. My company, Sproxil, provides a cloud-based service called Mobile Product Authentication™ (MPA) that allows consumers to use their mobile phones to determine if their medicine is genuine, at point of purchase, in a matter of seconds. Each package using the MPA service bears a label with a unique PIN as well as a text number. At the point of purchase, the consumer scratches the label to reveal the PIN code, then sends it to our authentication service via a free text message. Within seconds, a reply is sent back indicating whether the drug is genuine or counterfeit.
I’m proud that in January we reached a milestone within regions of Africa where consumers have used MPA technology one million times to verify their medication.
Rugby is one of the world’s toughest sports. Large men wearing little or no protective gear collide with each other at full speed. They leap. They scramble. They mash together in scrums. So it’s no wonder that rugby’s injury rates are nearly three times higher than soccer’s.
Credit: Leicester Football Club
In professional rugby, one of the essentials for achieving a winning record is reducing the injury rate. That’s why the Leicester Tigers, the most successful professional rugby team in the United Kingdom, recently adopted predictive analytics software aimed at proactively reducing injuries. The goal is to avoid the physical and mental fatigue that sets players up for some of the most common rugby injuries, which include muscle and ligament tears and joint dislocations.
“Our data suggests that if we have a fully fit squad, we’ll rival any team in Europe. If we have a lot of injuries, we’ll have trouble competing with the best,” says Andy Shelton, Head of Sport Science. In spite of having three key players out with injuries right now, the Tigers are in second place in the premier division in the final weeks of the season.
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Editor’s note: To celebrate the history of math and its impact on the world, IBM has released Minds of Modern Mathematics, a free iPad app that re-imagines a classic 50-foot infographic on the history of math created by the design team of Charles and Ray Eames and displayed at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City. Janet Perna, a retired IBM executive and one-time math teacher, has strong feelings about the importance of math education–starting in elementary school. Join the conversation on Twitter: #math #Eames
By Janet Perna
former General Manager, IBM Information Management
When I was a young math teacher fresh out of college in my hometown of Middletown, New York, I tried to make math entertaining and practical for my students. I’d have them learn basic arithmetic by doing things like making change and dividing a sheet cake into equal servings. They learned the basics of geometry by imagining that they were tiling the classroom floor. These exercises made math seem useful especially for those children who were not destined for college, but would become the backbone of the community taking on blue collar jobs in Middletown.
Unfortunately, then and now, most children are turned off to math by the time they enter junior high school. I have found that many elementary school teachers with whom I have spoken are intimidated by math, and aren’t confident enough to make it interesting and useful to their students. If teachers are afraid, the students will fear math, too. That’s why I believe that we need new programs to strengthen math skills and creativity in our university teacher education programs, and, even more broadly, in liberal arts curricula.
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by Martin Kelly, Partner, IBM Venture Capital Group
We’re pleased to announce the line-up for IBM SmartCamp 2012. This is our program for helping entrepreneurs who are developing products and services that make the world work better. Entrepreneurs who participate gain access to mentors who understand their industry and can help them develop their businesses. Also, networking and publicity can lead to venture funding.
We plan more than 17 SmartCamp events worldwide this year. The schedule starts in Miami on May 15th, with a new format focused on healthcare. Over the last two years we have seen growing interest in certain topics and believe the timing is right to have dedicated events. These one- and two-day events will bring together entrepreneurs, mentors and investors in particular industries allowing a more focused discussion. We will follow Miami up with New York on May 24th with a focus on Smart Cities. The New York event was planned to coincide with TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, to allow mentors and companies to make the most of the community.
For more information and to apply, you can get started here.
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By Cliff Pickover, IBM Master Inventor
and author of The Math Book, awarded the 2011 Neumann Prize
I just returned from the biennial “Gathering 4 Gardner” meeting that honors the achievements of Martin Gardner (1914-2010), the American mathematics and science writer. The conference promotes new and accessible ideas in recreational mathematics, mathematical art, magic, puzzles, and philosophy.
The conference had special meaning to me. My own interest in science, math, and science-fiction writing started in high school, after receiving a copy of Gardner’s The Unexpected Hanging and Other Mathematical Diversions, an early collection of some of his columns from Scientific American. The book’s tales of the fourth dimension, and matchbox computers for playing tic-tac-toe, energized my imagination.
Today, I work at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. For decades, I have been intrigued by a huge poster by American designers Charles and Ray Eames, adjacent to our Watson library, which features a chronological view of mathematics through the biography of great mathematicians. Gauss, Euler, Napier, Hilbert, and more!
One could stare at the poster for hours and never be bored with its intricate details. To mark the impact of math on the world, IBM has created an iPad app based on this poster, Minds of Modern Mathematics, which you can download here.
By Michael Haydock
IBM Global Business Services
Chief Scientist
This week we released the global IBM 2Q Retail Forecast, which found that home furnishing sales are going to receive a boost over the next three months— a healthy 8 percent increase for in-store sales and 28.44 percent for online sales. Combined, we expect to see a 16.6 percent increase in home furnishing sales in the months of April, May and June. This is good news for the retail industry.
There were a number of factors that contributed to this uptick – including an increase of rental activity, the rise of disposable incomes, and a trend toward “accessorization.” Perhaps the most interesting driver of future home furnishings sales– was discovered within a hidden correlation to the Chinese Year of the Dragon.
During the auspicious “Year of the Dragon” which falls once every 12 years, tens of thousands of people around the world plan their marriages and births to get an extra dose of luck and good fortune.
We decided to test our hypothesis against our in-store sales data. Did the home furnishing sales actually spike during the last Year of the Dragon, in the year 2000?
The answer is yes. Interestingly, home furnishings sales in the year 2000 ranked the third-highest out of a period of 22 years.
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Harry Reynolds
IBM Director Health Industry Transformation
What if your physician knew you as well as a personal shopper? Or how about if your health insurance provider could suggest the most advantageous plan the way your cell phone carrier recommends the latest family plan?
While the tongue depressor hasn’t changed in years, new influences such as social media, the mobile revolution and higher expectations from consumers are forcing healthcare organizations to rethink the way they deal with patients.
We are entering the age of the empowered health consumer. Consider that 50 million consumers will enter the individual and exchange insurance market by 2017. Additionally, a 40 percent decline in group health care coverage is expected by 2017. Meanwhile, annual private healthcare spending will increase by $430 billion by 2015.
Consumers now have unprecedented access to information about medicine and health care. As a result they’re becoming more demanding and better informed about the care they receive. Combine this new reality with the transition going on in healthcare and the industry will certainly face looking at patients and their health differently. Many organizations are even rethinking their business models.
This week during the World Health Care Congress in Washington, D.C., we’re discussing this new reality and the need for healthcare to be more consumer focused. Together we’ll explore what it will take to enable healthcare providers and insurance companies to connect and collaborate with patients better.
Taking a page from the retail industry playbook, can these types of organizations apply the retail mentality to better understand and influence consumer behavior through vast amounts of data? In all of this, analytics is key. Understanding the individual and providing a more personalized view of the patient will help organizations compete in a new era of healthcare transformation. This kind of insight can be used to keep patients healthier.
We are barreling through unprecedented change in the healthcare industry. Everything is changing with new competitors, new opportunities and new challenges. One thing is clear, better information just might enable better care.
View a Slideshare of Harry Reynolds’ presentation at World Health Care Congress.
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By Michael D. King
Vice President, IBM Global Education
Education is the foundation of any country’s future. It provides a path to good jobs and higher earning power. It can also foster the cross-border, cross-cultural collaboration required to solve the most challenging problems of our time.
One hundred years after the U.S. education system first expanded and transformed to prepare children for a booming industrial economy, a new kind of economy based on services and knowledge-based systems is changing the education landscape again. If we want our children to achieve their potential — and realize the potential of a smarter planet — then school itself needs to get a lot smarter.
IBM has a long legacy in working to improve our school systems. In the mid-90s, then-CEO Lou Gerstner hosted the first of three National Education Summits as part of the company’s Reinventing Education program, which focused on public school reform. Two decades later, IBM is at the forefront of developing the deep analytics technologies that are poised to radically transform the way we approach education and the insight we have into each and every student.
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Dr. William R. LaFontaine
Vice President, Technical Strategy
IBM Research
Coming from IBM Research, I think of innovation in two dimensions. First, there is the continuous innovation that goes into IBM’s products and services. This innovation provides important advances to current technology as well as helps IBM introduce breakthrough products. The benefits of this approach are clear in IBM’s next-generation computing platform PureSystems.
But we also look for more exploratory challenges that help us advance science by leaps and bounds. We call them grand challenges. Meeting them requires a very different set of practices and capabilities – and presents some interesting problems.
And that was the topic today as the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in Washington, DC hosted a forum with the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, IBM and Qualcomm to discuss how we can meet the next Grand Challenges.
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