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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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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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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:
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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 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.
