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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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If you can’t measure progress you can’t make progress. That’s one of the truisms of the human condition. Since the early days of computing, in the 1940s and 50s, computer scientists have searched for ways to measure their achievements. And, often, for all the obvious reasons, they have matched up their machines and software against humans in intellectually rigorous games.
IBM has used the human-versus-machine trope repeatedly over the years to motivate our scientists, focus our research and excite the imagination of the computer-savvy public. It’s one of the ways we take on what we call the “grand challenges”of computing.
Most recently, of course, the TV quiz show Jeopardy! provided the venue for mano-a-maquina combat. IBM’s Watson caused a sensation by beating two past grand-champions. Fifteen years ago, chess was the battlefield. On May 11, 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue became the first computer to defeat a reigning world chess champion in a regulation match. The achievement shocked many people—and showed just how capable computers were becoming.
Murray Campbell, one of three IBM researchers who made up the core of the Deep Blue project, explains why games are so compelling for computer scientists : “If you try to tackle something like general intelligence, you’ll die out of the blocks. It’s too much. But, with games, you focus on one specific problem. You have a chance to make progress and produce something of value that can be used as a component of something bigger.”
Computing pioneer Alan Turing got this whole game thing rolling in 1950 when he published a paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, which begins with an immodest proposal: “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’”At the time, computers were in their infancy. They were good at calculating, but not much else. In his paper, he mused about creating a written exercise where people would correspond with a computer—and scientists would see if the humans realized that they were interacting with a computer.
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By Andras Szakal
IBM US Federal CTO
A smarter government is more agile, more able to effectively respond to changing government needs and citizen dynamics. One of the best ways to improve the way our government works – both its operational efficiency as well as the services it provides to citizens – is through cloud computing.
Yesterday I participated in the Congressional High-Tech Caucus Cloud Task Force’s “Cloud Computing: A Primer” in Washington, DC as part of an industry panel which tackled issues critical to cloud utilization. The event was designed to help our legislators understand how to optimize IT and lower costs, reducing government waste. I was excited to be able to take this message to Congress, and appreciated the opportunity to join Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) and Rep. Doris Matsui (D-CA), co-chairs of the High Tech Caucus.
As citizens, there is a lot of reason to be excited about the promise of cloud computing to help our government operate more efficiently. We like to feel that our tax dollars are hard at work, and that maximum value is being squeezed out of every penny. Rapidly evolving advancements in cloud technologies in such areas as resource pooling, virtualization and operational automation must be considered to help transform and consolidate government data centers to ensure more effective use of resources and lower operational costs.
by Ioannis (Yannis) N. Miaoulis, president and director of the Museum of Science, Boston
I am delighted that IBM recently launched Minds of Modern Mathematics, the free iPad app that recreates the remarkable 50-foot infographic on the history of math designed by Charles and Ray Eames.
IBM collaborated with the Eameses to develop the richly illustrated timeline for Mathematica: A World of Numbers…and Beyond, an exhibit that opened at the California Museum of Science and Industry (now the California Science Center) in Los Angeles in 1961. Replicas later traveled to the New York World’s Fair and beyond.
Mathematica’s interactive models illustrating basic math concepts have intrigued visitors at the Museum of Science, Boston since 1981. Children like playing with the Celestial Mechanics machine, releasing steel balls into orbits like those of planets around the sun, while a 12-foot-high Probability Board captivates adults, as it sends plastic balls clattering through a maze of steel pins to form a bell-shaped probability curve. Here is our exhibit:
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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.
By Wayne Balta
IBM Vice-President for Corporate Environmental Affairs
Ever since then-CEO Thomas J. Watson Jr. made environmental stewardship a company-wide priority in 1971, IBM has been in the vanguard among corporations when it comes to protecting the natural environment. And, with more than 425,000 employees in 170 countries, we can move the needle on sustainability.
But in addition to large companies like IBM, the world’s millions of small and medium-size businesses can also collectively accomplish quite a bit. More than 99% of all businesses fall within the SME category—which is typically defined as organizations with fewer than 500 employees. So, based on sheer scale alone, the world’s SMEs are not only the primary source of innovation and economic growth; they’re also the key to saving the planet.
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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.”
Tonight IBM will receive the World Environment Center’s Gold Medal, so this week we asked students at the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise to share their views on sustainability (we’ve included a video to show what IBM is doing to make the world smarter). Here’s the final post in the series, from Lawrence Han:
People complain that my generation’s “addiction” to technology will lead us down the path of unsustainability. I think they are wrong. While it is true that my generation, Gen Y (those born after 1980) is the quickest demographic to adopt new computing trends, the advances that we are adopting—mobile, cloud, big data—are intrinsically greener. So, as white-collar Baby Boomers step away from their life in front of a computer, and the new wave of Gen Y workers step forward to take their place, the computing landscape will move to a more energy efficient and sustainable future.
Consider that a decade ago, Baby Boomer households joined the Internet Revolution by purchasing hulking desktop computers. But over the past decade we have seen a shift with laptops overtaking the personal computing market. And that means less energy use—a typical laptop uses 45 watts while your typical energy guzzling desktop computer uses a whopping 100 to 300 watts of electricity.
