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Steve Hamm in
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.
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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.
This week IBM will receive the World Environment Center’s Gold Medal Award, so 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). From John Seaver:
A recent report by the Metropolitan Infrastructure Initiative at the Brookings Institute, called Transit Access and Zero Vehicle Households, revealed several striking statistics about Detroit transit. Of the 136,000 households without cars in the Detroit metro area, 85% have access to transit, but only 26% of jobs are accessible to these households within 90 minutes via that same transit.
It seems impossible to think that there is no connection between the challenges the city faces and the poor mobility of its population. This personally interests me because I am attending graduate school in Southeast Michigan. It is also important to me because I care about creating a sustainable future. And sustainability means more than protecting the environment; it also means protecting and enhancing people’s lives. Imagine the potential to create economic value by simply connecting labor with jobs through smarter public transportation.
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Steve Hamm in
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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Chris Luongo in
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.
This week IBM will receive the World Environment Center’s Gold Medal Award, so 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). From Berry Kennedy:
Corporate sustainability strategies are common practice in today’s corporate America, going far beyond a company’s environmental footprint, to becoming a central part of company strategy. Sustainability challenges companies to think about themselves as part of an integrated social and natural network. This type of “systems thinking” drives the emergence of new ways of business thinking.
Systems thinking includes an array of techniques that consider process, product or strategy within a larger context. Two of the more familiar concepts linked with systems thinking are industrial ecology and life cycle analysis. But a third concept — ecosystem services – is the next big challenge, requiring that companies consider how nature’s interacting pathways lead directly back to business success.
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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.
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by Ken Bisconti, ECM VP of Products and Strategy
There’s valuable content in those emails, documents, correspondents, statements, videos and blogs. The key is to find it, make it accessible, and share it.
By rethinking the strategic role of content, businesses can harness all this data, better connect people to key information, and analyze content to make better business decisions and reduce risk. Why the need? There are three key shifts today driving the need for a “strategic” view of content management.
This week IBM will receive the World Environment Center’s Gold Medal Award, so 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). Kicking off the four-part series is a post by recent graduate Nate Springer:
The most sophisticated management system in the world was developed in a laboratory of iron, oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon surrounded by a thin layer of ozone. This system, what we call the planet’s ecosystems, costlessly manages biological functions that allow us to enjoy life. We are just now beginning to understand and manage these complex systems.
Ecosystems can be thought of as vast data management systems that provide services to sustain all life on earth. The information equivalent of terabytes of energy, mass, volume, pressure and other data flows within ecosystems every minute. “Ecosystem services” are the benefits that humans derive from these natural processes and include food, fuel, climate regulation, clean water, and even recreation.
But today, the rapid rate of change we are imposing on the global environment forces us to ask an important question: can we really assume the full cost and management for Earth’s life-support systems?
