A Smarter Planet Blog

When the C-Suite Embraces Cloud, Powerful New Lines of Engagement Follow

2013-06-18T20:33:42Z

Marc Dietz, Director, IBM SmartCloud Solutions

By Marc Dietz

Traditionally relegated to back office IT managers reporting to the CIO, enterprise technology decisions are often made by a small subset of employees – generally not by executives closest to the business.

But cloud computing is changing all that.

Executives across the C-Suite are recognizing that they must reorient their businesses to become more competitive in a digital economy. This comes with a deeper understanding of how mobile and social technologies are reshaping the way people consume, disseminate and share information, and how the data generated from these applications is helping businesses transform their organizations and personalize their interactions with customers. New technologies – such as cloud computing – hold a new promise to open up powerful new lines of engagement.

But what truly excites these executives about cloud?

It’s obviously not the usual IT-centric motivations: computing power, scalability, flexibility, CapEx cost cutting. And, frankly, Line-of-Business executives care about business outcomes; not whether or not it’s delivered in the cloud. But the C-Suite is, in fact, reaching for the cloud because they want to transform marketing, procurement, supplier management, human resources, legal – everything it takes to go to market and manage people, reach new customers, and grow their business. And they want those transformations more quickly.

Cloud can be a business accelerator. In fact, Gartner estimates that by 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs, and with the ways that cloud is transforming marketing, clearly a growing percentage of that spend will be on cloud solutions.

To meet this new and growing demand, IBM unveiled new cloud solutions this week designed for the C-suite to boost innovation and help them meet their business objectives. This builds on the news of IBM’s intention to acquire SoftLayer, as well as our recently announced support for OpenStack and DBMongo as essential open standards for cloud computing – all part of a major push to the cloud.

Among the newest cloud business offerings is a social media analytics solution that chief marketing officers (CMOs) can use to get an emotional reading on how customers are viewing their brand. This offering provides marketers with deeper insights to understand consumer sentiments in social media and then to refine products, service levels, and targeted offers accordingly. This technology allows companies to gain a view of consumer perception that is uniquely their own, not industry-wide or owned by a third-party.

For example, London-based Speedo, the world’s largest swimwear brand, is using cloud-based digital analytics to improve the shopping experience for its customers. The result? Cross-selling revenue increased by more than 10 percent in online sales, generating six times more revenue per average order.

Those results are dramatic, but not necessarily unique.

According to a global IBM survey, Chief Procurement Officers who invest in Big Data analytics are driving 22 percent higher profit margins. With 89 percent of consumers choosing to do business with a competitor due to a poor customer experience, sales and e-commerce executives are increasingly investing in digital analytics to better understand consumers.

Put simply, IT continues to make its way into the front office, and cloud is leading the way. For the C-suite, cloud isn’t about computing power. It’s about agility, innovation, and transformation; finding new business models and revenue streams and better serving customers and employees.

As business executives seize the transformational power of cloud computing, enterprise adoption will grow dramatically, further driving technology decisions into the boardroom.

Technorati Tags: C-Suite, CIO, cloud, cloud computing, CMO, IBM SmartCloud, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, smarter cloud computing

Cognitive Computing: A New Imperative for National Competitiveness

2013-06-18T18:07:55Z

By Steve Hamm

Steve Hamm, IBM Writer

In an event that some observers say marked a shift in the history of computing, China has for the second time placed a machine atop the list of the world’s highest-performing supercomputers. The MilkyWay-2 system was designed and developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology.

For a group of legislators and science and technology leaders gathered in Washington, D.C. today, the news of China’s triumph, which came on Monday, served as a wake up call about the importance of investing in national competitiveness. “American national security and competitiveness depends on the US not falling behind in this critical area of science and technology,” said Congressman Randy Hultgren (IL-14).

Hultgren was one of a group of Congressmen who are crafting the American Supercomputing Leadership Act, a bill aimed at funding research in high performance computing at the national laboratories. Yet it was clear from remarks made by a scientists and government officials at the event, “Cognitive Computing: A New Way of Thinking,” that for the United States to retain its leadership in computing a collaborative effort involving not just government but academia and industry will be required. Eric Isaacs, director of the Argonne National Laboratory, cautioned that science and research “should not be funded in stovepipes.” He called for the creation of co-design centers, where people from multiple government agencies, universities and private companies can work together on the most challenging problems facing humanity.

To read more about the era of cognitive computing, download a free chapter of the coming book Smart Machines, by IBM Research Director John Kelly, at http://www.cup.columbia.edu/static/cognitive

IBM is one of the leading developers of cognitive computing technologies—starting with the Watson machine that beat two past grand-champions at the TV quiz show Jeopardy. Today, the company is busy bringing cognitive technologies to numerous industries, starting with health care. In each area, the company is forging alliances with other organizations. David McQueeney, a vice president at IBM Research, highlighted a couple of them: Smarter Energy Research Institute, aimed at creating the advanced energy utility of the future using wind and weather simulation; and the Sun Shot Initiative, aimed at using analytics to manage integration of solar energy into power grids. “The investments by the federal government are key to advances in cognitive computing,” he said.

One of the most important examples of how different types of institutions and scientific disciplines will have to work together is in the area where neuroscience and computer science overlap. The Obama administration has announced a goal of using supercomputing technology to map the human brain to help figure out how it works; a similar exploration is already underway in the European Union. “The breakthroughs will come at the intersections of the fields,” predicted James Olds, director of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University. Olds urged government leaders and scientists to be bold and be willing to take risks. “If we want to succeed, we have to be willing to occasionally fail,” he said.

While investing in education wasn’t on the official agenda at the cognitive computing event, it was recurring theme. Selmer Bringsford, chairman of the Department of Cognitive Science at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, advised people in the room to urge their children to study computer science and cognition. “Machines won’t design themselves and build themselves and makes themselves smarter. People will do that,” he said.

New Study Reveals Mobile Leaders’ Best Practices

2013-06-17T17:57:16Z

Christopher G. Pepin, Mobile Enterprise Services Executive, IBM MobileFirst

By Christopher G. Pepin

Using a mobile device is easy. Building a mobile enterprise that supports and secures hundreds, if not thousands of mobile devices, in your location and around the world, with limited staff and an increasing number of unauthorized equipment, is not.

To uncover what it takes to have a successful IT strategy on the mobile front, IBM and IDC have collaborated on a newly-published study, “Putting mobile first: best practices of mobile technology leaders.” The study is based on interviews with 361 IT executives in seven countries around the world and focuses on the adoption and benefits of mobile technologies in the enterprise. What exactly are mobile leaders doing to embrace mobile in the enterprise? Simply put, they’re planning, integrating, optimizing and managing their mobile infrastructures.

According to the study, mobile leaders are taking a strategic approach to planning mobile development and strategies, integrating mobile across the enterprise including monetization, optimizing mobile information technology infrastructure, and finally, managing mobile security.

While most enterprises are struggling to define a mobile security policy, implement BYOD programs, move beyond e-mail and embrace mobile applications, today’s mobile leaders are doing all that and more to integrate mobile into the fabric of their business

Because mobile is a disruptive and evolving technology many enterprises are also challenged by the growing mobile skills gap. But rather than hire all the mobile experts they need, today’s mobile leaders are engaging external information technology far more often than non-leaders. In the IBM/IDC Study, 86 percent of respondents indicated that an external provider can help them better address the skills gap and achieve their mobility goals as well as undertake additional mobile projects.

Becoming a mobile enterprise begins with a strategy and includes policy, education and technology. Understanding the current state of mobility, the desired end goal and the gaps are critically important to developing and executing a roadmap.

Many enterprises simply “don’t know what they don’t know” especially with mobile. Engaging an experienced professional that can articulate “the art of the possible” and draw on the experience of developing mobile solutions for similar clients worldwide, can not only speed up time to market and reduce costs, but build a sustainable IT strategy for a dynamic mobile environment moving forward.

Technorati Tags: IBM Smarter Planet, IDC, innovation, mobile computing, mobile enterprise, mobile infrastructure, smarter mobile computing

How Smarter Care Can Lead to Early Intervention

2013-06-17T18:55:04Z

John Hearne, Head of IBM Cúram Solutions, IBM Software Group

By John Hearne

I recently read a story about an elderly woman with a heart condition. She lives in a building without air conditioning and there was concern that a hot and humid day in July could easily put her health at risk and possibly lead to a costly ER visit.

As the story pointed out, the reality is that a few hundred dollars for an air conditioner could solve the problem before it ever happened.

Of course, to case workers at social services agencies around the world, the difficulty of identifying interventions before situations become critical is not news.

In a perfect system, an individual’s health needs would be understood not only medically, but also in the context of their lifestyle, living environment, family conditions and other social factors. Making this information readily available to health and case workers would help them spend more time in the field where they are needed the most.

IBM, through its Smarter Care initiative, enables care providers – from healthcare and life sciences organizations to social service agencies and pharmacies – to integrate into a single view the potential impacts of social determinants, lifestyle choices and clinical factors on a person’s well-being. They can then uncover insights using predictive, content and cognitive analytics. The end result: reduced hospital re-admissions, improved wellness for the individual and lower costs.

According to the Institute for Alternative Futures, social and environmental factors may contribute as much as 40 percent of the variance in health between populations. This means one group may be at a greater risk for heart problems or asthma due to climate conditions, for example.

As hundreds of social programs directors, city welfare leaders and mayors gather in Dublin next week at the European Social Services Conference, IBM will lead a dialogue around the importance of social investment. It will also discuss ways to bring about change in the way services are designed, delivered and evaluated.

At the forefront will be a discussion about RightServicing, an approach that focuses on how to best manage stressed resources and effectively deliver services to those citizens who need it most, when they need it.

Creating an environment around Smarter Care is about identifying an individual’s strengths and needs across all dimensions of care – clinical, social and behavioral.

With this knowledge, health and case workers can bring a wider range of services to address health risks, both medical and otherwise; including access to proper housing and education, supplementary income, proper nutrition and access to transportation.

Technorati Tags: Smarter Cities

MIT’s Thomas Malone on Collective Intelligence

2013-06-14T14:13:55Z

Thomas Malone, Prof. MIT

Thomas Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, is one of the leading thinkers in the realm of anticipating how new technologies will transform the way work is done and leaders lead. His 2004 book, The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life, helped thousands of executives and would-be executives see their organizations, and themselves, in startling new ways. As a result, many organizations are becoming more collaborative and democratic. Now, Malone is exploring how social business, data analytics and cognitive computing will transform organizations once again. Here, he talks about the revolution that is coming.

IBM: In your book The Future of Work, you talked about society being on the verge of a new world of work, a key element of which is decentralization of the organization. Since then, the social networking phenomenon has emerged and is sweeping not just popular culture but business organizations as well. How has this explosion of social networking affected your thinking?

Malone: Social networking is a good example of the kind of thing I was talking about in my book when I talked about how the cost of communication was decreasing. At the time I wrote the book, people were looking at e-mail and the Web. But since the book was written, there are these new ways of communicating electronically–Twitter, Facebook, et cetera. I think those are all excellent examples of the same underlying phenomena.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As information technology reduces the cost of communication, it becomes much easier for lots more people to know lots more things and in many cases they’re able to be well enough informed to make more decisions for themselves instead of just following orders from somebody above them in a hierarchy.

Today, the vast majority of the kinds of computing that are useful to us are various forms of helping us to connect with other people. In the case of email or Facebook or Twitter, that’s more or less a direct communication. In the case of something like Google, the computational intelligence is helping to find the other people or more precisely, the information other people have created. The computing itself is still primarily as a way of connecting us to other people or things they have produced.

We’re still in the fairly early stages, but in the future computers will increasingly be able to help take actions on our behalf, not just give us information. It’s certainly possible in principle and becoming more possible in practice to have computational intelligence–to do things like what intelligent humans would do or in some cases even things that humans couldn’t do.

IBM’s Watson is the poster child now for this other way of using information technology. This new technology hasn’t yet had a profound influence in our economy and our society, but there are very intriguing possibilities for how the computational use of computing will become more important.

IBM: In The Future of Work, one of your key concepts was decentralization of organizations. Now you’re using a different term, collective intelligence, and it looks like there’s been an evolution in your thinking.

Malone: After I finished The Future of Work and spent about two years talking about it, I decided to think about what’s coming next—what’s around the corner that we don’t see clearly yet. I became convinced that the perspective of collective intelligence was a very useful way of thinking about that. We’re no longer thinking about today’s organizations and how they’re going to change. Instead, we’re talking about the goal of having intelligent organizations and thinking about how that can occur in new ways with these new technologies. One of our core research questions at our MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is, “How can people and computers be connected so that collectively they act more intelligently than any person, group or computer has ever done before?” It’s a very provocative question that leads us in new directions—pointing to very different organizations than we have today.

IBM: You’re saying it’s not man-versus-machine, but man working together with the machine.

Malone: Exactly right. I think man-versus-machine is in some ways the traditional way of looking at this question, but I think where we’re really headed towards man-plus-machine. In fact, just a couple of days ago, I came across a quote from J.C.R. Licklider, the computing pioneer, from 1960. He said, “In not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly,” and “the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.” So the combination of people and computers will be able to think in a way that neither people nor computers have ever done before. I think that’s the really exciting potential and opportunity for us ahead.

IBM: What are the opportunities and challenges that this shift creates for top managers?

Malone: I think new information technologies give us opportunities to organize work in new ways, and to create new types of organizations. And I think some of the most important things that top managers can do is figure out how to take advantage of that.

In the traditional industrial organizations, one of the most important ways of measuring the effectiveness of an organization was in terms of its productivity. How much output did you produce for a given amount of input? In our fast-changing world where innovation and adaptation are more and more the critical success factors, another increasingly important measure of the effectiveness of an organization is not just how productive it is but how intelligent it is. Intelligent organizations will be better able to adapt rapidly to changes in their environment, better able to innovatively take advantage of new possibilities, better able to be flexible and sense and respond to the world and not just do more efficiently what worked yesterday.

For managers, one of the important challenges is going to be dealing with power. These shifts that are coming will in many cases diminish the traditional kinds of power for top managers. That goes back to one of the key messages of The Future of Work. In many parts of our economy, the best way to be economically successful is to give a lot more power to a lot more people throughout the organization. That means top managers will have less of the traditional kind of command and control power we used to think of as central in their jobs. For some managers, that will be a challenge.

One of the paradoxes I talk about in The Future of Work is what I call the paradox of power: Sometimes the best way to gain power is to give it away. Think of people like Linus Torvalds (the creator and coordinator of the Linux operating system), who gave power away to programmers all over the world and in a certain sense gained a different kind of power from doing that. Or think of Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, who gave power away to customers but gained another kind of power from doing so. That’s a paradox but also a real opportunity. These new technologies provide new ways of giving people the information and incentives they need to do the right things with that power.

If you have a way of telling how much everybody in the organization is contributing to the bottom line of the company, you don’t necessarily have to tell them what to do, just let them figure out how they can contribute the most to bottom line of the company. Of course, that’s not always easy to measure, but I think one opportunity is to find more and more ways to get closer and closer to doing that.

You need to create organizations where people have the right kinds of connections and the right kinds of incentives to make decisions for themselves. But the leader also has to lay out a goal and a vision of where they want the organization to end up. Then people understand the broad goal, they can interpret for themselves and in their own situation how to help the company get there—often in very interesting and innovative ways. If you try to tell them what to do more precisely, you would not give them that scope for innovation and therefore you often get less of what you ultimately want.

Technorati Tags: Center for Collective Intelliggence, IBM, MIT, Thomas Malone

USGA Turns to Cloud for Scale and Resilience

2013-06-13T15:30:59Z

Jessica Carroll, Managing Director, Information & Digital Technologies, USGA

By Jessica Carroll

A nimble, dynamic infrastructure, with round-the-clock support, and an environment where you can deliver on your customer’s needs faster. This is what the smart CIO wants. The cloud promises all of these advantages (and more), but does it come through on the promise?

At the USGA we’re a case study in action. As a non-profit organization, our focus is not on technology or sales. It is on serving the game of golf and the growing universe of people who play the game or want to learn more about it. The cloud enables us to support this mission by focusing technology on these growth areas, rather than legacy IT utility services.

There’s no better place to see this than on usopen.com, the USGA’s online destination for the U.S. Open, golf’s national championship. With over 6 million visitors, over 83 million pageviews, and 1.3 million video streams across all platforms in one week alone, the infrastructure to serve up a high performing website is a brilliant case for using the elastic cloud. As we consider the hardware, bandwidth and manpower required to support this volume for one week of the year it’s obvious that the investment needed could not possibly make long-term sense for us.

Roll in the cloud. The USGA has partnered with IBM to provide a scalable cloud hosted solution that can flex with our growing digital offerings and our growing online fans. Problem solved.

Beyond usopen.com, we have embraced cloud thinking in many areas, including disaster recovery.

The cloud helped us step up our game regarding business resilience in ways we simply could not have considered previously. Years ago disaster recovery solutions, such as mirrored data centers, were outside of our reach and we settled on traditional tape backup rotations off-site. With today’s dependency on real time access to information we knew we had to rethink our disaster recovery strategy. The cloud made this transition easy. IBM’s SmartCloud afforded us a means to backup up mission critical data nightly off-site, with minimal infrastructure and support on our part.

Often discussion about the cloud lands on loss of control by IT, but that truly misses the big picture. The key is to choose cloud environments and cloud vendors you know you can trust. The customer service and reliability of your vendor is equally as important as the hardware any vendor’s sales team will extol. It’s critical to remember that wherever your systems live, they are still your systems. Wherever your data resides, the responsibility of that data is still yours. While not every application may present the right case for the cloud, at the USGA we have found the right balance by carefully placing the right systems with the right vendors to give us the service we require.

Whether we’re serving up a first-class online experience of the U.S. Open to our fans or we’re providing resilience for our data, the USGA has turned to cloud technology as a way to provide agile solutions to support the business.

Technorati Tags: backup and recovery, Big Data, IBM SmartCloud, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, mobile computing, social business

Deep Partnerships Will Drive Progress in the New Era of Computing

2013-06-14T15:16:45Z

Steve Hamm, IBM Writer

By Steve Hamm

In the coming era of cognitive systems, fundamental changes will be required at each level of technology–from nanotechnology to the software programming layer. These shifts will require remarkable feats of science and engineering. Yet it’s possible that even greater challenges will come as we go about harnessing the new technical capabilities and using them to solve the world’s most challenging problems. So it will be essential for tech companies like IBM to form deep collaborative partnerships with organizations that possess domain expertise, including those in health care, financial services, media and government.

This was one of the messages delivered by John E. Kelly III when he spoke last evening at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. Kelly was interviewed by John Hollar, the museum’s president, in the institution’s Revolutionaries speakers’ series. Just minutes earlier, the two had participated in a photo-op in the museum’s new IBM Watson exhibit. IBM has donated the stage set it built for the Jeopardy TV quiz show, where Watson in 2011 defeated two past grand-champions.

John Kelly, left, and John Hollar, at the IBM Watson exhibit; Feature Photo Service

(Kelly’s book about the new era, Smart Machines: IBM’s Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing , will be published in the fall by Columbia University Press. To read a free chapter now, go to the Columbia University Press web site.)

Kelly believes that the world is on the cusp of a new era, when new kinds of computers will help people and organizations analyze huge volumes of data and penetrate complexity. Watson’s victory on Jeopardy represented a milestone on the path to the cognitive era.

On stage with Hollar, Kelly recounted the relationship that IBM forged with Mars Inc., maker of M&Ms and other popular chocolate candies. Executives from Mars had approached IBM in 2008 looking for help in solving disease problems that were threatening its supply of cocoa, the essential ingredient in chocolate. Together, in just two years, scientists from IBM and Mars used high-performance computing to decode the cocoa genome. The knowledge gained from the project is helping Mars and cocoa farmers develop methods for improving the health and yields of cocoa plants.

After Watson won on Jeopardy, everybody wondered what would be the next step for the technology. Kelly told a museum audience of more than 400 that he knew, “We needed strong partners to take Watson to the next level, like our partnership with Mars.” And, indeed, that’s the way it has worked out. IBM has partnerships with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Cleveland Clinic in cancer treatment; with WellPoint in health care management; and with a handful of other organizations and companies.

Each human domain has it’s own “language,” not just the words that people within it use to express ideas, but processes for getting things done and even ways of thinking. In order to have impact in these areas, Watson and other cognitive computer programs and cloud services will have to learn how to decode the domain and interact with humans operating there in the ways that they’re most comfortable. The cognitive systems must be trained by experts and fed all of the relevant knowledge about the domain. Then the systems learn more as they interact with people and data.

Health care is the best example of how this is happening. IBM scientists and engineers are working with oncologists at Memorial Sloan Kettering to capture their expertise in Watson. Faculty and students at Cleveland Clinic Medical School are teaching Watson how they approach patient’s problems and correcting the system when it makes mistakes.

But there will be other important areas for collaboration, as well. For instance, IBM is working with The Nielsen Co. to use Watson technology to develop new and more effective ways of measuring the impact of marketing in the digital era.

Kelly told the museum crowd that we’re just at the start of a long journey. “We’re talking about a journey that will last the next 40 to 50 years,” he said. Which means there will be many partnerships coming for IBM, as well.

Technorati Tags: Computer History Museum, IBM

How UCB and IBM are Leveraging Big Data Analytics to Better Understand Epilepsy

2013-06-12T14:04:07Z

Patty Fritz, Vice President, Corporate Affairs and Operational Excellence, UCB

By Patty Fritz

Despite afflicting 65 million people worldwide, including nearly 3 million Americans, epilepsy remains one of the least understood and most individualized chronic conditions. A recent special issue of the medical journal, The Lancet, highlighted the significant unmet medical needs in epilepsy and called on public health officials to treat this disease as a global health priority.

To address this pressing public health issue, global biopharmaceutical company UCB and IBM have announced phase one completion of a proof of concept project that will use Big Data and advanced analytics to potentially offer more personalized care to millions of people living with epilepsy.

Currently, a team of IBM researchers is poring through de-identified, anonymous data on more than 1.5 million U.S.-based epilepsy patients – approximately half those affected by the condition in our country – using machine learning tools and patient similarity analysis. The goal of the project is to demonstrate that an interactive system can be developed that translates massive amounts of patient data and scientific insights that healthcare providers can consult at the point of care to inform their treatment decisions.

When technologies like analytics and cognitive computing are applied to big data, it may revolutionize the way we deliver and receive medical care. UCB’s patient-centric approach and IBM’s long-standing reputation for expertise and innovation in the fields of technology and analytics present a natural partnership. Harnessing the predictive power of IBM’s technology would enable us to arm physicians with information that supports their clinical decision-making and could help them improve quality of care for patients living with a little understood and highly individualized condition.

No matter who is on the receiving end—academia, research institutions, patients or physicians—addressing the challenges of epilepsy requires collaboration with a diverse group of internal and external experts. This is the first step toward streamlining large amounts of data into actionable approaches to epilepsy care and ultimately improving quality of care for people living with epilepsy.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, Big Data analytics, epilepsy, IBM Smarter Planet, patient care, predictive analytics, smarter analytics, Smarter Healthcare, smarter research, UCB

How Cognitive Systems Can Help Make the World Work Better

2013-06-10T13:44:35Z

By Michael Karasick

Michael Karasick, Vice President and Director, IBM Research-Almaden

The world is on the cusp of a new era of computing, which we call the era of cognitive systems. New computer technologies are coming that will help people and organizations penetrate complexity and make better decisions. At IBM, we believe that this coming revolution in artificial intelligence has the potential to transform the way business is done and dramatically accelerate innovation. Cognitive systems will enable humans and machines to interact together and achieve things that neither could do on their own.

The victory of IBM’s Watson on the TV game show Jeopardy! was one of the milestones in this new phase of computing. Scientists at IBM and elsewhere are pushing the boundaries of science and technology fields ranging from neural networks to machine learning to create machines that sense, learn, reason and interact with people in new ways.

(IBM Research Director John Kelly is speaking about the future of computing today at 7 p.m. Pacific Time at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. His book about the new era, Smart Machines: IBM’s Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing , will be published in the fall by Columbia University Press. To read a free chapter now, go to the Columbia University Press web site.

We expect the coming era to emerge over the next couple of decades as one major breakthrough in science and technology follows another. Over time, these advances will fundamentally alter the relationships between people and machines. They will transform computers into truly useful assistants that magnify and accelerate our abilities and enable us to do things we never could have done before. As a result, you can expect better outcomes for individuals, the organizations and society.

–In the doctor’s office, cognitive systems will assist the physician by harnessing vast amounts of data to help them diagnose illnesses and choose among treatment options.

–In a big city, cognitive systems will help city leaders react to a crisis or prioritize infrastructure investments by using data to gain insights into complex systems.

–In the home, intelligent assistant apps on smart phones will help elderly citizens by serving as health monitors and advisers in managing chronic diseases and promoting wellness.

–In companies, cognitive systems will help engineers and designers create new products and services that respond better to the demands of consumers or even anticipate their needs.

One of the greatest impacts of cognitive systems will come in the realm of discovery. In the pharmaceutical industry, the process of new drug development takes anywhere from 10 to 15 years and costs $500 million to $1 billion per drug. Further, more than 90% of the potential drugs that are explored never make it to market. Working with major pharmaceutical companies, a team at IBM Research-Almaden is developing a system that makes it possible for companies to identify promising molecules quickly, find new uses for compounds already proven safe and spot diseases that could be treated more effectively.

The solution draws on text analytics, visual data mining and machine learning. With it, scientists will be able to search though millions of published papers, medical literature, patents and databases describing chemical properties to find the proverbial needle in the haystack that can make a huge difference for pharma companies, physicians and patients alike.

This could save years and hundreds of millions of dollars for each drug, but also could transform the discovery process in any industry where R&D speaks the language of materials science, chemistry and intellectual property law.

We believe that cognitive systems will help us make sense of our amazingly complex world and provide a new collaborative dimension to human reasoning and decision making—whether it’s for business leaders reshaping industries or regular people trying to choose careers or investment strategies. These technologies will help create new products, services, companies and entire industries.

We look to our clients, university researchers, government policy makers, industry partners and tech entrepreneurs to take this journey into the era of cognitive systems with us. And, just as importantly, we hope to inspire university and high school students to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Together, we can produce another wave of progress in computing.

Technorati Tags: cognitive computing, IBM

Meet a Great Mind: Marek Nowicki

2013-06-10T16:07:41Z

Marek Nowicki, PhD student in computer science at University in Toruń, Poland

Computer scientist Marek Nowicki was inspired to join IBM Research after discovering the “cool” work being done at the lab in Zurich. After applying for the IBM Great Minds Challenge, he got his opportunity. The Smarter Planet blog caught up with Marek recently to learn a little more about him, and check on his progress.

You’re doing some interesting academic work around Java and HPC. Tell us about it.

I’m a computer science PhD student studying at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland. My thesis is about building a library called Parallel Computing in Java (PCJ). It enables Java to run successful on high performance computers (HPC). My goal is to make Java ubiquitous in High Performance Computing, which is challenging from both a technical and cultural perspective.

And what are you working on at IBM Research, Zurich?

I am helping to develop middleware for an internal Big Data analytics tool for IBM sellers. The middleware handles all of the process requests for the data, and we want to make this as fast as possible for the sales team. So I’m installing and configuring the servers and developing sophisticated cache mechanisms and algorithms. Eventually it will be used by thousands of IBM sellers, which I find gratifying.

What brought you to IBM in the first place?

Last December my research supervisor and mentor, Professor Piotr Bała, encouraged me to apply for the IBM Great Minds Challenge at their labs in Zurich and Haifa. I took his advice and prepared my CV and position paper, not thinking that I would win. A few weeks later I received a call with the exciting news that I was selected.

And your opinion of the Greater Minds competition?

This challenge is different than others because it is focused on the individual — his or her knowledge and experience. There is no task or problem to solve and no questionnaire from a recruiter. I am proud to be only one of eight winners this year.

What about social media; how did that play in your decision to join IBM?

I am an active Facebook user and I “friended” IBM Research so I can keep up with the news. Often there are posts about various projects at the labs and I remember watching a video that was recorded on the roof of the lab in Zurich showing something that resembled a satellite dish. The research was cool. But in addition to that, I had a great impression of the surrounding mountains, the nature and then I thought, now that’s a place where I want to work.

Around the time of watching that video, I had submitted my Great Minds application, and was soon after contacted by Dr. Abdel Labbi on the IBM analytics team with an offer of a six-month internship.

What tips do you have for other Greater Minds applicants?

My best pieces of advice are not to worry, to be open minded and to focus your application on what you do best. Then make it clear in your position paper what you can offer IBM. A strong recommendation letter from your university staff is also very helpful.

Connect with Marek Nowicki on LinkedIn.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, Education, IBM Research, social_media