The Social Traffic Conundrum: An IBM vPanel Interactive Dialogue 

Date: Wednesday, September 22, 4pm ET 

Location:  The IBM New Intelligence Video Studio, http://www.livestream.com/newintelligence

Description: For Social Media Week 2010 — taking place simultaneously across five cities — IBM is bringing together four thought leaders from around the globe via a webcam-based virtual panel to discuss the challenge of urban traffic and how human behavior and social media can help remedy it.  

Panelists:

• Shaun Abrahamson, Founder and CEO, Mutopo
• Naveen Lamba, Industry Leader, Smart Transportation, IBM
• Sarah Goodyear, Cities Editor, Grist.org
• Richard MacManus, Founder of ReadWriteWeb

 (via IBMLabs)

IBM is enlisting some of the company’s leading scientists and technologists to help medical practitioners and insurance companies provide high-quality, evidence-based care to patients. As part of this initiative, IBM is collaborating with clinicians in numerous medical institutions and hiring medical doctors to work alongside its researchers to develop new technologies, scientific advancements, and business processes for healthcare and insurance providers. 

IBM Smarter Healthcare 

Saint Michael’s Medical Center in Newark, New Jersey is using IBM’s real-time location services to keep track of more than 2,000 pieces of medical equipment (think heart monitors, infusion pumps, ventilators) at a moment’s notice.

To support those physical solution centers we launched the Analytics Virtual Center (AVC) at the start of 2010, and welcome you to visit it, especially as we come up on the one year anniversary of the launch of our business analytics initiative.

The AVC underscores a central tenet of Smarter Planet — how digital and physical worlds — databases and drydocks,  petabytes and powerplants — are weaving themselves together. Through it, people can extend their physical presence, voice and ideas to a new digital dimension that isn’t constrained by geography.

Simply Easy

The AVC is a web-based and voice-enabled collaboration complex that we built on the web.alive platform, which is now part of IBM partner Avaya’s portfolio. It features a simple set of intuitive controls, quick avatar customization and 3D spatial audio. Many of the hundreds of visitors have  found the environment easier to use than other virtual worlds. In fact, most people find themselves “in world” and talking naturally with others within minutes.

While the environment’s navigation and architecture are purposefully minimalist, the facility supports some sophisticated tools, including a full-function “web surface” that can display any web content, including video, animation and Web-based services such as writeboards. Additional wall surfaces can display presentations, documents, photos and graphics.

In addition to an auditorium and six meeting rooms that can be made private for confidential discussions, the AVC includes a rooftop “garden” with six kiosks for different displays, projects or topics.  We’re also using the rooftop for an “innovator in residence” program that is open to analytics-related projects or initiatives from academia, startups,  NGOs and other organizations seeking to innovate around analytics.

Of course, the AVC is also available for business development and client meetings. And we expect to also put it work as a vehicle for recruiting new talent to IBM, especially for people with expertise in various areas of analytics, simulation, predictive modeling and other aspects of “big data” innovation in areas including energy, smarter cities, healthcare and transportation.

To discuss or schedule a tour, meeting, event, the innovators-in-residence program or how you might like to work with us via the Analytics Virtual Center, we’ve set up a tool with the new Tungle.me appointment service.

You can also leave us a voicemail via Skype.

The following is a guest post from Lonne Jaffe, Director, Public Sector Solutions, IBM Software

This Smarter Health video describes some of the benefits of connecting electronic medical record systems with each other and with other healthcare software systems. Technology like the IBM Health Integration Framework that brings all these systems together can enable a better patient experience, improve treatments, lower costs, and allow scientists to confidentially use data for disease research. That’s health information working together.

As healthcare software becomes more sophisticated, security and privacy remain a priority. IBM helps protect patient information and helps healthcare organizations comply with government privacy regulations while achieving the extraordinary benefits of smarter healthcare.

Following is a guest post from IBMer Lonne Jaffe:

At the HIMSS 2010 conference in Atlanta this week, the topic of improving collaboration in the healthcare industry will be front and center. At IBM, we believe software that can enable hospitals, physicians, patients, health insurance companies and others to share information, work together and collaborate more effectively is critical to decreasing healthcare costs and improving the quality of care.

For example, Boston Medical Center and caregivers across the Boston HealthNet are using collaboration software from IBM and IBM Business Partner Carefx in a new eReferral system, enabling primary care physicians to share information with specialists both before the referral and after the specialist visit. Previously, as is the case in many health systems, referrals were tracked by generating paper and faxes, often getting lost in the process. The result? The time to get an appointment with a specialist has declined from 90 days to less than 10 days in many cases.

Another way to improve collaboration is to get a more comprehensive view of the patient. IBM announced today it has finalized the acquisition of Initiate Systems, a software vendor that has played a key role in improving data integrity and collaboration across the healthcare industry. The software can sort through billions of patient records at a time, determining each unique individual from another with a similar name, so doctors can get an accurate and complete view of every patient. More than 1,700 healthcare organizations and some 40 health information exchanges (HIEs) across the world use the technology to uniquely identify patient records at all points of registration and care across various systems and different organizations.

This acquisition also brings to IBM technology for collaboration between physicians and hospitals, facilitating the flow of important information such as referrals and lab results. It is also another example of what we consider smarter healthcare – helping healthcare organizations everywhere capture, share, analyze and act on information in a connected, coordinated and systematic way.

SeeClickFix empowers residents to actively care for and improve their neighborhoods.

Welcome to the SeeClickFix Challenge: Feb 8-21 on the Smarter Cities Scan

Smarter Cities asked if this great new service wanted to use our platform to share user suggestions and success stories on its citizen-powered service. So here’s the SCF challenge: over the next two weeks share your SeeClickFix story.

How can communities and towns put SCF to new uses. Got a question? Use the Ask feature and you shall be answered.  Got something fixed via SCF? Post a story. Fixed something? Do tell.

Already have a Tumblr site? Tag your post “scfchallenge” and we can reblog your contribution straight into the collaboration.

About SeeClickFix. SCF enables anyone to:

• See - spot a non-emergency issue in your neighborhood
• Click - open a ticket describing the issue and what can be done to resolve it
• Fix - publicly report the issue to everyone for resolution

in silico modeling creates images of liver inflammation and cancer that are similar to what might be seen under the microscope.

At the University of Pittsburgh’s McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, researchers are using IBM technology to open up new dimensions in biological modeling. With the help of an IBM Shared University Research (SUR) Award and an IBM supercomputer, Pitt is using leading-edge in silico biological research, which uses computer simulations to explore biological pathways and test therapeutic interventions, tissue engineering, cell therapies and artificial organs and biodevices. The results of such research could significantly reduce the cost of new drug development and shorten the treatment evaluation process – getting treatments to the market faster and cheaper. These modeling techniques are similar to those used to generate the fantasy creatures of other worlds in movies, such as “Lord of the Rings” and the “Star Trek” series. So instead of creating an imaginary character to fill out a battle scene, Pitt scientists are applying computational techniques to simulate, for example, inflamed liver cells morphing into cancer. That allows them to see not only how tumors develop, but how drugs or other interventions could affect disease progression.

For example, the Pitt research team has simulated liver tissue to study how a chronic hepatitis infection can lead to liver cancer, lung tissues to study viral infection and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and skin to study how patients with spinal cord injuries develop pressure ulcers. This type of advanced modeling can help researchers better understand basic biological processes and allows them to screen drugs and determine their impact on the body to uncover the best interventions for a broad range of diseases.

For more info, read an interview with Dr. Yoram Vodovotz in the  Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Photo credit:  University of Pittsburgh Center for Inflammation and Regenerative Modeling

Technorati Tags: biological research, health care, healthcare, McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, supercomputer, University of Pittsburghy, UPMC

AsthmaMD iPhone App Helps Asthma Sufferers, Gathers Aggregate Research Data

Each day 11 people die of asthma in the U.S., and it accounts for one-quarter of all emergency room visits. Since 1980 the asthma death rate overall has increased by 50%. A new iPhone app called AsthmaMD, which was created by am Pejham (a doctor and researcher) and Salim Madjd, aims to help some of those sufferers. The application let’s them keep a diary of attacks, helping them keep records of the severity of attacks, medications used, etc.

infoneernet:

New Device Prints Human Tissue

Invetech has delivered what it calls the “world’s first production model 3D bio-printer” to Organovo, developers of the proprietary NovoGen bioprinting technology. Organovo will in turn supply the devices to institutions investigating human tissue repair and organ replacement.

Keith Murphy, CEO of Organovo, based in San Diego, said the units represent a breakthrough because they provide for the first time a flexible technology platform for organizations working on many different types of tissue construction and organ replacement.

“Scientists and engineers can use the 3D bio printers to enable placing cells of almost any type into a desired pattern in 3D,” said Murphy. “Researchers can place liver cells on a preformed scaffold, support kidney cells with a co-printed scaffold, or form adjacent layers of epithelial and stromal soft tissue that grow into a mature tooth. Ultimately the idea would be for surgeons to have tissue on demand for various uses, and the best way to do that is get a number of bio-printers into the hands of researchers and give them the ability to make three dimensional tissues on demand.”

» via Live Science