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IBM’s Watson Shows Up For Work
IBM’s Watson supercomputer is about to start work evaluating evidence-based cancer treatment options that can be delivered to the doctors in a matter of seconds for assessment.
IBM and WellPoint, which is Blue Cross Blue Shield’s largest health plan, are developing applications that will essentially turn the Watson computer into an adviser for oncologists at Cedars-Sinai’s Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute in Los Angeles, according to Steve Gold, director of worldwide marketing for IBM Watson Solutions.
Cedars-Sinai’s historical data on cancer as well as its current clinical records will be ingested into an iteration of IBM’s Watson that will reside at WellPoint’s headquarters. The computer will act as a medical data repository on multiple types of cancer. WellPoint will then work with Cedars-Sinai physicians to design and develop applications as well as validate their capabilities.
Dr. M. William Audeh, medical director of the cancer institute, will work closely with WellPoint’s clinical experts to provide advice on how the Watson may be best used in clinical practice to support increased understanding of the evolving body of knowledge on cancer, including emerging therapies not widely known by physicians.
IBM announced earlier this year that healthcare would be the first commercial application for the computer, which defeated two human champions on the popular television game show Jeopardy! in February.
IBM Goes Social
December 12, 2011 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Responding to increased use of tablets within business settings, IBM will launch on Wednesday several mobile applications designed to let employees use IBM enterprise social collaboration software with iPads and other mobile devices.
The new applications, free to customers with active licenses of the IBM software, have been built specifically for tablet interfaces and have security, IT management and compliance features.
“The apps are very lightweight and talk directly back in a secure manner to the enterprise systems that people who don’t have these devices are using inside the company,” said Rob Ingram, senior manager of IBM’s Mobile Collaboration Strategy.
One of the applications lets employees use IBM Connections via iPads, while another one is for LotusLive Meeting users to participate in online meetings using iPhones or Android, BlackBerry or iPad tablets.
For IBM Sametime, another application lets employees engage in one-on-one or group instant messaging sessions on iPad and Android tablets. There is also one application for Lotus Symphony Viewer that lets users view ODF-based files, including documents, spreadsheets and presentations, on iPads, iPhones or Android devices.
There are also applications for managing telephony tasks within IBM Sametime from tablets and for Android device users to add widgets to home screens as shortcuts to their Lotus Notes mail and calendar.
Mobile Security Threats Continue To Grow
October 15, 2011 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
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According to industry analysts, mobile device shipments will exceed a billion devices in 2015 and will rapidly outrun PC shipments. That’s great news for end user convenience, mobility, and work-anywhere productivity. But it also means that enterprises must prepare for the fact that the criminals will target these devices with attack exploits, spyware,
and rogue applications.
And while IBM’s IT security research team, X-Force, predicts a modest 33 software exploits targeting mobile devices in the year ahead, that’s roughly twice the number of such attack code released in the past year.
The group also sees a number of other troubling mobile security trends. First, when software flaws do surface, many mobile phone makers do not rapidly deploy software patches to devices; malicious apps are often distributed through third-party app markets. Another troubling trend is that some mobile malware can collect end user’s personal information for use in phishing attacks.
An example of vulnerabilities that would make such attacks possible are the two recent Android security flaws that were reported to affect popular handsets including the AT&T Samsung Galaxy SII and various HTC devices.
The security find announced by security researcher Trevor Eckhart, called HTClogger (logging tools introduced by handset maker HTC) that could leak email account information, user location, phone numbers, and messaging logs.
Handset maker HTC said, in a statement, that it is working to quickly issue an update to its customers. “HTC is working very diligently to quickly release a security update that will resolve the issue on affected devices. Following a short testing period by our carrier partners, the patch will be sent over-the-air to customers, who will be notified to download and install it. We urge all users to install the update promptly,” the company said.
Google Buys Patents From IBM
September 22, 2011 by admin
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Google has purchased more than 1,000 patents from IBM, as part of its strategy to strengthen its patent portfolio to counter litigation, according to records of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Jim Prosser, a Google spokesman, confirmed the transfer, reported by a blog SEO by the Sea, but did not provide details such as the the purchase price Google paid for the patents.
Google also acquired another over 1,000 patents from IBM in July. It transferred recently some patents to smartphone maker HTC to help it pursue patent litigation against Apple.
Google has been interested in buying patents for some time now, which led to its failed bid in June for the patents of Nortel Networks, and its proposed acquisition of Motorola Mobility for about US$12.5 billion.
The tech world has recently seen an explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents, which threatens to stifle innovation, Kent Walker, Google’s senior vice president and general counsel, said in a blog post in April.
“But as things stand today, one of a company’s best defenses against this kind of litigation is (ironically) to have a formidable patent portfolio, as this helps maintain your freedom to develop new products and services,” he added.
The acquisition of Motorola Mobility’s patents was a key consideration for Google to start talking to the company in early July. But Motorola told Google that it could be a problem for Motorola Mobility to continue as a stand-alone entity if it sold a large portion of its patent portfolio, according to a filing by Motorola to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday.
The First PC Had a Birthday
The year was 1981 and IBM introduced its IBM PC model 5150 on August 12th, 30 years ago today.
The first IBM PC wasn’t much by today’s standards. It had an Intel 8088 processor that ran at the blazing speed of 4.77MHz. The base memory configuration was all of 16kB expandable all the way up to 256kB, and it had two 5-1/4in, 160kB capacity floppy disk drives but no hard drive.
A keyboard and 12in monochrome monitor were included, with a colour monitor optional. The 5150 ran IBM BASIC in ROM and came with a PC-DOS boot diskette put out by a previously unknown startup software company based out of Seattle named Microsoft.
IBM priced its initial IBM PC at a whopping $1,565, and that was a relatively steep price in those days, worth about $5,000 today, give or take a few hundred dollars. In the US in 1981 that was about the cost of a decent used car.
Because the IBM PC was meant to be sold to the general public but IBM didn’t have any retail stores, the company sold it through US catalogue retailer Sears & Roebuck stores.
Subsequently IBM released follow-on models through 1986 including the PC/XT, the first with an internal hard drive; the PC/AT with an 80286 chip running at 6MHz then 8MHz; the 6MHz XT/286 with zero wait-state memory that was actually faster than the 8MHz PC/AT and (not very) Portable and Convertible models; as well as the ill-fated XT/370, AT/370, 3270 PC and 3270/AT mainframe terminal emulators, plus the unsuccessful PC Jr.
IBM Debuts Fast Storage System
IBM
With an eye toward helping tomorrow’s data intensive organizations, IBM researchers have developed a super-fast storage system capable of scanning in 10 billion files in 43 minutes.
This system easily bested their previous system, demonstrated at Supercomputing 2007, which scanned 1 billion files in three hours.
Key to the increased performance was the use of speedy flash memory to store the metadata that the storage system uses to locate requested information. Traditionally, metadata repositories reside on disk, access to which slows operations.
“If we have that data on very fast storage, then we can do those operations much more quickly,” said Bruce Hillsberg, director of storage systems at IBM Research Almaden, where the cluster was built. “Being able to use solid-state storage for metadata operations really allows us to do some of these management tasks more quickly than we could ever do if it was all on disk.”
IBM foresees that its customers will be grappling with a lot more information in the years to come.
“As customers have to store and process large amounts of data for large periods of time, they will need efficient ways of managing that data,” Hillsberg said.
For the new demonstration, IBM built a cluster of 10 eight-core servers equipped with a total of 6.8 terabytes of solid-state memory. IBM used four 3205 solid-state Storage Systems from Violin Memory. The resulting system was able to read files at a rate of almost 5 GB/s (gigabytes per second).
Intel Developing Thunderbolt Technology
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A new interconnect technology being developed by Intel could be ready for market by 2015 and will be able to move data between computers at up to five times the speed of its recently launched Thunderbolt technology, an Intel researcher said earlier this week.
The new technology uses silicon photonics, which combines silicon components with optical networking, to transfer data at up to 50 gigabits per second over distances of up to 100 meters, said Jeff Demain, strategy director of circuits and system research at Intel Labs, at a company event in New York.
Intel expects the technology to be ready for use in PCs, tablets, smartphones, televisions and other products by 2015, Demain said. As well as being faster than today’s interconnect technologies, it’s expected to lower costs because the components will be built using existing silicon manufacturing processes.
The technology could possibly be used in TVs and set-top boxes to carry video streams at much higher definition than those available today. Image resolution is likely to quadruple by the middle of the decade, when successors to 1080p have arrived, and that will mean more data has to be pushed to the TV.
It should also enable faster data transfers between smartphones, tablets, PCs and peripherals such as external storage drives.
The technology still has a way to go, but Intel showed its progress at the event in New York Wednesday. It showed what it said were working prototypes of the silicon chips used to transmit and receive the laser signals.
IBM Outs Fast Graphene Transistor
Big Blue is in the process of showing of its latest graphene transistor that is capable of executing 155 billion cycles per second. IBM’s test revealed that the transistor is 50 percent faster than previous versions of the experimental transistors.
That said the transistor has a cut-off frequency of 155GHz. The previous transistor had a frequency of 100GHz when IBM showed it off last year.
IBM’s Yu-Ming Lin stated that the research further showed that high-performance, graphene-based transistors can be asembled at an economical cost using standard semiconductor manufacturing processes. Meaning, commercial production of graphene chips should be happening in the near future.
US Seeks To Regain Supercomputer Title
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Last year the US lost the Super Computing crown to China which was assisted by a US corporation. Hating to be beat the US is not seeking to wion the crown back under a project being called Titan.
On the campus of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge Tennessee we have gotten word that “Titan” has been commissioned by the US Department of Energy. The Supercomputer is expected to achieve speeds of 20 petaflops per second.
Benefits of Cloud Computing
In a nutshell Cloud Computing is the process of having on-demand hosted computing services provided outside your own network environment through a vendor’s Public or Private Data Center. Cloud Computing can be broken into three distinct categories. They are SaaS (Software as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), and PaaS (Platform as a Service).
Even though the concepts of Cloud Computing have been around for years, it still remains in its infancy. However, its adoption rate has been rather explosive lately, due in part to its seamlessness and ease of information integration.Cloud Computing has many benefits for medium and small businesses by way of collaboration and Productivity. For instance users will have the ability to work on the same projects in real-time from any location whether it’s the office, at home or an overseas location, at any time. The office never closes.
Another reason Cloud Computing has become so enticing is businesses can cut expenses on hardware and IT staffing to support the very same services as if they were on-site (Break/Fix issues are resolved by the vendor and the customer is never aware since services are redundant). Security is also enhanced because leading vendors adhere to higher levels of security features that are cost prohibitive to most medium and small businesses. In these days of high profile data breaches added security is must have.
Businesses should also consider their IT teams will not have a steep learning curve adapting to Cloud based services, since most user environment applications are similar in design to those they are accustomed to using today. Another added convenience is that Cloud Computing rids businesses of the old and costly software licensing requirement for every application/user. Cloud Computing allows the business to buy services on a time/usage metric.
If your business is looking to stay agile and save money, Cloud Computing may be the right direction to move.