David Post, Ph.D., Executive Manager, Global Smarter Cities
By David Post, Ph.D.
In the course of my travels to over 60 countries around the world I have seen and learned a lot. One thing that never ceases to amaze me, no matter where I am, is how local innovation and seemingly small ideas can cause huge ripples in a community.
Some of the most creative ideas to make a village, community or city smarter come from residents; people who see an opportunity to make their lives and the lives of their neighbors better.
These community based approaches—which are created for communities, by communities—can dramatically improve local quality of life while spurring economic and community development. As importantly, effective ideas and approaches can be shared with other communities to catalyze more widespread change and improvement. IBM looked for some of the best of these ideas when People For Smarter Cities partnered with Zooppa, a crowd sourcing community. Continue Reading »
Otto Doll, Chief Information Officer, City of Minneapolis
By Otto Doll
As Chief Information Officer of Minneapolis, I used to get asked a lot about what will be the next big killer app. Today, I’m asked what’s the next big killer outcome.
The processes that drive Minneapolis are very focused on data. Each week, city leaders and council members sit down together to review and make decisions, but increasingly we’re doing more than looking at data about the past, today we’re on a path to see our city in two, three and even four dimensions. The goal is to turn data into better decisions and better outcomes for our citizens.
To do this, analytics is key. By looking at patterns, event correlation, hot spotting and anomaly detection, we’re now using technology to tell meaningful stories through data—where the participants help generate the content. Continue Reading »
Russ Wilson, Director, IBM Mobile Innovation Lab
By Russ Wilson
It is no revelation that the demand for mobile products is driving innovation at an incredibly fast pace. If you think technology moves fast, mobile technology is moving at the speed of light.
According to VentureBeat, on average, 2,371 new mobile apps are published each and every day. That is a staggering number relative to the rate of traditional software products. Admittedly many of those apps will fail, but that’s acceptable and even necessary.
After all, innovation requires experimentation, risk, and iteration. If the constraint of guaranteed success is imposed on the innovator, you will most certainly force the innovator into an engineering mindset and suffocate the kindling of creativity. Continue Reading »
Jonathan E. Helm, Assistant Professor of Operations and Decision Technologies
Indiana University Kelley School of Business
By Jonathan E. Helm
The opportunity around big data is seemingly endless. Big data seems to be everywhere and is a part of everything – embedded in e-commerce, social media and electronic health records. Organizations large and small are presented with an opportunity to leverage the vast amount of data to transform operations. What’s missing though is the “How?” How do we actually use big data?
That’s the question we’re tackling at Indiana University Kelley School of Business. We’ve had the opportunity to team with IBM to help integrate big data curricula into our lesson plans to ensure our students are learning more than just the basics around big data. For example, one of our classes introduces big data concepts by enabling the students to learn about about Hadoop to tackle large amounts of structured data using IBM InfoSphere BigInsights, allowing them to develop Java MapReduce applications. Continue Reading »
By Anna Hodge
I am part of a generation that is always gazing into the horizon for the next great gadget, the next engaging smart phone app, the next addictive tech tool that will most likely distract me during my college lectures.
I know that most millennials are just like me, standing tall on their toes, trying to see above the heads in front of them to determine what the next innovation will be and when they can purchase it. In such a fast-paced environment, it’s easy to forget about all the innovative groundwork that was laid over the years to get us to this point. That’s why it’s important to stop every once in a while and take the time to recognize the contributions of the innovators.
Three IBM engineers were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame on Wednesday for their invention of the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), which was developed more than 70 years ago. ASCC performed high-speed, complex mathematical calculations. Continue Reading »
Alejandro Reti, MD, Senior Director of Population Health, Premier Inc.
Hiding in the buzz around the Affordable Care Act’s delivery system reforms is a provision affecting every nonprofit hospital in the country. This provision requires nonprofit hospitals to conduct triennial community health needs assessments (CHNAs) to justify their tax-exempt status and participate in many federal programs.
Though CHNAs haven’t been in the spotlight, they’re playing a big part in population health management, helping to support many of key delivery system reforms. They’re designed to help providers target, set and support their community’s health improvement priorities so they can appropriately allocate resources.
But many of today’s CHNAs lack objective, complete data and the ability to analyze it. They’re driven by a limited number of static, county-level indicators, such as causes of death or reasons for hospitalization, and require manual management of large data sets from various sources. Continue Reading »
The era of cognitive computing is upon us. Scientists and engineers are designing new systems that ingest vast amounts of information, learn from their interactions with people and data, reason, and help us make better decisions. The opportunities are vast, but so are the challenges. That’s why fulfilling the promise of cognitive computing will require contributions from a large number of people in industry, academia, government and civic life.
So please join the New York Academy of Sciences, ETH Zurich and IBM as they present a discussion between Lino Guzzella, president-elect of ETH, the MIT of Europe; and John Kelly, senior vice president and director of IBM Research, the largest corporate research organization in the world. They will speak about research and collaboration to advance cognitive computing. View the discussion on this Livestream site at 7 p.m. And join the Twitter conversation at #CognitiveComputing, #ETH and #ZHNY.
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Alistair Rennie, General Manager of Business Analytics, IBM Software Group
By Alistair Rennie
Imagine being able to make a well-informed decision based on real time insight, available anywhere and anytime. Now imagine this for all the decision makers in your organization. We’re getting there.
Today IBM took one step closer toward realizing its vision of “analytics everywhere” with new capabilities and solutions that will transform how business users perform their roles, collaborate, and make decisions. How? By making sophisticated analytics more accessible, easier to use, and available to employees at any location and at any moment.
IBM researchers and FUIJIFILM of Japan announced today they have demonstrated 85.9 billion bits per square inch, a new world record in areal data density on low-cost linear magnetic particulate tape. 85.9 billion bits per square inch translates to 154 terabytes of data roughly the text from 154 million books all stored on a standard tape cartridge measuring 4.02 Long x 4.15 Wide x 0.85 High. This is the third time IBM and FUJIFILM have achieved such a feat since 2006. But what does it mean? The Smarter Planet blog caught up with Dr. Mark Lantz from IBM’s Research lab in Zurich, Switzerland, recently to find out. Lantz has been working on exploratory tape with FUJIFILM since the first record was set more than eight years ago.
Smarter Planet: Why is 60 year-old tape so important today?
Mark Lantz: Even though Big Data is more than 60 years old it is very relevant today for one main reason — Big Data. Currently the rate of data creation is exploding with the total amount of data in the world more than doubling every two years, while at the same time the aerial density scaling of disk systems has fallen to less than 10% per year. So there is a big diversion between the rate at which we are creating data and our ability to cost effectively store it. Continue Reading »
Martin Littmann, Chief Technology Officer & CISO, Kelsey-Seybold Clinic
By Martin Littmann
Healthcare may be the one of the only industries that experience universal stress across the organization when its customer base (patients) grows.
From facilities management to professional personal support, everything shifts into overdrive when patient numbers spike, and information technologies are not immune. Each new patient and patient encounter generates a great deal of new information – both structured in form of patient records, and unstructured, in the form of medical images, audio and video.
From the systems that have to process that information to those that have to store, manage and retain that information, healthcare institutions are increasingly looking for ways to get higher performance out of over-stressed systems, while easing the management of those systems as much as possible. Continue Reading »
