IBM's Watson to Tackle Healthcare Next

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- IBM's Watson computer thrilled "Jeopardy" audiences in February by vanquishing two human champs in a three-day match. It's an impressive resume, and now Watson has landed a plum job.

IBM is partnering with WellPoint, a large health insurance plan provider with around 34 million subscribers, to bring Watson technology to the health care sector, the companies said Monday.

It will be the first commercial application of Watson, which is a computing system that aims to "understand" language as humans naturally speak it. IBM (IBM,Fortune 500) has been working on Watson for more than six years.

The goal is for Watson to help medical professionals diagnose and sort out treatment options for complicated health issues. Think of the system as an electronic Dr. House.

"Imagine having the ability to take in all the information around a patient's medical care -- symptoms, findings, patient interviews and diagnostic studies," Dr. Sam Nussbaum, WellPoint's (WLP, Fortune 500) chief medical officer, said in a prepared statement.

"Then, imagine using Watson analytic capabilities to consider all of the prior cases, the state-of-the-art clinical knowledge in the medical literature and clinical best practices to help a physician advance a diagnosis and guide a course of treatment," he added.

WellPoint plans to begin deploying Watson technology in small clinical pilot tests in early 2012.

Speed and natural language: Watson can sift through 200 million pages of data and provide a response in less than three seconds. But perhaps even more impressive than Watson's speed is its ability to process natural language, the way that humans speak it.

That's no easy feat for a computer. Human language is full of subtleties, irony and words with multiple meanings.

Take the "Jeopardy" example. Watson studies the questions by considering many factors, ranging from straightforward keyword matching to more complex challenges like homonyms (the bark of a tree is not the same as a dog's bark) and paraphrasing ("Big Blue" is the same thing as "IBM").

Watson is able to do this quickly thanks to software that runs on 10 refrigerator-sized racks of IBM Power7 systems. The machine is a grandkid to Deep Blue, the chess-playing IBM supercomputer that trounced world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.

IBM said early on that health care is a field where it anticipated commercialization opportunities for Watson. Other markets IBM is eying include online self-service help desks, tourist information centers and customer hotlines.

Watson's "Jeopardy" face-off against champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, which first aired February 14-16, will be re-broadcast starting on Monday.

Via: http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/12/technology/ibm_watson_health_care/index.htm?hpt=te_bn9

Is the notebook dying?

Yes. You can scream all you want, but yes, the notebook is dying.

First it was the death of the netbook, and now analysts are piling on Best Buy's CEO remarks about iPad cannibalizing laptop sales by 50%.

Morgan Stanley notes that notebook's year-over-year growth has been negative for the first time ever this August. They have gone as far as saying that: "Tablet cannibalization"—chiefly by Apple's (AAPL) iPad—is at least partially responsible."

That growth is negative doesn't mean that notebooks are not selling anymore. We don't even know if the pattern will keep going on for 2011, although chances are that it will. But there is a pattern now, one that is completely new. Right now, the laptop market is not growing anymore.

In fact, growth has been steadily decreasing since March—even while new, faster, cheaper laptops have been introduced since then. The incoming September numbers show another 4% decrease. That's one of the reasons why manufacturers like Dell, Samsung, and HP are racing to get their own tablets in the market before Apple becomes unstoppable in this new computing world. If you think that HP wasn't thinking about this trend when they bought Palm, you are seriously mistaken.

The end of the laptop

So, are tablets the end of the laptop? Perhaps it is too early to tell now—even with the loud and clear numbers—but yes, yes they are. Eventually, it will happen. New computing formats have been replacing old computing formats since the beginning of the information era. Just a few years ago, some people couldn't believe the desktop market was going to become stagnant. But it did, and today many people only use laptops.

The same will happen with tablets.

Laptops will not disappear. Not now, not right away. Like the desktop, they will survive for years on different industries and enterprises. Eventually, however, I'm sure they will vanish completely except for a very few specialized niches, just like they have disappeared for many workforces who have moved from traditional computer platforms to smart phones. Gene Roddenberry was right.

So what will happen with the keyboard, you ask? I can't type on a tablet! Well, I write for a living, so I understand that concern. I know I will keep using keyboards until new input methods replace them.

But now think about the immensity of people who, unlike you and me, don't touch a keyboard at all or touch it just barely, to send "hey, see you at 5! LOL! xxxooo" mails or write Facebook messages or chat with contracted words and emoticons. Think about the majority of people who, outside their work offices, never touch and don't want to touch a keyboard. Think about the amount of the huge amount of blue collar workers who don't use computers in their work, just depend on their phones to communicate. Think about the increasing number of office workers who have moved from desktops and laptops to their smart phones. And in addition to all those, think about that big majority of consumers who don't give damn about computers.

For those people, tablets are indeed the future. Because that's really all their need in their digital lives: A way to easily get their entertainment, communicate with others, and access their memories. And as tablets evolve, connecting to cameras, camcorders, smart phones, printers and AV systems, becoming hubs rather than just the end of a chain, that future will come even sooner than expected. Full Article via [Fortune]

10 Futuristic Concept Laptop Designs

Technology grows too fast and to keep ourselves synchronized with the modern trends, we must take into account every progress whether that may be of past or of the future.

Compiled below is a list of the most futuristic concept laptop designs, some of which have won achievement awards while the rest are just too cool to know about.

Take a look and see which one of these do you think will most likely embrace reality in coming times.

read more | digg story

The Future of the Workplace

Posted on CNN earlier today:

Work stations with a built-in treadmill and portable meeting rooms are just some of the developments that may become commonplace in the offices of the future. Workplace technology has changed dramatically in recent years and the offices we work in are finally set to catch up. The advent of laptops, wi-fi and BlackBerries means that high-tech workers are no longer tethered to their desks, and the office of the future will be designed to let workers roam.

Dutch designer Michiel van der Kley has come up with Globus, a stylish spherical "podule" that looks like a piece of art, but is actually a mobile work station. Open it up, take a seat, switch on your laptop and you're good to go. If you need to see a colleague you can take your laptop with you and talk shop at a ScooterDesk, an ultra-mobile mini work station by Belgian design firm Utilia.

Another Belgian company, Living Tomorrow, predicts that as we become increasingly able to work from home, workplaces will spend more time unoccupied. It says flexibility will be the key to filling unused space, which means that as well as mobile work stations, we'll be seeing mobile meeting rooms.

Offices of the future may include more informal team areas,

like this one designed by Perkins + Will.