IBM

IBM’s supercomputer Watson is trying its hand at discerning personalities, and it bases its guesses on text samples. A demonstration of the technology allows anyone to copy in their own snippet of text and get an assessment based on it — whether your own will prove accurate is another matter. This is the latest example of computers learning to predict and analyze; we saw a different example yesterday via a neural network that is learning to write.

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IBM is making a big deal of celebrating a tiny achievement, successfully producing a 7nm chip that could mean huge efficiency improvements in phones, laptops and more. Squeezing more than 20 billion transistors into a chip the size of a fingernail took figuring out new manufacturing processes and chewed through part of a $3bn investment IBM earmarked back in 2014, but it's shaping up to be worth every cent. Big Blue predicts a power/performance increase of more than 50-percent from the smaller processors.

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Moore's Law is something cooked up by Gordon Moore in a paper long ago. Moore would eventually go on to found Intel and the law states that computing power will double every two years. In the years since Moore came up with his law, it has held true but some scientists and researchers believe we are nearing the end of life for Moore's Law as we begin to reach limits on how small we can make chips.

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Last summer’s partnership between Apple and IBM has proven extra-special for the latter company’s workers -- as of yesterday IBM employees can choose to use a Mac as their work computer rather than a PC, removing the shackles from a company that has been out of the PC business for many years. The change took place on Thursday, and it didn't take long for IBM employees to praise the decision on their social accounts. A quick peek at Twitter shows that many will be requesting Macs instead of their PCs.

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Therapy can be a useful tool for those with deep-seated issues or anyone who needs a sounding board for life's big decisions. Seeking a therapist is now seen as a way to reach out for help instead of a strange act of narcissism. When it comes to finding a therapist, a good match can make a world of difference. Picking a practitioner from the Yellow Pages is a complete crapshoot; now, IBM's Watson is lending its supercomputing power to creating ideal matches between patients and therapists on Talkspace, an online, licensed therapy provider that you can access from your smartphone.

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IBM's powerful supercomputer, Watson, can make calculations at superhuman speeds, making connections between analyzed data that humans might miss. This is exactly why a team of oncologists plans to use Watson to guide cancer therapies at fourteen different cancer institutes in America and Canada. The hospitals are paying IBM a subscription fee to access the supercomputer. Watson will be especially useful to oncology institutes as cancer doesn't have a one-size-fits-all protocol. Sure, we imagine it's as simple as radiation or chemotherapy, but sometimes tumor cells induce odd mutations in surrounding cells, making them impervious to standard treatments.

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Apple and IBM have entered an agreement with Japan Post to bring iPads to the elderly. The move is a technological step for Japan Post’s ‘Watch’ service, which leverages postal employees to check in on the elderly now and then. Watch currently costs 1,000 Yen/month ($8.50 or so). Japan Post is government-owned, and operates roughly 24,000 post offices in addition to a large bank. Japan Post is also one of the nation’s largest insurers, and hopes iPads will both scale their Watch service as well as make it easier on everyone involved.

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IBM envisions the future of medicine where vast networks of medical information are securely stored in a cloud network. IBM plans to use its AI supercomputer, Watson, to analyze the data and a make new record keeping system that could be used by all health care systems. IBM has reportedly developed a new department at its headquarters dedicated to developing Watson for the medical field. Furthermore, IBM recently acquired the medical analytics company Explorys, which has access to 50 million medical records in the U.S., and Phytel which gives feedback to doctors and patients about after-care.

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BlackBerry has just revealed a new tablet, but don't worry, it's not a follow-up to the flop that was the company's PlayBook. It's called the SecuTablet, and it's basically a modified version of Samsung's Galaxy Tab S 10.5, albeit with a strong focus on data security. The device is a result of BlackBerry's purchase of security firm Secusmart last year, as well as a software partnership with IBM. The SecuTablet is part of BlackBerry's attempts to find success in targeting the corporate and government security sectors.

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IBM’s Watson knows quite a bit — enough to compete on Jeopardy. A brilliant database of info, Watson isn’t so great at other languages. To help with learning Japanese, IBM has enlisted the help of SoftBank to train Watson in Japanese. The aim of this partnership is to bring Watson to a new enterprise space; beyond that, IBM and SoftBank either don’t specifically know what they will do with Watson, or just aren’t saying. What they do know is that Watson needs to learn the native tongue before anything else.

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Christmas means a lot of things to a lot of people, but one undercurrent is noticeable: shopping. Though most stores are shut for the day, we can still go online, and we’ve likely got a series of gift cards in-hand which give us license to buy. In our mobile world, location doesn’t matter much, either. Great apps from retailers mean the mobile shopping experience is often better than on the desktop, and the latest numbers from IBM reflect as much, showing mobile shopping traffic is on the rise.

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US supercomputers are having to grow up, with a wider set of tasks the machines at Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories are being asked to do by the researchers, national security teams, and others given access to them demanding a change in architecture in order to keep them flexible. IBM and NVIDIA are upgrading two supercomputers - Sierra at Lawrence Livermore, and Summit at Oak Ridge - using IBM's support for the open-source OpenPOWER standard, increasing the interconnect speed of the CPU and GPU processors responsible for doing all the heavy-duty crunching. In fact, so the companies claim, there'll be as much as a tenfold cut in processing time for real-world applications.

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