Advancing Equal Technology Access Rights to People with Disabilities

Editor’s note: This article is by Frances West, Worldwide Director, IBM
Human Ability and Accessibility Center 

I was honored to testify to the
U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on Thursday, Nov. 21 to discuss IBM’s point of view on
the proposed U.S. ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons
with Disabilities (UNCRPD).




Frances West



The
UNCRPD mandates that

Read More

Sensors remind doctors to wash up

Fighting hospital-born infections starts with
simple hygiene.



While operating rooms are one of the most sterile places in the world – where special procedures and chemicals keep instruments and the doctors and nurses who use them perfectly clean – it’s a small space within a hospital. Other areas of open hallways and waiting rooms are near impossible to keep so perfectly germ-free. So, as

Read More

Why games matter to Artificial Intelligence

Dr. Gerald Tesauro, the IBM Research scientist who taught
Watson how to make
wagers when its Jeopardy!, has been named an Association for the
Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Fellow. His development of TD-Gammon,
“a self-teaching neural network that learned to play backgammon at human world
championship level,” and work applying machine learning across disciplines from
computer

Read More

"Smart Machines" Preview

IBM Senior Vice President and Research Director Dr. John E.
Kelly III and IBM writer Steve Hamm have authored a book, Smart Machines:
IBM’s Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing, which will be published by
Columbia University Press this fall. The book presents a comprehensive
perspective on the future of technology and calls for government, academia and
the global tech industry to help power

Read More

How to move an atom

Chris Lutz
IBM Research scientist
and atom mover

IBM scientists take you inside the workings of a scanning tunneling microscope and the discoveries they’ve made.


Want to see what an atom really looks like close up; or try to
actually move one? All you’ll need is a two-ton scanning tunneling microscope –
otherwise known as an STM. Not something you can easily buy or use as part of
a personal

Read More

Nobel for High-Temperature Superconductivity Turns 25

Twenty-five years ago today, IBM scientist Georg Bednorz received a call from the Nobel Committee, coincidentally while he was traveling in Stockholm, to tell him that he will receive the 1987 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work in high-temperature superconductivity.


Müller and Bednorz on 17 May 2011 at the opening of the
Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology Center


His fellow colleague and

Read More

Advancing Quantum Computing

Quantum computing has been a Holy Grail for researchers ever since Nobel
Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, in 1981, challenged the
scientific community to build computers based on quantum mechanics.

For
decades, the pursuit remained firmly in the theoretical realm. But now
IBM scientists believe they're on the cusp of building systems that will
take computing to a whole new level.

&

Read More

IBM 5 in 5: Mobile is closing the Digital Divide

Editor's note: This post about IBM's Next 5 in 5 prediction about the future of mobile computing is by Paul Bloom, IBM's Chief Technology Officer for Telco Research.Think about what you can already do with your mobile smartphone – check your bank account, tweet, watch television, and oh yeah, make a call. But all of this access still depends on where you are, and you have to initiate the

Read More

Dr. Tze-Chiang Chen receives IEEE honor for technology leadership

“Generation after generation we hit the technology wall. IBMers possess the attitude that we never see the wall as a barrier; we see it as an opportunity for innovation.”
– T.C. ChenWhen Dr. Tze-Chiang Chen joined IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York in 1984, the microprocessors ran at 5 MHz with 275,000 transistors per microprocessor. Since that time, Chen has

Read More

Ponder This: A Q&A with puzzle master Oded Margalit

Every month since May 1998, thousands of people match wits with the best minds in IBM Research by trying to solve Ponder This puzzles. The Ponder This puzzles began as a way for IBM researchers to increase productivity. Some employees found that when they got stuck on a problem, that immersing themselves in solving a completely different type of problem helped get them back on track.

Read More

Nanotechnology and the future of computing

var _gaq = _gaq || [];_gaq.push(['_setAccount','UA-24351777-10']);_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);(function() {var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);})();

Read More

IBM Fellow Josephine Cheng honored as UCLA's 2010 Alumna of the Year

Guest blog post from Vijay K. Dhir, Dean, UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science:"The UCLA Engineering Alumnus/Alumna of the Year Award, established in 1965, honors the superior achievements of alumni who have brought honor and distinction to the school. The hallmark of each recipient is a sterling record of distinguished career accomplishments, complemented by a history of

Read More

You Don’t Need a PhD to Improve Water Quality in Your Area

This re-post is in support of Blog Action Day 2010: Water.Soon-to-be-released Mobile App Lets Anyone Contribute Valuable DataMany would agree that clean drinking water is one of our most precious resources. But what many don’t realize is that we walk over and drive passed our drinking water everyday, making valuable observations about the water’s condition as we do so.The problem is that the

Read More

Rethinking the Mobile User Email Experience

You're standing in line or at a conference so you quickly check your email on your smartphone. Basically, you want to know what's new; what needs to be handled immediately; what can be deleted now and what can wait until back in the office. If it's something that you can put off until later, you probably have some trick to remind yourself. Then, you get back to your desk and find yourself

Read More

East Meets West : Analyzing Digital Medical Records to Understand Treatment Efficacy

Eastern and Western medicine take very different approaches to the practice of medicine -- whether in prevention or disease treatment. And while, they may seem mutually exclusive, more and more clinicians are trying to understand how and when it may be best to integrate the two in order to prescribe the most effective, appropriate treatments for a patient.Combining data from Traditional Chinese

Read More

Health is a complex system -- and understanding it requires a complex system too

Tomorrow, IBM Research will kick off a new multi-year Grand Challenge project. The challenge is to build a platform that integrates multiple scientific models to create meaningful connections among different domains -- such as agriculture, transportation, urban planning and much more -- to better understand the ecosystem of influences on health, the health of individuals and the health of

Read More

More than shopping

Switzerland's top retailers looked into the "day after tomorrow" in retail at the Zurich Research Lab's ISLRetail is a tough business. For years, prices have been the differentiator. "Price competition is becoming fierce in an industry in which margins are already extremely narrow. But this will not be sufficient in the future," predicts Moshe Rappoport, executive technology briefer and expert

Read More