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oracknows | September 17, 2017For nearly as long as I can remember, I've been a fan of Jeopardy! Indeed, if I'm at home at 7:30 PM on a weeknight, Jeopardy! will usually be on the television. Given that, I remember what was basically a bit of stunt programming in 2011, when Jeopardy! producers had IBM's artificial intelligence supercomputer Watson face off against two of the most winning champions in the history of the show, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Watson won, leading Jenning's to add to his Final Jeopardy answer, "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords."
Watson's next challenge was similarly highly hyped:…
dgmacarthur | October 6, 2009IBM's announcement that it will be entering the DNA sequencing technology race (which I mentioned briefly earlier today) has created a tremendous amount of mainstream media interest. That's understandable given IBM's size and history of innovation, but how likely are they to represent serious contenders for the potentially lucrative sequencing market?
Firstly, it's important to note that this announcement represents more of an expression of interest in the field rather than anything close to a mature technology; IBM will not be rolling out a machine to sequence your genome at any stage in…
dgmacarthur | October 6, 2009Things are as usual moving at ludicrous speed in the world of genomics, but sadly I only have time to post a few pointers to some of the most striking developments.
IBM is moving into the third-generation sequencing arena. The company is developing a new sequencing technology based on tiny nanopores - a field already being explored by the understated British nobility of sequencing, Oxford Nanopore. This is all over the news, but Dan Vorhaus has an introduction and is promising to follow up on further developments. You can also watch a pretty but largely content-free animation of the process…
pontiff | April 1, 2009Wow, this is a very cool result:Researchers at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorkstown, NY have announced a breakthrough which they feel could revolutionize power consumption in computers. Today's computers are power hungry: a typical computer consumes hundreds of watts of power. Not only does this power consumption add up to a lot of wasted power, but increasingly the amount of heat generated by the machines is a significant barrier to building faster more powerful computers. The researchers at IBM say they've made a breakthrough in how computers consume power which will…