watson

After IBM's Watson computing system defeated two human competitors on Jeopardy this year, it partnered with the nonprofit Scripps Research Institute to direct the tournament prize money toward finding a cure for drug-resistant malaria.

Now all the team is asking for is a little help from around the globe. It's using the World Community Grid, described as a "supercomputer of the people," to use spare computing power from volunteered PCs.

Since the Grid was set up seven years ago, some 575,000 people in more than 80 countries have donated spare computing power from nearly 2 … Read more

Amazon wants to be the Netflix of books, and we can't wait. The 9/11 Memorial uses tech to honor the victims memory. If you just use Twitter to lurk, you're not a bot, we're paging Dr. Watson and we want your Android OS name ideas!

IBM has inked a deal with health insurer WellPoint that will let the latter use the technology behind "Jeopardy"-playing computer Watson to suggest patient diagnoses and treatments.

The arrangement, which marks the first time the Watson technology will be used in a commercial application, will be announced Monday, according to The Wall Street Journal. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

WellPoint hopes the technology will help improve the quality of patient care and help reduce costs. It will be introduced next year and will initially be used by nurses who review treatment requests from … Read more

According to an article in this week's MIT Technology Review, IBM researchers are working on a new 120 petabyte data repository made up of 200,000 conventional hard disk drives working together. The giant data container is expected to store around 1 trillion files and should provide the space needed to allow more powerful simulations of complex systems, like those used to model weather and climate.

The new system benefits from a file system known as General Parallel File System (GPFS) that was developed at IBM Almaden to enable supercomputers faster data access. It spreads individual files across multiple … Read more

Everything was fine in Android-land until the Gingerbread update. Well, then again, "fine" might be a little strong.

I'd been through an original Motorola Droid, which was a nice little keyboard wrapped in a seriously slow-performing phone with a terrible camera and no end of software update woes.

I went from that to the Samsung Fascinate, wooed by its sleek looks, great camera, and big, beautiful screen. Sadly, the Fascinate was loaded down with carrier crapware, including the staggering inclusion of Bing instead of Google as the default system search. It was so crippled you couldn't … Read more

You're sitting at dinner. The phone rings. You don't recognize the number. Who can it possibly be?

Either the lover of your dreams or, slightly more likely, someone trying to sell you a landline to add to your cable package.

And yet, it might well be that this won't be some ordinary telemarketer. It might be the infamous "Jeopardy" player, Watson, the IBM supercomputer.

The way ExtremeTech tells it, Watson is being groomed for even lower things than game shows.

For IBM reportedly has a dream of turning him into the world's most efficient (… Read more

For months, IBM's "Jeopardy" champion computer Watson has been a major PR win for the company, and tonight, its lead developer was awarded Big Blue's highest technical honor.

At a ceremony in New York, CEO Samuel Palmisano celebrated Watson team leader David Ferrucci and seven other employees as IBM's newest Fellows. The eight new Fellows join a group of just 209 previous winners, among whom have been the creators of technologies such as DRAM, the scanning tunneling microscope, Fortran, and relational databases.

And while the other seven 2011 winners include scientists and innovators who have … Read more

editor's notebook Since you've all no doubt shut off your smartphones for the "National Day of Unplugging" and hence can't rely on Angry Birds to help you procrastinate on doing your taxes (you have just a little more than a month, you know), I'll gallantly help you shirk (with an assist from the illustrious New York Times).

The Times' Web site is proudly making it difficult to get anything constructive done today, by offering up an interactive feature in its Science section that lets you try out your roshambo chops against a computer opponent. … Read more

The inventors of the digital camera, the industrial robot, public-key cryptography, and the barcode are just some of those being inducted into this year's National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Today, the National Inventors Hall of Fame announced its latest selections of the people responsible for some of the key technologies that we use and rely on today.

In 1975, a Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson built a device that was able to capture an image, convert it to an electronic signal, and then digitize and store that image, leading to the world's first digital camera, according to the … Read more