ibm

Patients at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center may receive cancer diagnoses and treatment with the help of IBM's Watson supercomputer by the end of 2013.

Watson would make diagnoses and suggest treatment approaches that take into account individual patient concerns, the Associated Press reported today.

Using its natural-language processing powers, the artificial intelligence system will study textbooks, oncology studies, and medical records if patients give permission. An advisory panel will test its assessments of increasingly complicated cancer cases. … Read more

IBM said this evening that its scientists have developed a computer chip that can move a trillion bits of information a second.

Known as the "Holey Optochip," the prototype optical chipset can transfer the equivalent of 500 high-definition movies a second, or the entire U.S. Library of Congress Web archive in an hour, Big Blue said. The innovation is possible because IBM's scientists figured out that, by drilling 48 minuscule holes in a standard quarter-inch silicon CMOS chip, they were able to ramp up data transfer rates from what was possible.

And by breaking through the … Read more

Apple is once again tops in the eyes of the business world, according to Fortune.

The iPhone maker took the lead as the world's most admired company for the fifth year in a row.

Selected No. 1 by business professionals polled for Fortune's annual list, Apple was cited for its banner year. CEO Tim Cook was able to steer the company after the resignation and death of Steve Jobs to end 2012 with a prosperous fourth quarter thanks to heavy demand for the iPhone 4s.

Trailing in second place was Google, which went through its own transition last … Read more

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Scientists at IBM say they have made a quantum computing breakthrough that demonstrates that a full-scale quantum computer is not only possible but is within reasonable reach.

In an announcement being made today at the American Physical Society in Boston, Matthias Steffen, manager of IBM's experimental quantum computing group, will unveil the research that has led his team to conclude they are the brink of developing scalable technology that could far outstrip what even the strongest supercomputers can do today.

A traditional bit has only two states--zero and one. But for its quantum computing efforts, IBM has decided to … Read more

IBM researchers have created a subatomic snapshot of the electric charge within a molecule, an advance that could have applications in ever-smaller transistors or in solar power.

Scientists from IBM Research in Zurich, Switzerland, published a paper in Nature Nanotechnology today that describes a technique for measuring how electrons move when forming molecular bonds. This method allows them to create images of how the electric charge is distributed within molecules, giving science a better picture of chemistry at the molecular level, said Fabian Mohn, who coauthored the paper.

Having a picture of the electric charge distribution could be useful tool … Read more

What started out as a research project at IBM has become not only an unbeatable "Jeopardy" champion but also a new line of business for Big Blue. And it's coming to the cloud.

IBM's Watson project proved a big hit when it appeared as a contestant on "Jeopardy" one year ago and proved that machines are indeed smarter than man (I for one welcome our robot overlords.)

And now, IBM is taking Watson to the next level, having created a commercial business unit working to offer Watson both on-premise and as a hosted cloud … Read more

There was a time when IBM's mainframes were cutting-edge machines for scientific and engineering calculations.

Those days began in the 1960s, when IBM's System 360 rewrote the rules of computing and before humans walked on the moon. Big Blue long since has moved its high-performance technical computing effort toward its high-end Blue Gene systems and more conventional Linux servers using Intel and AMD x86 chips and Unix servers with its own Power processor. IBM's System Z mainframe line is now geared for commercial customers who are willing to pay a premium for reliability and high performance for … Read more

A team of researchers have designed a material durable enough to operate on a microscopically small scale, a step toward fabricating nanoscale biosensors and optical equipment.

IBM Zurich today announced the results of a collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Wisconsin-Madison to build an ultra-small probe tip, which is 10,000 times smaller than a pencil point. Because it's substantially harder than previous designs, it's hard enough to be a component in microscopic mechanical machines.

For example, these tips could be part of in-body monitors to track glucose levels in diabetic patients or sensors … Read more