Category Archives: Australia

Geraldton, Australia Becoming a Smarter City, with IBM Help

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Working with an IBM Smarter Cities Challenge team, the city of Geraldton, Australia is working to build its eminence in technology and clean energy, to attract partners and investors on its path to becoming a global Smarter City.

geraldton

Geraldton CEO Tony Brun writes at Citizen IBM about how IBM and Geraldton’s collaboration on how best to use its abundant natural resources. As a member of the global community of Smarter Cities, Geraldton is today well positioned to improve the quality of life for its citizens while advancing its agenda for economic development. Get the story. 

Related:

Ginni Rometty Discusses How to Build a Smarter City:

The Smarter City (interactive)

- Posted by Regan Kelly

IBM Video Series Celebrates International Women’s Day

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iwd_squareInternational Women’s Day is this week: March 8, 2013.

To coincide with this global event, 18 IBMers – of all ages, cultures, and stages of their careers – are talking about IBM values, corporate social responsibility, job opportunities, and flexibility. In these videos, they’re sharing why they love being part of a company that makes the world a better place, with its enduring commitment to diversity (including diversity of thought), and its rigorous focus on innovation.

Check out the video below from IBM Australia:

In this video from IBM Diversity, Sylvie speaks of the opportunities and amenities provided in her time with IBM to promote family and professional achievements. She also shares her insight on how leadership is demonstrated differently when it comes to gender, and says, “Women tend to collaborate more, which can be the signature of a strong leader.”

Some of the events IBM has or will be participating in for 2013 for International Women’s Day:

IBM has also had a long history of supporting and participating in this notable worldwide event. Here’s a few of the past stories and events:

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Greater IBM: How do you plan to celebrate International Women’s Day?

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Additional resources:

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–Posted by Julie Yamamoto, Program Manager, The Greater IBM Connection

The Big Bang, Big Data, and IBM: Supercomputing R&D for Radio Astronomy

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This circuit board is covered with antennas geared to listen to radio signals of a frequency between about 450MHz and 1.5GHz. The Square Kilometer Array project aims to cover a square kilometer across the southern hemisphere of Earth with such antennas.

This circuit board is covered with antennas geared to listen to radio signals of a frequency between about 450MHz and 1.5GHz. The Square Kilometer Array project aims to cover a square kilometer across the southern hemisphere of Earth with such antennas. (Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

(from cnet.com)

HANOVER, Germany — IBM is working to advance the supercomputing state of the art in memory, optical links, and processing with research stemming from a massive radio telescope project.

Called the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), the telescope is to be built from 2016 to 2024 in southern Africa and Australia. Before that, IBM is working to develop the necessary computing technology through a five-year partnership with the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (Astron).  The idea is to create computing systems that can handle the tremendous quantity of data from the radio telescope, said Ronald Luijten of IBM Research in Zurich. It will produce 14 exabytes of data each day — about 14 million times as much as an ordinary PC’s hard drive can hold. Read more / see the photo gallery.

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– Posted by Regan Kelly, Editor/Community Manager, The Greater IBM Connection

Nothing to Sneeze at: IBM supercomputer takes on the common cold

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australia common cold2

An illness like the common cold has widespread health and social impacts. Indeed, the Human Rhinovirus (HRV), the most frequent cause of colds, is believed to exacerbate asthma in about 70 percent of cases; and in Australia alone, the common cold costs employers around 1.5 million workdays, or $600m in lost productivity per year.

In conjunction with researchers at the IBM Research Collaboratory for Life Sciences–Melbourne, scientists from St. Vincent’s Institute of Medical Research and the University of Melbourne are now using IBM supercomputing technology to simulate the common cold at the molecular level to build a fully atomistic, three-dimensional simulation of HRV.  This will allow researchers to gain a more precise picture of how a drug attacks rhinovirus at the molecular level, and potentially lead to future treatments for other viruses as well.

Read more about it in this Smarter Planet blog post by Dr. John Wagner, Manager, IBM Research Collaboratory for Life Sciences-Melbourne, Australia

Also check out this infographic on the common cold

–Posted by Julie Yamamoto, Program Manager, The Greater IBM Connection