IBM-Sponsored “City Forward” Site Wins a Webby Award for Corporate Social Responsibility

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City Forward, a free IBM-sponsored website that city leaders and the general public can use to compare and consolidate multiple data sources for cities around the world, has won the 2013 Corporate Social Responsibility “Webby Award” from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS).

Gina Cardosi, IBM

Project manager Gina Cardosi

At Citizen IBM, Certified Project Manager Gina Cardosi (who worked on City Forward) writes about the genesis of the project, its use of open big data, and why City Forward is critical to this era of mobile computing, cloud computing, data analytics and the global socialization of information. Read more. 

Related:

The Webby Awards: Honoring the Best of the Web

The IADAS

Watson at Your Service: IBM Unveils the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor

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Watson will now be taking your calls: the IBM Jeopardy!-winning supercomputer is getting a job in customer service.

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IBM has unveiled the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, which uses cloud-delivered mobile and online chat technology to assist customers anytime and anywhere.  (Jon Simon/Feature Photo Service for IBM)

The IBM Watson team is pleased to announce the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, designed to revolutionize how companies and their customers interact with each other over the lifetime of their relationships.

The IBM Watson Engagement Advisor is a smart assistant whose services can be used in many industries, especially those that receive many customer service calls, including retailing, banking, insurance and telecommunications. It will help customer service agents and customers get the answers to their questions via an “Ask Watson” feature available through mobile devices, online chat sessions, email, and other means.

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The Watson Engagement Advisor will be able to quickly address customers’ questions, offer advice to guide purchasing decisions, and troubleshoot problems. In other words, when you need customer service, you might soon be interacting with Watson.

Read more on this new era of computing.

More:

Video: Announcing the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor

.PDF: IBM Watson Engagement Advisor – Transforming the way people and organizations interact over the lifetime of their relationship

Learn more about Watson

Follow Watson on Facebook

For more insights on this story, please visit the Smarter Planet Blog

Learn more about Smarter Commerce

Join the conversation about Watson by including the hashtag #ibmwatson

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- Posted by Regan Kelly

IBM’s Ginni Rometty Reveals Watson’s Future

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IBM CEO Ginni Rometty (photo, Fortune Magazine)

In this interview from Fortune Magazine, IBM’s Ginni Rometty reveals what’s next for the company’s talking supercomputer Watson, including its future service.

In addition, she discusses what it means for IBM to be an innovation company at a scale of more than 400,000 employees, the five key pieces of continuous transformation, and more.

Fortune senior writer Jessi Hempel interviewed the IBM CEO last week at the National Venture Capital Association’s 40th anniversary conference, VentureScape.

Read the interview.

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What did you think of this story? Let us know in the Leave a Reply field below.

- Posted by Regan Kelly   This post is part of The Greater IBM Connection’s May 2013 theme of emerging trends.

Watson Goes to Washington, Shows Off Latest Health-Care Work to Lawmakers

- by Emi Kolawole, in The Washington Post

IBM supercomputer Watson was in Washington, D.C. late last week to show lawmakers what it’s learned about health care. The Watson team has been collaborating with Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and health-care insurance provider Well Point to teach Watson everything there is to know in the medical world.

Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) receives a demonstration of new proposed capabilities for the Watson supercomputer on Capitol Hill Thursday, May 16, 2013. (Emi Kolawole)

Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), right, receives a demonstration from IBM’s Michael Holmes of new proposed capabilities for the Watson supercomputer on Capitol Hill Thursday, May 16, 2013. (photo, Emi Kolawole)

Members of the team were in Washington to showcase some of the supercomputer’s new health-care related features, including the ability to ingest patients’ medical information and synthesize thousands of medical journals and other reference materials along with a patient’s preferences to recommend treatment options.

Watson, IBM representatives made sure to emphasize, does not offer do-this-not-that instructions to doctors or diagnose patients on its own. Get the full story.

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Related:

Learn how Watson can help solve the health care challenge

IBM Watson for Health Care: The Voice of the Doctor (video)

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty Touts Watson, New ‘Golden Era of Technology’

Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy!-winning supercomputer, is about to become an advisor to research-oriented industries, says IBM Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty.

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty

Speaking in San Francisco this week to the annual meeting of the National Venture Capital Association, she said that Watson is part of a third era of technology, in which computers learn.

In fact, given today’s confluence of cloud, mobile, social and big data technologies, future historians may regard this era as “a golden era of technology,” she said, because the vast amount of information being generated will change how individuals make decisions and how companies work. Read what else she had to say, in this article by Deborah Gage at The Wall Street Journal.

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What did you think of this article and what’s next for Watson? Let us know in the Leave a Reply field below.

What Should You Tell Cloud Adopters? Five Key Messages

Frank De GilioBy Frank De Gilio, Smarter Computing blog

Recently I was part of a video debate panel on cloud computing. Actually rather than a debate, it was more of a discussion on the roles of public and private cloud in an enterprise.  Larry Carvalho, Kevin Jackson and I talked about issues in a discussion moderated by David Linthicum. While these discussions were hardly the arguments that make for entertaining video, they leveraged different perspectives to provide a good thumbnail sketch of what enterprises are experiencing when it comes to cloud infrastructure.

Photo: What would you tell cloud adopters? Here are 5 key messages:  http://ibm.co/YFl9Qe

David kept the conversation rolling and there were some very interesting topics that are important to businesses trying to create hyper-efficient IT services.  You can see some great clips, as well as the full replay in a blog post here.

The topics discussed by the panel deserve a little more discussion than was possible in the hour allotted. I plan to dedicate a post to each topic in the near future, but for the time being, there are a few messages that came out very strongly. What are those five key messages?

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Greater IBMers, what would you add to this list? Is anything missing?

- Posted by Regan Kelly. Part of our May 2013 theme of emerging trends.

IBM’s Culture of Service: Finding Time to Participate

Kathy Pham on a project with Orlando fourth grader Tamara

The author with her protégé Tamara, a fourth-grader in Orlando.

In this essay at Citizen IBM, IBMer Kathy Pham shares what she’s learned about finding the time to forge connection and community while spending most of her weekdays traveling as an IBM “road warrior”.

See how Kathy – a Business Analytics and Optimization Senior Consultant with IBM Global Business Services – navigates the mobile lifestyle while still finding the time to be engaged in personally fulfilling projects. She’s happy to be part of a company that provides “so many unique opportunities for service,” said Kathy. Find out how she does it.

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Related:

IBM: A Culture of Service

Greater IBMers, whether or not you are a current IBMer, how do you participate? Tell us YOUR story in the Leave a Reply field.

- Posted by Regan Kelly

Must Read: What Makes a Leader? One Crucial Factor

Most people in the workforce know a story (or two) about a highly intelligent, highly skilled candidate who was promoted into a leadership position only to fail. Many also can tell a story about someone with solid—but not extraordinary—intellectual ability and technical skills who was promoted into a similar position and then soared.

In other words, it can seem like identifying individuals with the right stuff to be leaders is more art than science, says author Daniel Goleman. After all, different leaders’ personal styles vary widely: some are subdued and analytical; while others spend more time promoting their agendas and themselves. Just as importantly, different situations of course call for different types of leadership.

In this classic piece from Harvard Business Review, Mr. Goleman explains that the most effective leaders are all alike, however, in one crucial way. What is it? 

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About the author:

Daniel Goleman is an internationally known psychologist who lectures frequently to professional groups, business audiences, and on college campuses. Emotional Intelligence remained on The New York Times bestseller list for 18 months. The Harvard Business Review called emotional intelligence “a revolutionary, paradigm-shattering idea”. The book was named one of the 25 “Most Influential Business Management Books” by TIME Magazine. In addition, The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Accenture Insititute for Strategic Change have named Goleman among the most influential business thinkers.

Now Playing: IBM Scientists Create a Movie by Moving Atoms

boy and“A Boy and His Atom” is the world’s smallest stop-motion movie. It can be seen only when  magnified 100 million times. It was made by a scanning tunneling microscope moving atoms.

And it was created by IBM Research.

Watch this remarkable 90-second film now:

More:

The Making Of: Check out this collection of photos from the scanning tunneling microscope lab at IBM Research – Almaden

How did they do it?

Exploring the limits of storage and moviemaking

Why Make the Atom Movie? To Get Kids Excited about Science and Technology

Learn more about atomic memory, data storage, and Big Data

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Greater IBM, what do you think?

- Posted by Regan Kelly

IBM Executives Broadcast May 15: Creating a Smarter Workforce

Mark your calendar – don’t miss this just-added broadcast with IBM executives and influential thought leader Patrick Wright of the Darla Moore School of Business, Wednesday, May 15 at 11 a.m. EDT. (When will this take place in my time zone?)

Register now for Creating a Smarter Workforce and learn about the IBM Smarter Workforce strategy, and how a smarter workforce can help you. Details:

Event infographic

Register and attend!

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- Posted by Regan Kelly