IBM Think Conference Day 2

Creating a Bespoke Design Thinking Practice in Utilities with IBM Cloud Garage​

A major utilities customer has embarked on their own design thinking journey, but to meet their unique industry and internal requirements they needed help to support the scale and speed of their design thinking practice. These choose the IBM Cloud Garage as their design and collaboration partner to help define and scale their design practice and develop an approach to support it enterprise-wide. Learn how this collaboration has led to a successful design transformation for the customer.

IBM Research Science Slam: Predicting 5 Innovations to Help Change Our Lives in the Next 5 Years

Our mission at IBM is to help our clients change the way the world works. There’s no better example of that than IBM Research’s annual “5 in 5” technology predictions. Each year, we showcase some of the biggest breakthroughs coming out of IBM Research’s global labs –five technologies that we believe will fundamentally reshape business and society in the next five years. This innovation is informed by research taking place at IBM Labs, leading edge work with our clients, and trends we see in the tech/business landscape. Presented via a 'Science Slam' - our researchers will share their work and predictions through compelling, personal narratives that bring the technology out of the labs and into everyday life - in under five minutes each.

Video: Science Slam

Accelerating the Journey to AI

Organizations recognize data is what fuels digital transformation, and are looking for new ways to unlock the value of their data and accelerate their journey to AI. That is why 80% of them view AI as a strategic opportunity.  Yet, only 19% of organizations understand the data required for AI. Successful organizations apply a prescriptive approach to climbing the ladder to AI, based on a unified architecture that delivers everything they need for enterprise AI, on any cloud.  In this session, hear Chief Data Officers and Chief Innovation Officers share a behind-the-scenes look at their approach to managing the full lifecycle of AI, and the essential lessons learned on their journey to drive smarter decisions throughout the organizations.

Video: Accelerating the Journey to AI

Hybrid, Multicloud by Design. Accelerating the Enterprise Cloud Journey

Cloud is integral to virtually every enterprise digital transformation strategy. Yet less than 20% of workloads have moved to the cloud. Why? Put simply, complexity. Enterprises are struggling to modernize apps and workloads, and overcome persistent tech and data silos reinforced by vendor lock in. Agile enterprises can accommodate changing business requirements at speed. The right cloud foundation built on open standards frees workloads and data to run on the right cloud model, on or off premises, and across multiple clouds. It embraces tech and data from more sources to speed innovation. And when combined with unique industry, security and tech expertise, it can tailor the journey to cloud to your enterprise for better outcomes.

Hybrid Multicloud By Design

Transform Your Analytics with IBM Data Virtualization

Data virtualization allows customers to discover, query and control access to data across their enterprise in a scalable manner. IBM's new data virtualization technology is designed to query across data sources (IBM Db2 family, IBM Netezza, Oracle, Informix, SQL Server and many others), on-premises, on private cloud and public clouds and across geographies. The new technology provides a quantum leap in scalability over previous federation methods, with increased emphasis on governance and access control. Its primary goal is to enable central access across your data sources via a virtual data platform. This virtualization helps eliminate data silos, bringing the data closer to the business for actionable insights.

Transform Your Analytics

The Blueprint for Smart Businesses

How do you design your business for growth? Being "digital" at the edges is no longer enough. To succeed companies need to truly align the data they own towards purposeful innovation. This is the story of an insurance company who is now a risk management expert. Of a car manufacturer who found their competitive advantage in mobility. It is about an apparel retailer who is a fashion expert. But where do you start? Smarter businesses differentiate themselves from within. They have a culture of agile innovation that leverages AI and cloud on their journey to become a smart, secure and sustainable business. This is a new era for business - defined by incumbent disruptors - where companies who have a past, have the most promising future.

Video: Blueprint For Smart Buisnesses

What We've Built on IBM Quantum So Far​

Quantum computing offers theoretical speed-ups for many business applications. This includes creating new materials, calculating new markets and optimizing logistics. Accenture and IBM Research have come together in a first-of-a-kind partnership to demonstrate quantum computing’s applicability to today’s business challenges. Business application teams from over 15 different countries around the globe will be testing out their theories, by using IBM Q with the specific objective of showcasing the possibilities this new compute paradigm can bring.

IBM Think Conference Day 1

​I had the pleasure to attend the IBM Think conference in wet and chilly San Fran from Feb 11-14th of this year. 

The event overall was very interesting, thought provoking, and provocative. I'll be posting the event materials as well as some of my notes and thinking of the specific events and conference.

What's New In Dev Ops

On the first day, I didn't actually make it to this event due to traffic, but I was interested in it. Here's the material:

What's New In Dev Ops​

Core message: ​Devops is not about software development, it's about improving the economics of software delivery. Various IBM toolchains for DevOps are discussed. Worth a look, but a bit of an attempt to sell IBM tools in this space.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Designing for Today's Business Needs

This was an absolutley fantastic session, and it's unfortunate it wasn't recorded. A great demo of design thinking with developers, architects, and business folks.

New software designs start with many whiteboard sessions to sketch an idea, get insight from peers and ultimately total buy-in from stakeholders. How are you handling the likely re-architecture as you drive your cloud strategy? This can be laborious, time-consuming and often frustrating. Development teams need to agree on a new breakdown of capabilities, logical flows between services, and interaction with external services. Communicating this strategy can be complex within the team and with all stakeholders and LOBs. What's needed is a shared design space where teams modernizing applications can collaborate effectively to design and communicate an architecture as it continuously evolves.

A Picture is worth 100 words

Access the Future Today: Quantum Computing​

Quantum computing takes advantage of the laws of quantum mechanics found in nature and represents a fundamental change from classical information processing. For two years now, IBM has enabled more than 100,000 people around the globe to access quantum computers for learning, research, and tackling new problems. While still early, we believe it’s just a matter of time until we start using these devices to solve certain problems better than we can today. IBM’s Dario Gil will discuss this radically different approach to computing built on the laws of quantum mechanics and how the roadmap for mainstream adoption of this new technology is being forged today by IBM in collaboration with a global community across business, academia and research.

Video: Quantum Computing

How to Realize the Value of DevOps

I'll be honest: I didn't get a lot out of this session. There was some good encouragement that DevOps is the way to go, but little in the way of actually tackling it, or the business value it unlocks.

Join experts in a discussion about the challenges and direction of DevOps.

Speakers:

• Andrea Martinez, IBM
• Alan Shimel, Media Ops Inc (DevOps.com)
• Matthew Crabbe, QA Media
• Mick Ahmad, FannieMae
• Eitan Azoff, Ovum

IBM and SAP Cloud Platform: Agility to Intelligently Transform and Innovate Your Business

This was a pretty good discussion on leveraging good end user experience to unlock both digital transformation, but also enabling new channels for delivery.

Digital transformation demands an enticing customer experience across all channels independent of underlying data, and a flexible IT landscape that provides a comprehensive suite of integration tools. SAP Cloud Platform provides an enterprise grade business Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to help customers address those requirements. IBM GBS has enabled high-value use cases for how companies can extend and personalize their SAP S/4HANA deployments, both on-premises or in the cloud, and has built innovations side-by-side leveraging SAP Cloud Platform. Hear how IBM is providing a design-led approach with Apple iOS and is leveraging next-gen technologies like Blockchain and Watson with SAP Cloud Platform to create a unique value proposition.

Think 2019 Chairman's Address: Building Cognitive Enterprises

The linup for this event was far too long to even think about getting inside, so many of us caught the video from the restaraunt around the corner. A great networking opportunity nonetheless! Worth a look.

Join IBM Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty and some of the world’s top CEOs and leaders as they share their journeys to the Cognitive Enterprise.

Video: Building Cognitive Enerprises​

Interface

Great book and a very fun read. I think Stephenson co-wrote this book before Snow Crash. For sure before the horrendously long Cryptonomicon and it's sequels.

The story follows US Governor William Cozzano, who suffers a stroke just before he runs for President. A loose consortium of financial interests called "The Network" come together with the aid of a biotechnologist and a spin doctor to embed a biochip in Cozzano's head to recover from the stroke. This it does, but it also allows the Network to control and manipulate Cozzano into becoming the perfect candidate, and one that will work in the Network's best interests.

Very good read.

http://www.amazon.com/Interface-Neal-Stephenson/dp/0553383434

iRobots: Roomba & Scooba

After much debate, Hiyat came home with two household cleaning robots last week: the Roomba and the Scooba. You can't help but anthropomorphise these guys (we decided that they are males) and they've really helped out around the house.

 

 

 

The Roomba is a vacuuming robot and is the epitome of automation. He comes with a charging base that he finds himself, a timer, and he avoids stairs, walls, and will concentrate on areas that are dirty. He even dusts the baseboards and railings that he can reach. He will wake up at a prescribed time, wander all around the upstairs cleaning and then go and find his charging station underneath the night table when he's tired. He makes it all the way into both kids' rooms and does the bathroom floors too. You won't believe the dust and hair that he's pulled out of the carpets -- it's disgusting. If you put him on area rugs on the main floor he will stay on them and do a good job cleaning them.

 

 

The Scooba took a lot more time getting used to. He's a lot less automated than Roomba, without a timer or a base station. This becomes obvious after using him, because unlike the Roomba that only needs electricity, the Scooba needs clean water, cleaning solution, and to have the dirty water dumped out. He does a pretty good job too -- even on the slate. He vacuums, washes, and squeegees up the dirty water all in one go. It's good too, because unlike mopping it actually picks up the dirty water instead of just pushing it around.

 

 

 

Overall, I'm pretty impressed with this pair. They really help keep the house clean, which we don't always have time to do now that we have 3 kids. I'll start Scooba on the main floor and Roomba up on either the basement or the area rugs on the main floor (he would have already done the upstairs that morning) when we put the kids in the tub and by the time we're done we have clean floors througout the house. Very good labour saving devices even though there a bit on the pricy side at $5 

http://www.irobot.com/

Douglas Adams Interview: Is there an Artificial God?

 

In honour of Douglas' memory, Biota.org presents the transcript of his speech at Digital Biota 2, held at Magdelene College Cambridge, in September 1998. I would like to thank Steve Grand for providing this to us. Douglas presented this ''off the cuff'' which only magnifies his true genius in our eyes. -- Bruce Damer

This was originally billed as a debate only because I was a bit anxious coming here. I didn't think I was going to have time to prepare anything and also, in a room full of such luminaries, I thought 'what could I, as an amateur, possibly have to say'? So I thought I would settle for a debate. But after having been here for a couple of days, I realised you're just a bunch of guys! It's been rife with ideas and I've had so many myself through talking with and listening to people that I'd thought what I'd do was stand up and have an argument and debate with myself. I'll talk for a while and hope sufficiently to provoke and inflame opinion that there'll be an outburst of chair- throwing at the end.

Before I embark on what I want to try and tackle, may I warn you that things may get a little bit lost from time to time, because there's a lot of stuff that's just come in from what we've been hearing today, so if I occasionally sort of go… I was telling somebody earlier today that I have a four-year-old daughter and was very, very interested watching her face when she was in her first 2 or 3 weeks of life and suddenly realising what nobody would have realised in previous ages - she was rebooting!

I just want to mention one thing, which is completely meaningless, but I am terribly proud of - I was born in Cambridge in 1952 and my initials are D N A!

http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/

Why Great Minds Can't Grasp Consciousness

Personally, I believe that consciousness is an emergent property of complex, ordered (yet chaotic) systems which are not necessarily biological in nature. It's just that biology has spawned complex ordered systems to deal with information.

[Gross] wondered whether scientists would ever be able to measure the onset consciousness in infants and speculated that consciousness might be similar to what physicists call a "phase transition," an abrupt and sudden large-scale transformation resulting from several microscopic changes. The emergence of superconductivity in certain metals when cooled below a critical temperature is an example of a phase transition.

In a recent email interview, Gross said he figures there are probably many different levels of consciousness, but he believes that language is a crucial factor distinguishing the human variety from that of animals.

Gross isn't the only physicist with ideas about consciousness.

This bit sounds promising:

According to Greenfield, the mind is made up of the physical connections between neurons. These connections evolve slowly and are influenced by our past experiences and therefore, everyone's brain is unique.

But whereas the mind is rooted in the physical connections between neurons, Greenfield believes that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, similar to the 'wetness' of water or the 'transparency' of glass, both of which are properties that are the result of -- that is, they emerge from -- the actions of individual molecules.

For Greenfield, a conscious experience occurs when a stimulus -- either external, like a sensation, or internal, like a thought or a memory -- triggers a chain reaction within the brain. Like in an earthquake, each conscious experience has an epicenter, and ripples from that epicenter travels across the brain, recruiting neurons as they go.

 

http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/050808_human_consciousness.html

In The Age Of The Smart Machine

Zuboff asserts that the computer is paving the way for a redistribution of authority in the workplace. Geared to managers and information-systems experts, her findings, though ponderously written, will be of value to those who want to get the most knowledge and power from computerization.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465032117/qid%3D990751110/102-3394161-3320161

Fundamental Limits On Computation & Consciousness

The physical limits to computation have been under active scrutiny over the past decade or two, as theoretical investigations of the possible impact of quantum mechanical processes on computing have begun to make contact with realizable experimental configurations. We demonstrate here that the observed acceleration of the Universe can produce a universal limit on the total amount of information that can be stored and processed in the future, putting an ultimate limit on future technology for any civilization, including a time-limit on Moores Law. The limits we derive are stringent, and include the possibilities that the computing performed is either distributed or local. A careful consideration of the effect of horizons on information processing is necessary for this analysis, which suggests that the total amount of information that can be processed by any observer is significantly less than the Hawking-Beckenstein entropy associated with the existence of an event horizon in an accelerating universe.
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0404510

Wired AI Article

A new type of thinking machine that could completely change how people interact with computers is being developed at the Department of Energys Sandia National Laboratories. Over the past five years, a team led by Sandia cognitive psychologist Chris Forsythe has been working on creating intelligent machines: computers that can accurately infer intent, remember prior experiences with users, and allow users to call upon simulated experts to help them analyze problems and make decisions. Forsythes team was originally trying to create a "synthetic human" -- software capable of thinking like a person -- for use in national defense.
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,60153,00.html

AI Depends On Your Point Of View

Even the dumbest people can look at a situation from several different angles. But thats still a problem for even the smartest computer systems. The Real-World Reasoning project, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program, is designed to get computers to start examining situations in more than one way. Its part of a larger effort, spearheaded by the Agencys Information Processing Technology Office, or IPTO, to move toward machines that can think for themselves. Software has gotten a lot smarter in recent years -- computers are now much better at recommending books, guessing your chances for getting appendicitis, and even piloting a spaceship. But each of these efforts requires a different type of reasoning. And programs still stink at switching from one mode to another.
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,59799,00.html

Smart Heuristics

What interests me is the question of how humans learn to live with uncertainty. Before the scientific revolution determinism was a strong ideal. Religion brought about a denial of uncertainty, and many people knew that their kin or their race was exactly the one that God had favored. They also thought they were entitled to get rid of competing ideas and the people that propagated them. How does a society change from this condition into one in which we understand that there is this fundamental uncertainty? How do we avoid the illusion of certainty to produce the understanding that everything, whether it be a medical test or deciding on the best cure for a particular kind of cancer, has a fundamental element of uncertainty?
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gigerenzer03/gigerenzer_p2.html

AI Advances in Video Games

The video game in which this AI was embedded was Civilization III [see screenshot]. The creation of Firaxis Games (Hunt Valley, Md.), Civilization III sets the player and various computer opponents to fighting military, economic, and cultural battles across a randomly generated set of continents and oceans. While game AIs are most visible when they take on the role of an opponent to a human player, they can also be used to work in the games background, making sure the digital environment runs smoothly, and even on the players behalf in roles like tutors or wingmen. An increasing number of other games are taking advantage of changes in computer architecture and the growth in processing power to become smarter than ever before. Although most of these games use relatively unsubtle AI techniques, a few pioneers are even showing the academic AI community a trick or two. While AI originated in the laboratory, it has now been co-opted by designers of video games, and work is under way on increasing the learning powers of a video games cast of characters and refining their social interactions with one another and with human players, too. At this point, even cinematographers and the military are showing interest in possible applications.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/dec02/mind.html

God Is The Machine

At todays rates of compression, you could download the entire 3 billion digits of your DNA onto about four CDs. That 3-gigabyte genome sequence represents the prime coding information of a human body ? your life as numbers. Biology, that pulsating mass of plant and animal flesh, is conceived by science today as an information process. As computers keep shrinking, we can imagine our complex bodies being numerically condensed to the size of two tiny cells. These micro-memory devices are called the egg and sperm. They are packed with information. That life might be information, as biologists propose, is far more intuitive than the corresponding idea that hard matter is information as well. When we bang a knee against a table leg, it sure doesnt feel like we knocked into information. But thats the idea many physicists are formulating. The spooky nature of material things is not new. Once science examined matter below the level of fleeting quarks and muons, it knew the world was incorporeal. What could be less substantial than a realm built out of waves of quantum probabilities? And what could be weirder? Digital physics is both. It suggests that those strange and insubstantial quantum wavicles, along with everything else in the universe, are themselves made of nothing but 1s and 0s. The physical world itself is digital.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.12/holytech.html

More Wolfram Universe As Code Stuff

Stephen Wolfram, author of A New Kind of Science and creator of the Mathematica software system, captivated the audience at PopTech with his theory in a session titled "The Rules of Reality, Revealed." "Any system whose behavior doesnt look obviously simple to us is as simple as any computational system," said Wolfram, explaining the principle of computational equivalence.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,55939,00.html

Downloading Your Brain

Wed all like to live forever, but biology wont cooperate. So heres a modest proposal. Why dont we scan our most essential feature - our mind - digitize it, and transfer it to a computer? The result could be a kind of digital immortality. It would also release us from the limitations of our bodies, and allow us, paradoxically, to fulfill even more of our human potential, in a computer. This is the radical idea of inventor and writer Ray Kurzweil. In his book The Age of Spiritual Machines he draws a roadmap, showing how advancing computer technology and Artificial Intelligence will lead to the possibility of existence inside of a computer in just a few decades.
http://radio.cbc.ca/programs/quirks/archives/02-03/oct19.html

The Plastic Brain

An intricate society populated by billions of demanding neurons exists inside every brain. Each of those neurons has a complicated life with desires that must be met in order to stave off stupidity, according to research presented at the American Neurological Associations (ANA) annual meeting. Brain plasticity doesnt refer to the texture of ones gray matter, but instead indicates how the 100 billion or so neurons in a brain communicate with each other. A plastic brain is a learning brain.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,55779,00.html

A New Kind Of Science

The underlying theme of "A New Kind of Science" is that reality is like the "cellular automata" which scientists began simulating on computers three decades ago. These are computer programs -- some of them extremely simple -- that, if allowed to run indefinitely, may generate extraordinarily complex images and processes. Gazing at these kaleidoscopically rich images, scholars such as Wolfram and Fredkin began to wonder if they were witnessing more than just pretty pictures. Were they witnessing, in effect, the evolution of mini-universes on a computer screen? They werent alone in speculating about a link between the computer images and the real world. Some scientists, such as Oxford University evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins, claimed cellular automata mimicked the evolution of life. They developed cellular automata resembling insects that "crawled" around the screen and mutated, reproduced and ate each other.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2002/07/01/MN108224.DTL

One Billion PCs In The World

Its taken since 1975 for a billion pcs to be sold in the world -- but it will double by 2008. A perfect example of the Kurzweil singularity in action.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_2077000/2077986.stm

Number Of Computations Done Since The Universe Began

A physicist has worked out how many calculations have happened since the Big Bang. We are all living inside a gigantic computer. No, not The Matrix: the Universe. Seth Lloyd, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, has estimated how much information the Universe can contain, and how many calculations it has performed since the Big Bang. Lloyd views every process, every change that takes place in the Universe, as a kind of computation. One way of looking at the exercise is to imagine setting up a simulation of the Universe, particle for particle, on a hypothetical super-duper computer.To simulate the Universe in every detail since time began, the computer would have to have 10^90 bits - binary digits, or devices capable of storing a 1 or a 0 - and it would have to perform 10^120 manipulations of those bits. Unfortunately there are probably only around 10^80 elementary particles in the Universe.
http://www.nature.com/nsu/020527/020527-16.html

QA on Wolframs Book On Chaos/Biology/Mathmatics/Computation...

Almost all the science thats been done for the past three hundred or so years has been based in the end on the idea that things in our universe somehow follow rules that can be represented by traditional mathematical equations. The basic idea that underlies A New Kind of Science is that thats much too restrictive, and that in fact one should consider the vastly more general kinds of rules that can be embodied, for example, in computer programs.What started my work on A New Kind of Science are the discoveries I made about what simple computer programs can do. One might have thought that if a program was simple it should only do simple things. But amazingly enough, that isnt even close to correct. And in fact what Ive discovered is that some of the very simplest imaginable computer programs can do things as complex as anything in our whole universe. Its this point that seems to be the secret thats used all over nature to produce the complex and intricate things we see. And understanding this point seems to be the key to a whole new way of thinking about a lot of very fundamental questions in science and elsewhere. And thats what I develop in A New Kind of Science.
http://www.wolframscience.com/qanda/