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Category: health
IBM late last week renewed its commitment to big data, the white-hot field of analytics and insight-mining. The company promised to invest $100 million in research tools, and threw its weight behind the Hadoop open-source technology used by Google, Yahoo and Facebook for managing globs of unstructured data.
During a break at the big-data confab at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., I had a chance to hear about another project: the education of IBM’s Watson supercomputer as a medical student. Watson, you may recall, is the question-answering demolisher of former Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. But for more than year before the airing of the Jeopardy contest, IBM’s Watson team had been prepping the underlying DeepQA software to take on the data problem of health care diagnosis. Answering the question “What’s wrong with this patient given these set of symptoms and this family history?” turns out to be a natural fit for the computer.
visit link to read full Forbes article:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2011/05/25/ibms-watson-now-a-second-year-med-student/
……….. IBM-Maryland are three to five years from a real pilot test with doctors and widespread use of Watson as a diagnosis tool is more like 8 to 10 years out.
What is Watson? (wiki definition)
Watson is an artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language,developed in IBM’s DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM’s first president, Thomas J. Watson.
In 2011, as a test of its abilities, Watson competed on the quiz show Jeopardy!, in the show’s only human-versus-machine match-up to date. In a two-game, combined-point match, broadcast in three Jeopardy! episodes February 14–16, Watson beat Brad Rutter, the biggest all-time money winner on Jeopardy!, and Ken Jennings, the record holder for the longest championship streak (74 wins). Watson received the first prize of $1 million, while Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter received $300,000 and $200,000, respectively. Jennings and Rutter pledged to donate half their winnings to charity, while IBM divided Watson’s winnings between two charities.
Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage,including the full text of Wikipedia,but was not connected to the Internet during the game. For each clue, Watson’s three most probable responses were displayed on the television screen. Watson consistently outperformed its human opponents on the game’s signaling device, but had trouble responding to a few categories, notably those having short clues containing only a few words.
Interested in accelerating change & lifestyle redesign? Then you must learn about Ubi!
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: CLICK HERE [kickstarter project]
The Ubi is an always-on voice-activated computer ready to help. Just plug it in, talk to it and it’ll help you connect with your world.
Ubi – Always on. Always ready to help.
Ubi is a voice-activated computer that plugs into a wall outlet. You talk to the Ubi and it talks back. It directly connects to the Internet through wifi.
“Look ma, no hands!”
We believe people want to do things when they’re at home – they clean, they fold laundry, they cook, they eat, they spend time with loved ones. These are all things that (for the most part) take up use of our arms and hands. When we’re at home, we’d rather use our limbs for other activities than typing, scrolling, or swiping.
Ubi is short for ubiquitous computer because it’s always on, always listening, always ready to help. It can scribe, listen, analyze. Ubi will either talk back to you the information you seek or indicate information through multi-color lights.
Ubi listens to its environment and senses it through sound, temperature, light, pressure, and humidity. It can record this information or use it to trigger events and communication.
What can it do?
Ubi can be used for potentially hundreds of applications. The applications we plan to ship with the Ubi are:
- Voice-enabled Internet search
- Speakerphone
- Indicator light (light changing based on events, e.g. weather, stock, email)
- Home speaker system with sound piping
- Virtual assistant (audio calendar, feed reader, podcast etc)
- Voice memos
- Alarm clock
- Intercom system
- Baby monitor
- Noise pollution monitor
- Controlling the climate of your home perfectly (through web enabled thermostats like Nest)
A Helping Hand
We see a huge potential for Ubi to assist those who have visual, hearing, or mobility impairments. With its indicator lights and talk-to-activate functionality, Ubi is super simple to setup and use. We want the Ubi to make it easier for our parents and loved ones to stay connected with us and the world.
Your Kickstarter Contribution
We’re serious about making this technology of our dreams easily available to everyone. Your Kickstarter contribution is going to allow us to get safety approval (FCC and CE) so that it can be used everywhere. It will also help driving down the cost of making the Ubi so that everyone can afford at least one. In a nutshell, your contribution will:
- Allow us to meet regulatory approval
- Get our first production run in place (tooling, machining, and chip printing – we are working with local firms who are very talented)
- Allow us to complete the initial apps we’re going to deliver with the Ubi
Rewards
Each Ubi reward above the $1 level comes with one Ubi unit that has wifi and a slew of other functionality. It also includes the Ubi web, iPhone and Android app and access to the Ubi portal to monitor and setup the Ubi remotely. You’ll also get early access to the API.
Ubi is available in arctic white or midnight black. Please specify which is your preference when you back the project.
- $1 – Access to backer-only updates and early offers when product is launched
- $149 – Early backers – 1 Ubi (limited to first 100)
- $189 – Single Ubi
- $349 – Two Ubis
- $479 – Three-pack of Ubis
- $649 – Five-pack of Ubis
- $6,000 – Distributor pack – 50 Ubis
How it works
Ubi plugs into a wall outlet and accesses the Internet through a wifi connection. It has a microphone and speakers and listens for commands. Saying “Ubi” wakes up the Ubi for receiving verbal commands. You can then instruct the Ubi to do your bidding. Ubi will receive plain language commands. Ubi communicates back to you through speech or by using lights.
Onboard the Ubi are sensors to monitor your environment:
- Temperature
- Humidity
- Air pressure
- Ambient light
This data can be stored online or used to trigger alerts to your mobile device or email.
The Ubi runs Android with a powerful processor to perform voice recognition and also has the ability to connect to other devices. You can plug in speakers, USB drives, or connect through Bluetooth directly to your iPhone or Android device. For developers, you can also communicate with potentially thousands of devices (through RF, wifi, or Bluetooth) and we’re making the device open so peripherals and other applications can be used with it.
Technical Specs on the Ubi
- Android 4.1 Jelly Bean
- 800 MHz ARM Cortex-A8 Processor
- 1 GB RAM
- 802.11 b/n/g Wifi Enabled (WEP, WPA, and WPA2 encryption)
- Hi fidelity speakers and omni-directional microphone
- USB 2.0 with 5 V power supply
- Bluetooth 4.0
- Temperature, humidity, and air pressure sensors
- Ambient light sensor
- RF Transceiver Module
- Plugs into a standard NA 110 V, 15A power outlet (world versions to be forth-coming) UPDATE: NA two-prong plug, but 100-240 VAC, 50-60 Hz support!
- Dimensions (approximate): 4.0″ x 4.0″ x 1.1″
Where We’re At
We’ve been working for over ten months on the concept, design, and prototyping of the Ubi and we’re now at a point where we’re ready to bring it to the Kickstarter community. We’ve also built an early working prototype and have been refining the design to make it more compact and easier to use. We’ve been in contact with manufacturers and suppliers and have spec’ed out the costs for bringing the Ubi to market. Ubi is currently slated to work in English with North American voltages. We hope to expand this to other regions and languages.
We’re working with local and overseas suppliers for sourcing the Ubi’s electronics and plan on completing the machining, assembly, testing and certification of the Ubi in the Toronto area. We’ve also worked with certification authorities for pricing of safety and communication testing of the Ubi and inspection will be completed at the final point of assembly.
Our team is experienced in working on dozens of projects for engineering research institutions. All of our team members have engineering backgrounds and have delivered on real engineering projects in the past.
Sample Data from the Ubi
Below is an example of some of the data that will be available from the Ubi as it monitors different aspects of its surrounding environment. The Ubi can constantly monitor your home to provide triggers or feedback.
To learn more about pre-ordering a Ubi: CLICK HERE