Why IBM’s Watson represents innovation and half of Silicon Valley doesn’t!

Quoted from Wired.com

At a time when many young entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and Wall Street bankers are pumping internet startup valuations sky-high, IBM’s Watson project serves as a reminder that American innovation is about more than conjuring up a deal-of-the-day website or latching onto the latest social media gaming craze.

Watson “reads” the millions of pages of content in its “brain” in less than three seconds. The system is not connected to the internet, but totally self-contained.

Check out the rest of the article: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/02/watson-jeopardy/

IBM supercomputer Watson is set to square off tonight in a historic Valentine’s Day encounter against Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a landmark test of artificial intelligence. #IBMWatson.

As I have stated earlier, our economy, our society and our world needs creative thinkers who can think outside the box. Don’t follow the herd. Create something new. Define something new. Define yourself.

Hope this inspires.

IBM TJ Watson Research Center receives IEEE Corporate Innovation Recognition!

This really resonates with me as I recently hosted an event releated to the future of social media at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center.

The IBM T.J. Watson Research Center will receive the 2009 IEEE Corporate Innovation Recognition for its advances in speech recognition technology. The award, sponsored by IEEE, recognizes the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center for long-term commitment to pioneering research, innovative development and commercialization of speech recognition. The award will be presented tonight at the IEEE Honors Ceremony in Los Angeles, California.

The IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, led by Dr. David Namahoo since 1998, has pioneered much of the basics of speech recognition technology and continues to be influential in setting the directions in which the technology moves today. The benefits of speech recognition technology can be “heard” in many aspects of everyday life. When using voice commands in the car to initiate a phone call or to change the music playing on the audio system, or when speaking what you want while calling for customer service, it is speech recognition technology that understands what is being said.

Ofcourse, allso benefitting from speech recognition technology are those who are not able to physically type on a keyboard and can instead enter data by speaking words into the computer as well those people who are deaf or hard of hearing, who benefit when audio content is automatically captioned.

IEEE Medal of Honor, for an exceptional contribution or an extraordinary career in the IEEE fields of interest, sponsored by IEEE Foundation to Robert H. Dennard – IBM Fellow, IBM Thomas Watson Research Center, New York City, NY, USA

I am always in support of technological innovations that help all of us in some way or another. Congrats IBM Research team, you guys deserve it!

You can find more information about the award here: http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/about/awards/HonorsCeremony/2009hc.html.