Monthly Archives: June 2012

‘If Someone Has Relevant Content, We Want To Be Working With Them,’ :Dr. Josko Silobrcic IBM Watson

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by Susan Eustis

IBM Watson is being designed to read and understand questions, providing evaluative statements that are relevant to the diagnostic and treatment tasks at hand in clinical situations.  Watson is being trained to become a medical assistant, and a good one at that.

Boston is a hotbed of physicians, and those in attendance filled the room at the IBM Innovation Center for the launch of the IBM Campfire Series and the Watson lecture.  The doctors listened intently and asked insightful questions enthusiastically as Dr. Silobrcic talked about Watson.  IBM’s Dr. Josko Silobrcic is Senior Medical Scientist at IBM Research.  He discussed Watson technology and how it is being deployed at WellPoint and Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC).

According to Dr. Josko Silobrcic, the IBM Watson project is set to help physicians and clinicians deliver better healthcare by improving the information flow to them as a combination of structured and unstructured data flows into a composite rating system as a clinical presentation is collected.  The system is stateless, adding and subtracting data relevant to a particular patient presentation as it becomes known.

The IBM Watson project has set out to understand the entire body of medical information.  So far it has digested 220,000 documents.  These documents have been indexed and loaded into Watson.  The documents can be short or they can be an entire medical textbook.   The aim is to create a computer system that can be trained and can keep learning as new information is added to the research base.

“If someone has relevant clinical content, we want to be working with them,’ according to Dr. Josko Silobrcic.  An example of IBM collaboration with a clinical information organization is the partnership with NCCN. National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) is an alliance of 21 of the world’s leading cancer centers, is an authoritative source of comprehensive information.  NCCN promotes continuous quality improvement.  It has been instrumental in creating clinical practice guidelines.  The primary goal of NCCN initiatives is to improve the quality, effectiveness, and efficiency of oncology practice.

IBM Watson aims to improve the quality and safety of medical care delivery.  It takes aim at decreasing the cost of care.  It has been good at engaging patients, improving audit trails, and improving efficiency of care delivery.  Watson is set to help physicians and clinicians better utilize team skills.  This is a product that can support medical best practices, facilitating their delivery to the point of care.

Watson is positioned to advance the achievement of evidence based medical care.  Watson is an engine of healthcare delivery, leveraging algorithms and implementing scoring.  Patterns of care delivery that work are documented in the system.  Using Watson, various partners in healthcare work to deliver customized applications.  Watson is positioned to help with patient workups.  It helps physicians achieve a differential diagnosis that is consistently supported by the best information available.

 

Telephones

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 Today we write about telephones illustrating the value of partnershis.  KOONTECH is a professional manufacturer for industrial  telephones.  It has been doing this for 15 years. Regular customers include SIEMENS,AVAYA, CALCTEL, HUAWEI, ZTE.  End users include the UK Railway, Italian Railway, Hongkong MTR, Singapore MTR, Beijing Metro, Hongkong Airport, and Shenzhen Airport.

Products mainly include the following series: Waterproof Telephones, Emergency Telephones, Public Telephones, and Elevator Telephones.

Products have proprietary intellectual property rights and a patent.  The company is a unique professional telephone manufacturer with the IP67  waterproof standard, EN Railway 50121, CE, FCC certification.

Wireless Data Device and Software Apps Market Shares and Market Forecasts from WinterGreen Research

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by Susan Eustis

WinterGreen Research has two studies to be published in two weeks, on wireless data devices and on software apps.   The studies detail market shares and market forecasts.  Wireless smart phones and table devices are being used to enable B to B, B to C, and B to E.  These new uses depend on connectivity to the back end transaction systems in a secure manner.  IBM is uniquely positioned to support this transition in transaction management from the current Internet implementations to the wireless glass because it has such a strong position in integration software technology and in secure systems.
Bring your own wireless data device trends are impacting businesses, schools, workplaces, enterprises, and public venues.  The recent trend of employees to bring personally-owned mobile devices to their place of work, and using those devices to access privileged company resources is recurring and growing.  WinterGreen Research has a new study describing the trends for using devices to conduct transactions and for accessing email, file servers, and databases.
Wireless hardware device markets are divided between smart phones and tablets.  There ore over 1 billion smart phones in use worldwide.  Software used on the device often comes in the form of apps downloadable from an app store.
Wireless personal device access is making significant inroads in business.  90% of employees already are using their own technology in some capacity at work.  Businesses are not able to block the trend even if they want to.
The Apple App Store illustrates a digital application distribution platform for software that can be managed by iOS.  It is developed and maintained by Apple Inc, but other vendors support other stores. The apps are generally free and allow users to browse and download applications.  Depending on the application, they are available either for free or at a cost.  In the case of Apple, 30 percent of revenue from the store goes to Apple, and 70 percent goes to the producer of the app.

IBM’s Innovate Conference Panel of Highly Accomplished Women Executives in IT

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by Susan Eustis

IBM’s Innovate Conference had a panel of highly accomplished women executives in IT moderated by Connie Moore, Forrester Research.  The talk was about personal leadership mindset when taking business risks.  The panelists were:

- Gina Poole, Vice President, IBM Rational Software

- Cheryl Allison, Director, Raytheon Network Centric Systems

- Ellen Daley, Managing Director, Forrester Research

- Meg Selfe, Vice President, IBM Rational Software

- Karla Wallace, Senior Manager, General Motors

Gina Poole was eloquent in talking with the gathered women as was Ellen Daley.  It was a trusting group, seeking to encourage those women gathered to feel safe in their work environments to express themselves and create a work presence with which they are comfortable.  Advice flowed freely, creating an atmosphere of equality and support.

We were urged to seek a mentor and to have fun in our work.  We were reminded that men are trained as little boys to be competitive; women need to work to achieve the same sense of competitiveness.  This writer notes the innate differences between little boys and little girls, men and women.  Though raised competitively playing football and baseball and rough and tumble, this writer still notes significant difference between the sexes.

In any case the meeting had a lively discussion about the difference between being raised to play with dolls and to communicate or to go out and compete at a game.  We were encouraged by the speakers to create teams of people in our work, attract people who are intelligent and able to work in a team environment.  We were encouraged to tell jokes and create laughter in the workplace.  Gina Poole talked about some of the web site projects that had been successful for her, taking a risk to develop them and investing her own time to make them work.  She talked about recruiting others to help with the project in their spare time, and how she worked to make the projects grow.

The women were generally full of stories about themselves-  One woman had gone swimming with two other people out to the middle of a lake and then those people swam away from her, “leaving me to drown” as she said.  She had the presence of mind to turn back toward shore and not panic.  She floated on her back, swimming and resting until she got back safely, explained to those fascinated listeners that she was more careful after that how she chose her swimming companions.

Forrester’s Ellen Daley was an entertaining panelist talking about failure and how you need to admit failure and just go forward from there.  This was an impressive group of women execs in IT creating a team amongst ourselves nurtured by the shelter provided by the IBM Rational Software General Manager Dr Kristof Kloeckner whom we all thank.

IBM Green Hat and Rational Innovate Conference:

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By Susan Eustis

The IBM Rational Green Hat testing product provides the ability to produce software that can be trusted to work.  Test environments are a key aspect of that ongoing need to provide flexible response to changing market conditions is ever present.  Competitive pressures create the need to respond rapidly to new challenges.   The quantity of new code and existing code changes is significant as new products and services are rolled out.

It is possible to simulate a real production environment as soon as the developer is ready to test the code using GreenHat Rational testing products.  The GreenHat testing simulations can be used to access what the workload behavior will be after the new application is rolled out.  Reduced time and effort to test new code are significant because reduced IT complexity makes it easier for teams to support key business priorities.

Fujitsu Kazuo Yabuta Talks about Software System Test Engineering

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By Susan Eustis

Fujitsu Kazuo Yabuta is chief architect of the system engineering technology unit.  Fujitsu has developed a technique to automatically prepare test scenarios of data, to run the tests, and check the results based on a formal description of the application specifications.  It creates a situation where it is possible to provide more comprehensive testing scenarios.  This technique has been available for full scale application development.

Speaking at the IBM Rational conference, Fujitsu Kazuo Yabuta was eloquent in his descriptions of the value of testing in a methodical manner.  His experience is related to achieving structured process control.

Mikio Aoyama Software Engineering Initiative Represented at IBM Rational Innovate Conference

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By Susan Eustis
Mikio Aoyama Professor of Software Engineering at Nanzan University had an Initiative Represented at IBM Rational Innovate Conference in Orlando Florida.
The development of the Internet systems has provided interactive computing.  Mikio has a focus on the growing need for qualitative and quantitative improvements in software technology.   Decreases in the cost of computer hardware trigger a need for dramatic reductions in the cost of software.  Enhancing the quality and productivity of software opens up a wide range of possibilities for computers.
The NISE (Network, Information and Software Engineering) focuses on the aspects of information processing systems, as the integration of network, information, and software technology.  A main concern is to investigate the cooperation between humans and software technology.   SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) is an area of research where the technology to build applications with software functions is delivered through standardized interface and messages over the networks.
The major platforms of SOA include Web services which deliver functions over the Web, peer services over the P2P, Grid services over the grid, and mobile services over the mobile computing.

Mobile App Building: Kevin Stoodley, IBM Fellow, John Wiegand, IBM Rational Chief Architect, and Leigh Williamson, Distinguished Engineer IBM

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Building a Mobile App: Kevin Stoodley, IBM Fellow, John Wiegand, IBM Rational Chief Architect, and Leigh Williamson, Distinguished Engineer IBM

By Susan Eustis

Building a Mobile App: Kevin Stoodley, IBM Fellow, John Wiegand, IBM Rational Chief Architect, and Leigh Williamson, Distinguished Engineer IBM were able to demonstrate the steps for building a relatively simple mobile app from beginning to end at the IBM Innovate conference today. They explained that the complexity of building an app is to make something fairly difficult look really simple.
Building even a simple mobile phone app depends on designing from the glass to the back end by noting the functional and non-functional characteristics as a first step. These engineers had a tool that let collaboration occur in a concise manner. There was a sketch of user interface (UI) links. This was a simple sketch, but it was complete, it had been tested with users, not just designed by programmers.
The links in the app took into account the need for traceability, for describing relationships visually. It looked so simple to build the app once these engineers were able to show relationships between modules with a path. The audience could see descriptions of modules linked to a mockup with full disclosure of context.
Once you can see the app requirements, it was demonstrated how development works. The image had been integrated as someone had fulfilled the task of getting a graph from the marketing team. There was a requirements composer, there was a code developer. Once the tasks were integrated in the tool, one of the team could choose implement. With the development modules interacting with team concert it was possible to fill out missing pieces in relatively short order.
Developers work to test coverage and accuracy of the code, to be sure that it works. Traceability is a significant aspect of the code development. Relationships are expressed as links. User stories represent test cases that are a significant aspect of the app development.

Hayden Lindsey Moves IBM Into Mobile Apps for Enterprises to Give to Customers

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by Susan Eustis

Hayden Lindsey, IBM Distinguished Engineer and VP of the tools and compilers group, talked at the Rational Innovate conference 2012 about the challenges of enterprise modernization.  He went into detail when he described the opportunity for mobile apps that change how users interface to enterprise web sites.  Change in enterprise web site design needs to occur as users are connecting to the back end CICS systems.  CICS transactions account for more Internet traffic than Google.  Achieving connectivity to the transaction at the back end is a difficult problem in part because of the overall quantitiy of data that needs to be managed and in part because of the quality of the app that is needed.   Designing from the glass back to the mainframe is something IBM is expected to excel at.

The mobile systems form factor impacts user expectations.   The ability to download apps creates an expectation on the part of the consumer as to how the apps from enterprises should behave.  The user has certain expectations of usability.    Commercial enterprise apps cannot afford to behave in a less usable manner than the Apple store apps for consumers.  Enterprise apps that are launched from the Apple store that provide interface to an enterprise web site need to be free and to work in a compelling manner.  These enterprise apps need to get good reviews.  IBM is positioning to provide the software development tools and the integration software that permits enterprises to develop mobile apps that behave in the desired manner.

Greg Lotko Embraces Modernization of System z

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by Susan Eustis

Greg Lotko is the Business Line Executive of the System z Division for IBM Systems & Technology Group, responsible for all facets of IBM’s mainframe business including strategy, marketing, sales, operations, technology development and overall financial performance.  Greg spoke in a compelling manner about the modernization of the mainframe, creating a case for movement of front end web enabled Linux workload from distributed systems onto the mainframe.

He illustrated the modern aspect of the mainframe by comparing it to a corvette.  The look is still the same, but the insides have been modernized.  Greg complements the mainframe on its rock solid stability and scalability.  “Put the pedal to the metal (100 percent utilization), and it doesn’t blink!” is his interpretation of the mainframe.

According to Greg, the mainframe is able to move into virtualization markets.  Virtualization was pioneered on the mainframe.  The mainframe is far more advanced than competitive virtualization systems.  The mainframe virtualization can handle 1,000 images while competing systems may manage 55 in a similar configuration.  The mainframe is good at managing workload even as people move software from one environment to another, not paying any penalty as they have duplicate systems running during the move.