1. Oded Cohn
Director, IBM Research ‐ Haifa
Living in a Smarter Planet
© 2011 IBM Corporation

2. In a Smarter Planet everything is becoming
INSTRUMENTED INTERCONNECTED INTELLIGENT
MANUFACTURING IT CUSTOMERS
WORKFORCE SUPPLY CHAIN TRANSPORTATION FACILITIES
INTERNET OF THINGS
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3. Challenges are everywhere; opportunities are broad
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4. Smarter Planet affects our basics
•How shall we, as individuals, live in this new
emerging environment?
•Will we benefit from our planet becoming
smarter?
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5. In the U.S., a typical carrot has traveled 1,600 miles, a
potato 1,200 miles, a chuck roast 600 miles…
… grocers and consumers throw away $48 billion
worth of food every year
with the cost of 1 grain of rice one can buy more than 100 transistors
IBM and Matiq are developing a smarter food tracking solution,
the first‐of‐its‐kind in the Nordics …
… it uses RFID technology to track and trace meat and poultry
from the farm, through the supply chain, to supermarket shelves
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6. Smarter water management
Leakage detection at the network level using analytics
The average water loss level is 20% in EU countries
London loses nearly 50% of its water due to leakage
in aging pipelines
Water loss reduction using dynamic pressure control
Optimal valve placement for effective pressure management
Link with asset management to enable rapid repairs and maintenance planning
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7. Analytics
will affect personalized evidence based medicine
Predicting Breast Cancer
• Chemotherapy or hormonal
therapy reduces the risk of
distant metastases by
approximately one‐third (30%)
• Currently – treatment is been Will my disease recur?
Do I need adjuvant treatment?
given to about 80% of the
patients
• As a results – about 60% of the
patients are been given
unneeded treatment
Our goal: Systemic adjuvant treatment for breast cancer patients
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8. Growth markets deserve adequate technologies
Spoken Web ‐ a parallel web for the masses
Traditional web
Post Web
Search query Text Pages
Web pages
Spoken web Expert/
Farmer Hyperlinked Voice Sites Business info
“Improved Post
VOICE
average
Information
yield output after Questions
using
pesticides
I got to know
from this
Answers
service”
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9. Changing the way the world works
Human assisted computing: via mobile phones
Creek Watch – an iPhone app that helps report on creeks
conditions
(more in 5 x 5)
“mobile sourcing” ‐ use spare cycles of cell‐phone users to do
some useful work
– Real time translation
– Reading signs for the blind
– Assist in books digitization
– Your original ideas here ☺
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10. Want to play chess or just chat?
• Chess (DeepBlue – Kasparov, 1997)
–A finite, mathematically well‐defined search space
–Limited number of moves and states
• Human Language
–Words gain meaning when grounded in human cognition
–Computers can not bind words to human experience to derive meaning
© 2011 IBM Corporation
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11. IBM Research
Hard Questions?
Computer programs are natively explicit, fast and exacting in their calculation over
numbers and symbols….But Natural Language is implicit, highly contextual, ambiguous
and often imprecise.
Structured
Unstructured
Where was X born?
– One day, from among his city views of Ulm, Otto chose a water color to send
to Albert Einstein as a remembrance of Einstein´s birthplace.
X ran this?
– If leadership is an art then surely Jack Welch has proved himself a master
painter during his tenure at GE.
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12. The Jeopardy! challenge
Automatic question answering along 5 key dimensions
Broad/Open $200
Domain If you're standing, it's the
direction you should look
to check out the
Complex wainscoting.
Language
High Precision
$2000
Accurate Of the 4 countries in the
Confidence world that the U.S. does
not have diplomatic
relations with, the one
High that’s farthest north
Speed
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14. Potential business applications
Tech
Support
Healthcare
and life
sciences
Enterprise knowledge
management and
business intelligence Government
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15. Next Five in Five
Innovations that will change the way people work, live and play over the next
five years:
• You'll beam up your friends in 3‐D
• Batteries will breathe air to power
our devices
• You won’t need to be a scientist to
save the planet
• Your commute will be personalized
• Computers will help energize
your city
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anKiEoxkpxM © 2011 IBM Corporation
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