Caught Red-Handed, Say Cheese

You’re a farmer and your life’s work is the cultivation of precious Parmigiano Reggiano cheese. You wake each morning to three golden ingredients—milk from northern Italy, salt and calf rennet—that you’ll combine to create a rich flavor for family gatherings and romantic evenings across the world. More importantly, you think, as you rise out of bed, it’s about the passing on of a tradition—bringing the past into the present. But at the grocery store, you notice an assortment of cheeses being sold under the guise of Parmigiano Reggiano, with ingredients you can’t even pronounce. Your heart drops. What do you do? Speak to the store manager? Warn customers as they walk by? No, this is 2015: you look to big data. By providing a real-time view of production, it can be determined which is the authentic Parmesan cheese, which is great for farmers, cheese-lovers and putting fraudsters out of business. The new Wild Ducks podcast is out. Listen to the quackers on cheese →

9 years ago

💻 IBM Japan in 15 Seconds 📚
Here’s your crash course on IBM Japan. In 1925, a tableware manufacturer installed the first IBM tabulating machine. In 1973, Leo Esaki won the Nobel Prize in Physics for electron tunneling. In 1982, the Tokyo Research Lab opened. In 1992, the ThinkPad700C was released. And now, in 2015, IBM’s teaming up with Apple in Japan to create an elderly-friendly iPad. We’re out of time, but rest assured, the goods are still being churned out. Class dismissed.

9 years ago

Learning 日本語

Spanish. Check. Portuguese. Check. Japanese? You got it. Cognitive polyglot IBM Watson is now taking on one of the ultimate linguistic challenges by adding Japanese to its repertoire. IBM and Tokyo-based SoftBank are teaching Watson to get a grasp of the thousands of kanji, 46 katakana and 46 hiragana characters, not to mention the almost endless contextual nuances Japanese presents. Once fluent, Watson will be able to understand, speak and think in Japanese, so it can analyze questions in the country’s mother tongue. 

9 years ago

People wait outside the museum to see the mysterious Automobile Accident Exhibit. They say things like, “I’ve heard it’s terribly sad” and “I don’t understand…what’s a car accident?” Sounds like a scene from a sci-fi flick, but Ralf Lenninger says, "We think there will be a point in time where accidents belong in a museum.”  He’s an engineer working with IBM Researchers to develop a technology that will actually make cars more aware of what’s going on inside and around them to make accidents a thing of the past. Interested in an automated car? Listen to how Ralf and Continental are making it happen  →

9 years ago

Man with Machine
A new THINK series

They help build our cities. Transport us. Record our history. Even wash the dishes. The machines we make remake the way we live. And now a new renaissance is underway. Through AI, we’re gaining new abilities that will enhance the way we create, work and play like never before. But don’t just take our word for it. We’ve collected a set of powerful quotes from leading futurists, scientists and journalists on the promise of AI technologies. And translated their thoughts into evocative works of art. Follow along as we explore the possibilities of not just artificial intelligence, but Augmented Intelligence—when people join together with machines to THINK.

9 years ago

The Ultimate Multitasker

Imagine if you could do one thousand trillion things at once. That’s what IBM’s Roadrunner did. Catherine Crawford and team created the first supercomputer to ever break the PetaFlop barrier. It would take the population of Earth 46 years to complete the tasks that Roadrunner can do in one day.

9 years ago

The nerds are out in full force. 

9 years ago

50… 51… 52… 53… Happy Pi Day-Hour-Minute-Second! 

9 years ago

Email Extractor

The next time you hit send and wish you hadn’t, don’t panic. This patent by Susann Keohane and team could allow you to revise an email you’ve already sent before the recipient reads it. Because let’s face it,we all have that one (or more) emails we wish we could take back.

9 years ago

Powerful Plastic

Jamie Garcia’s potentially world-changing discovery was the result of a happy accident – she left out a component needed during an experiment and ended up with a nearly unbreakable substance. This brand new kind of plastic is so strong that it’s easier to break the flask it’s created in than to damage the plastic itself. It could eventually be used to make recyclable car and airplane parts as well as aiding in 3D-printing applications and adhesives. Read more in Scientific American →

9 years ago