This stuff seeming almost from the future appeared a little while ago.
Watson joins the fight against cancer
Posted on Oct 18, 2013
By Mike Miliard, Managing Editor
First he won on Jeopardy!, now he's going to try to beat leukemia. The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center announced Friday that it will deploy Watson, IBM's famed cognitive computing system, to help eradicate cancer.
The two organizations will leverage Watson's computing power to help clinicians uncover insights from MD Anderson's vast patient and research databases, officials say. After a yearlong collaboration, the two will showcase a prototype of MD Anderson's Oncology Expert Advisor, powered by Watson.
That technology seeks to integrate the knowledge of MD Anderson's clinicians and researchers, and to advance the cancer center's goal of treating patients with the most effective, safe and evidence-based standard of care available, say officials. Starting with the fight against leukemia, the Oncology Expert Advisor aims to help clinicians develop and fine-tune treatment plans for patients, while helping them recognize adverse events that may occur throughout the care continuum.
"One unique aspect of the MD Anderson Oncology Expert Advisor is that it will not solely rely on established cancer care pathways to recommend appropriate treatment options," said Lynda Chin, MD, professor and chair of genomic medicine and scientific director of the Institute for Applied Cancer Science at MD Anderson, in a press statement.
"The system was built with the understanding that what we know today will not be enough for many patients," she added. "Therefore, our cancer patients will be automatically matched to appropriate clinical trials by the Oncology Expert Advisor. Based on evidence as well as experiences, our physicians can offer our patients a better chance to battle their cancers by participating in clinical trials on novel therapies."
First in Watson's sights: leukemia, which causes nearly one-third of all cancer deaths in children and adolescents younger than 15 years, according to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.
The technology is expected to be accessible to the cancer center's network of clinicians through a computer interface and supported mobile devices, say MD Anderson officials. This provides clinicians – and in turn, patients – with immediate, worldwide access to MD Anderson's expertise and resources, and to IBM Watson's technology prowess in quickly extracting crucial insights from large volumes of complex data.
With more than 100,000 patients cared for each year, MD Anderson has amassed a huge trove of clinical oncology data, but extracting usable insights from it all has proven difficult. Watson will try to extract and make sense of crucial information that might be otherwise trapped in databases, or in the electronic medical records of other providers.
Lots more here:
We also have this from the bleeding edge.
The Rapid Advance of Artificial Intelligence
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: October 14, 2013
The jubilant and occasionally squealing attendees appeared to have no idea that next door a group of real-world wizards was demonstrating technology that only a few years ago might have seemed as magical.
The scientists and engineers at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference are creating a world in which cars drive themselves, machines recognize people and “understand” their emotions, and humanoid robots travel unattended, performing everything from mundane factory tasks to emergency rescues.
C.V.P.R., as it is known, is an annual gathering of computer vision scientists, students, roboticists, software hackers — and increasingly in recent years, business and entrepreneurial types looking for another great technological leap forward.
The growing power of computer vision is a crucial first step for the next generation of computing, robotic and artificial intelligence systems. Once machines can identify objects and understand their environments, they can be freed to move around in the world. And once robots become mobile they will be increasingly capable of extending the reach of humans or replacing them.
Self-driving cars, factory robots and a new class of farm hands known as ag-robots are already demonstrating what increasingly mobile machines can do. Indeed, the rapid advance of computer vision is just one of a set of artificial intelligence-oriented technologies — others include speech recognition, dexterous manipulation and navigation — that underscore a sea change beyond personal computing and the Internet, the technologies that have defined the last three decades of the computing world.
“During the next decade we’re going to see smarts put into everything,” said Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington who is a specialist in Big Data. “Smart homes, smart cars, smart health, smart robots, smart science, smart crowds and smart computer-human interactions.”
The enormous amount of data being generated by inexpensive sensors has been a significant factor in altering the center of gravity of the computing world, he said, making it possible to use centralized computers in data centers — referred to as the cloud — to take artificial intelligence technologies like machine-learning and spread computer intelligence far beyond desktop computers.
Apple was the most successful early innovator in popularizing what is today described as ubiquitous computing. The idea, first proposed by Mark Weiser, a computer scientist with Xerox, involves embedding powerful microprocessor chips in everyday objects.
Steve Jobs, during his second tenure at Apple, was quick to understand the implications of the falling cost of computer intelligence. Taking advantage of it, he first created a digital music player, the iPod, and then transformed mobile communication with the iPhone. Now such innovation is rapidly accelerating into all consumer products.
“The most important new computer maker in Silicon Valley isn’t a computer maker at all, it’s Tesla,” the electric car manufacturer, said Paul Saffo, a managing director at Discern Analytics, a research firm based in San Francisco. “The car has become a node in the network and a computer in its own right. It’s a primitive robot that wraps around you.”
Here are several areas in which next-generation computing systems and more powerful software algorithms could transform the world in the next half-decade.
Lots more here:
This is really getting just more and more exciting. Both are must reads!
David.
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