IBM's Robert Talbot (while in Latvia) talks about Watson

IBM's Robert Talbot attended a local IBM Forum conference in Riga, Latvia recently, where he sat down to talk to this blogger (wearing both my Latvian and English-language blogger hats) about the future of the artificial intelligence entity called Watson.  Here it is -- the color is a bit weird and the inter-titles are in both Latvian and English. Anyway, good luck on your med boards, Watson. 

Michael Curry talks about the Websphere Application Accellerator at Impact 2011

Here is my video interview with Michael Curry of IBM about the new Websphere Application Accellerator for Hybrid Networks during Impact 2011 in Las Vegas. The video was originally edited for a Latvian speaking audience, hence some of the opening and closing titles.

Some video from IBM's IOD/Business Analytics conference

When I arrived at IBM's Information on Demand/Business Analytics Forum 2010, there were signs saying that there should be no video or audio recording of "sessions". I didn't see anyone else recording at the keynotes, so I didn't take the chance (usually, given the choice between bending or breaking rules not involving the life and limb of others and getting a good story, I would choose the story). Anyway, I did get some video of Akiba Saeedi, an IBM executive who talks about emerging markets and the new area of stream computing, analyzing data streams on the fly.
So here is the video, with some Latvian titles because it is also on my Latvian workplace blog.

Reflections on IOD 2009 and the Babylonian Sheep

IBM's conference Information on Demand 2009 (IOD 2009) took the IOD story a step further with considerable attention paid to predictive analytics. No surprise, as IBM just completed the acquisition of SPSS, a Chicago-based predictive analytics company.

Indeed, the IOD sequence has gone from gathering and grooming data (a single, hopefully truthful view of the company/customer base), making it all accessible (de-siloing), finding hidden gems (data mining and analysis) to using the data to look into future trends and developments (predictive analytics or wild guessing with lots of numbers/??/).

Common to all of this is that we have a large global base of electronic data that various smart spiders can zip through and give us the answers we need. But that sort of presumes that this vast electronic data base, growing by exobytes every year, will still be fully searchable and subject to analysis in 50 or 100 years.

Which brings up the Babylonian Sheep Question that I put to a few IBM folks, including Ambuj Goyal, but got no really satisfactory answer. Which is fine, because there probably is none. It is not so much a question as a kind of meta-framework setter.

So what is the Babylonian Sheep Question?

Simply, that if I want to get a rough idea of what the market was like for sheep in Babylon 4000 years ago, much of the data warehouse (clay tablets) are still there. One can drill down to the single transaction record level -- Uruk sold 20 sheep to Gilgamesh for 50 bushels of wheat, or whatever. Since the data warehouse (scattered among various museums) has survived 4000 or more years, I can safely assume it will be around in 200 or 300 years, never mind 50 years down the road (assuming no nuclear holocausts or the like, although that would only bake the clay more...).

Now, as for all those exobytes -- I really don't know what will be accessible in 2030. I certainly can't access some of the floppy disks I still have with stuff I wrote in the 1980s. With the global datasphere growing at petabytes per week (month?) it is clear that we will have to have new data compression and storage technologies. Otherwise we will be replacing the world's forests with forests of blade servers. I can imagine that 10 years from now, most data will be stored holographically in the cloud or in some other extreme volume storage technology. That is a long way from the floppy disk.

Ambuy Goyal, by the way, talked about data decommissioning, which addressed the issue of keeping relevant data around and instantly accessible, while putting historically interesting, but operationally irrevelant data stored elsewhere. Fair enough. But no answer to the Babylonian Sheep question. Because irrelevant as Uruk's sale of 20 sheep is 4000 years later, it is still there and available in printed translation from the cuneiform inscriptions. What will happen to my first American Express purchase records (from 1977 on some mainframe), which may be of some relevance when I am a 80 year old geezer some 20 years from now is another question. It may be solved, probably will be solved. But I am not all that confident that our entire electronic record of the world and daily life will be as durable as those fragmentary records of the Babylonian sheep market that we can still examine and analyze today.

IBM IOD 2009 second day highlights (videoblog)

Here is my video of what I thought were highlights of the second day of IBM's Information on Demand conference (IOD 2009) in Las Vegas. I also shot a lot of footage of Malcom Gladwell's address on the third day, but I may not be able to post that until I am back in Latvia.

A look at SPSS, IBM's new predictive analytics acquisition

I had a chance, while at IBM's IOD 2009, to talk to Jason Verlen, the chief product strategist at SPSS, a predictive analytics company recently acquired by IBM. Here is a video, unfortunately filmed near a source of green light which I did not notice. Did my best to make Jason look less Martian with iMovie :).

Highlights of day one at IBM's IOD2009

I am in Las Vegas on assignment from my day job at IBM's Information on Demand (IOD2009) and recorded some highlights of the opening day's presentations by Ambuj Goyal and Frank Kern.

The IOD 2008 opening show

IBM put on a rather impressive opening show at Information on Demand 2008 in Las Vegas (Vegas, after all). I shot some video of it -- the psychedelic performance and a nice sexy singer with a very libertarian song (my politics, sort of :) ).

I'm heading back to Riga today via Chicago and Frankfurt, a day on planes. There will be more to post -- video mainly-- from the conference when I get back.

At IBM Information on Demand

I am at IBM Information on Demand in Las Vegas. Not much time to blog, but it looks like we will here something about industry specific solutions (not just middleware to keep the data accurate and deliver it, generically, where it is wanted. They should also touch on cloud computing and delivery platforms

I have shot some video and will post it in the next couple of days (I head back to Latvia on October 29). Great stuff with Jeff Jonas, a genius on stitching unrelated data,  also some Steve Mills (head honcho of IBM's Software Division). Hope to edit it and get it out on my Latvian blog and here.

IBM Impact 2008, some random highlights

I tossed together some video from IBM's conference on Smart SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) Impact 2008. The start and end titles have some phrases in Latvian, as this is a dual use video.

IBM brainiac talks about widgets, mashups, SMEs

I got a chance to talk to Jason McGee, one of the chief developers of the IBM Mashup Center and the scripting language Websphere sMash about how small and medium businesses could use mashups for various purposes. This was recorded at the IBM Impact 2008 conference in Las Vegas. 

IBM honcho on SOA for small and medium business

I got a hold of Steve Mills, the Senior VP at the IBM Software Group (not an Executive VP, as I have mislabeled him on the video) for a talk about service-oriented architecture for IT systems as it applies to small and medium-sized businesses. I will be cross-posting this on my Latvian-language blog. This was recorded at the IBM Impact 2008 conference in Las Vegas, where I have been for several days. I will be back in Latvia on April 12 to write, probably, about the latest lunacies surrounding Lattelecom.

On the ground in Vegas for Impact 2008

UPDATED ON APRIL 7

I am on the ground in Las Vegas at IBM's Impact 2008 conference (about SOA and other rocket-sciency stuff). I was in the Boston area seeing family and getting away from the ongoing zoo in Latvia (about Lattelecom, but other stuff as well). Even Vegas seems normal by comparison. One strange thing I saw at McCarren Airport in Las Vegas was this iPod dispenser. Crazy. If it were iPhones, it wouldn't be there anymore.

I finally uploaded  a picture I took of the iPod dispenser (you have to use a credit card to buy one), yesterday, the picture upload function popped up once and didn't  working :(.  Also on the not-working list -- the WiFi network (for my MacBook) in the IBM press room here at the MGM hotel. Found an Ethernet connection.  But already a number of things seriously suck.