Which medicines should Europe's health systems pay for – and how much should they pay? No apologies for returning to the issue, because Europe's authorities have seized on it once again, putting drug pricing at the top of the bill at a meeting of Europe's health ministers in mid-April. Pharmaceutical executives never tire of the discussion either -- because they know that if it goes the wrong way, they could be out of a job, and that in the current tough economic climate, nothing can be ruled out. Even Sanofi's CEO Olivier Brandicourt, the strong man of France's drug industry, was ready to admit -- on his home turf, at a meeting in Lyon, on the eve of the health ministers' meeting -- that he was "not optimistic" that the industry was getting its message across. So there is fertile ground for the health ministers' discussions of pricing -- clothed in the modest figleaf of "Innovations for the benefit of the patient", as a concession to the traditional member-state insistence on keeping these decisions at national level.

IBM is expanding its flash storage lineup to power cloud data centers that carry out so-called cognitive computing. The company's newest FlashSystem arrays, introduced Wednesday, combine its fast and relatively affordable FlashCore technology with a scale-out architecture designed to be easy to expand. Cognitive computing, which IBM defines as real-time data analysis for immediate, automated decision-making, is at the heart of much of IBM's current technology push for enterprises and service providers. Its Watson technology is the star of the show but only the most visible part of what the company is doing in this space. An example of cognitive computing is a mobile operator analyzing information about phone call quality to make decisions on the fly about changes in the network, said Andy Walls, an IBM Fellow and CTO for flash systems. Large-scale, real-time computing needs flash, IDC analyst Eric Burgener said.

When most people think about artificial intelligence and cognitive computing, they think of futuristic technological landscapes overrun with evil robots. But a growing number of business and IT leaders are beginning to grasp how cognitive computing is radically reshaping the present IT landscape. This next wave of information technology is giving businesses the ability to outthink their competition and giving society the ability to solve some of our most pressing problems. In 2011, when a first-generation cognitive system outplayed two human Jeopardy champions, it did only one thing: answer natural-language questions. Today, that family of cognitive solutions has more than 30 capabilities, accessed via application programming interfaces (APIs) and delivered from the cloud.

IBM's California research lab sits atop a green hill in Almaden, 15 miles south of downtown San Jose. There aren't any signs that suggest if you drive up the narrow road that wraps around the hill you'll find a research facility at the top. No signs that the research center is home to a Fortune 500 company. No signs -- even inside -- that the company once dominated the personal computer industry. After decades in the spotlight as a hardware-centric firm selling PCs, servers and mainframes, the 105-year-old tech giant has made a dramatic shift into a realm that few understand: cognitive computing.

The arrival of artificial intelligence and its ilk -- cognitive computing, deep machine learning -- has felt like a vague distant future state for so long that it's tempting to think it's still decades away from practicable implementation at the point of care. And while many use cases today are admittedly still the exception rather than the norm, some examples are emerging to make major healthcare providers take note. Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, for instance, recently examined open source algorithms and machine learning tools in public health reporting: The tools bested human reviewers in detecting cancer using pathology reports and did so faster than people. Indeed, more and more leading health systems are looking at ways to harness the power of AI, cognitive computing and machine learning. "Our initial application of deep learning convinced me that these methods have great value to healthcare," said Andy Schuetz, a senior data scientist at Sutter Health's Research Development and Dissemination Group.

Rob has worked for IBM for almost two decades, first as Fellow and Chief Architect for the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) foundation. His current project is Watson, the company's cognitive computing technology that aims to change the way machines interact with humans at the linguistic, emotional and semantic levels. "Cognitive Computing" is like intelligence amplification for humans If we were to put "cognitive computing" into a category, it would probably look more like "intelligence amplification" (IA) rather than Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is the idea that machine learning can amplify human knowledge, capabilities, and aid day-to-day procedural decisions. IBM Watson, located at the company's research center in Yorktown Heights, New York (via Wikipedia) "Watson processes information by understanding natural language, generates hypotheses based on evidence, and, because it becomes more capable and precise, Watson will help leaders and organizations make better, more confident decisions."

I was a slow runner as a boy (jokes to a minimum please). I hated playing those backyard games where I had to chase people around. I found myself looking for ways to outthink the other kids I was chasing. Eventually, I became proficient at cutting around bushes, hopping fences and avoiding backyard obstacles (like garden hoses and trash cans) so that I could easily catch other kids. That's where we are with cognitive computing.

In keeping with its vision of an era of cognitive computing enabled by acceleration technology, IBM Research (NYSE: IBM) today announced plans for a multi-year collaboration with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to create the Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Research (C3SR) which will be housed within the College of Engineering on the Urbana campus. IBM has big ambitions for the center: "C3SR will build and optimize integrated systems such as state-of-the-art cognitive computing systems modeled on IBM's Watson technology that can master a subject area by learning from multimedia and multi-modal educational content. Such systems will efficiently ingest vast amounts of data including videos, lecture notes, homework, and textbooks, and reason through this knowledge effectively enough to be able to eventually pass a college level exam." Many details are yet to be worked out. The level of funding and size of installation will be announced this summer when the new center formally opens, said Hillery Hunter, a project driver and the director for systems acceleration and memory at IBM Research.

Since the discovery and emergence of computers, we know that they lack thought capacities. That is something where human mind surpasses computing technologies. Computers might not possess cognitive abilities, but they are capable of executing operations which completely rely on human perceptions. Whether it is business security, critical processes or customer experiences, it is possible to utilize the power of automation. From handwriting recognition, face identification and behavioral pattern determination to any task requiring cognitive skills, computers are capable of delivering the right solutions.