Hi Mimi Yes, but I'm very concerned about the usage of private AI-blackbox as IBM Watson, in medicine, healthcare and any analytics and decisions regarding people-privacy/private citizens life. Generally speaking there is a huge concern, now underrated, about incoming pervasive presence of artificial intelligence systems in our societies (IBM is along with Google, Amazon and few others big players). Specifically, the problem I see with IBM Watson is that it is a closed product of a private company. There is nothing bad in a pure commercial product approach, but problems arise if this product become spread in public domains, public services (universities, hospitals, etc.). Technically speaking, is not clear to me (and some scientists I interviewed) Watson inside algorithms/mechanics, because it's fully closed; I call this AI-blackbox.

A large radiology practice in the Miami area is the test bed for the first real-world application of IBM Watson interpreting medical images. Radiology Associates of South Florida, which has more than 75 physicians and handles about 1 million studies per year, is teaming with Baptist Hospital of Miami to apply Watson-powered "cognitive peer review" to medical imaging in an effort to diagnose aortic stenosis earlier. "We want to identify patients at high risk who may have been missed," said Dr. Ricardo Cury, director of cardiac imaging at Baptist Hospital of Miami and chairman and CEO of Radiology Associates. Watson speeds up the peer review process by assisting cardiologists and sonographers in spotting stenosis cases that otherwise might fall through the cracks, Cury explained at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago late last month. Watson looks for variations in practice, based on quality metrics and image analytics, explained Jon DeVries, global offering manager for IBM Watson Health Imaging.

At the end of June and beginning of July, I attended Viva Tech's international summit in Paris. Although the event was centred around Fintech and Insurtech, there were humanoid robots, flying drones, VR play stations… One could learn about the latest trends in retail and hospitality, media and medical industries, smart cities… But, the key idea of the organisers was to physically bring together top companies, investors and startups to boost innovation. There was a series of open innovation challenges designed to hack strategic business problems… In one word, a paradise for a guy like me! I learned a lot, met so many interesting people and interviewed some. One of them was David Kenny, General Manager of IBM Watson tasked to build Watson into "artificial intelligence as a service".

Competition that results in better care for people suffering from visual impairments is the right kind of competition. Following a path similar to that of Google's DeepMind, Microsoft India announced this morning that it's launching a new research group, the Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare, to bring data-driven eyecare services to India. Whereas DeepMind's swing at ophthalmology targeted the UK, Microsoft's ambitions are a considerably more global. The tech company is working alongside researchers from the United States, Brazil, Australia and, of course, India to train machine learning models that can identify conditions that can lead to blindness. Microsoft's key strategic partnership is with the L V Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad, India, one of the most prestigious hospitals in the country.

During the dot-com boom, online clothing sales were predicted to grow to 40% -50% of total sales. Although online sales of some other kinds of merchandise, such as books, have reached 50% of the market in the past 15 years, the percentage of online clothing sales hovers around 20%. The difficulty in finding the correct size and fit is one of the primary reasons that consumers are reluctant to buy clothes online. And their concern is not groundless; sizing varies among clothing manufacturers, and it is difficult to ascertain fit from online images. Consequently, 30%-40% of online clothing purchases are returned.

IBM's Watson supercomputer to fight real-world cyber security Seven months after first announcing that it was teaching its Watson cognitive technology platform to fight cybercrime, IBM Corp. has launched it into the real world, at least in test mode. The Watson for Cyber Security platform has been designed to discover behaviour patterns and evidence of hidden cyber attacks and threats that could otherwise be missed by existing security platforms. It does so by using Watson's ability to reason and learn from unstructured data, including the 80 percent of all data on the Internet that traditional security tools cannot process, including blogs, articles, videos, reports, alerts and other information. The software incorporates capabilities such data mining for outlier detection, graphical presentation tools and techniques for finding connections between related data points in different documents, including the ability to identify warnings of new types of malware from even obscure sources. In the initial beta phase, customers are not being charged for the service. Some 40 organisations signed on for the beta test, including Sun Life Financial, the University of Rochester Medical Center, Avnet, SCANA Corp., Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp., California Polytechnic State University, the University of New Brunswick and Smarttech.

Agriculture is the industry that accompanied the evolution of humanity from pre-historic times to modern days and fulfilled faithfully one of its most basic needs: food supply. Today this still remains its core mission, but it's integrated in a more complex than ever mechanism driven by multiple sociological, economic and environmental forces. This $5 trillion industry representing 10 percent of global consumer spending, 40 percent of employment and 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions continues to keep pace with world's evolution, changing tremendously over the past years. Digital and technological advancements are taking over the industry, enhancing food production while adding value to the entire farm-to-fork supply chain and helping it make use of natural resources more efficiently. Data generated by sensors or agricultural drones collected at farms, on the field or during transportation offer a wealth of information about soil, seeds, livestock, crops, costs, farm equipment or the use of water and fertilizer.

IBM Watson and pharmaceutical company Teva will expand their existing global eHealth alliance to focus on two key healthcare challenges: The discovery of new treatment options and improving chronic disease management. Both projects will run on the IBM Watson Health Cloud. The partners jointly announced their expanded plans on October 26 at the World of Watson conference in Las Vegas. The partnership features a new, three-year research collaboration to develop cognitive technologies that enable a systematic approach to the emerging field of drug repurposing and deliver unprecedented scale in the discovery of new uses for existing drugs. The companies also announced that respiratory and central nervous system diseases would be the first targets for their chronic disease management initiative, which will be the first project to integrate data from The Weather Company - an IBM Business - into the analysis.

IBM Watson wowed the tech industry and a corner of U.S. pop culture with its 2011 win against two of Jeopardy's greatest champions. Here's how IBM pulled it off and a look at what Watson's real career is going to be. Between them, they'd racked up over $5 million in winnings on the television quiz show Jeopardy. They were the best players the show had produced over its decades-long lifetime: Ken Jennings had the longest unbeaten run at 74 winning appearances, while Brad Rutter had earned the biggest prize pot with a total of $3.25 million. Rutter and Jennings were Jeopardy-winning machines. And in early 2011, they agreed to an exhibition match against an opponent who'd never even stood behind a Jeopardy podium before. But this Jeopardy unknown had spent years preparing to take on the two giants in the $1m match, playing 100 games against past winners in an effort to improve his chances of winning. That opponent didn't smile, offered all his answers in the same emotionless tone, and wouldn't sit in the same room as his fellow contestants.

IBM Watson is known for its work in identifying cancer treatments and beating contestants on Jeopardy! But now the computing system has expertise in a new area of research: neuroscience. Watson discovered five genes linked to ALS, sometimes called Lou Gehrig's disease, IBM announced on Wednesday. The tech company worked with researchers at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. The discovery is Watson's first in any type of neuroscience, and suggests that Watson could make discoveries in research of other neurological diseases.