Vacation 2011 – Part 2

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After a year of hard work I’m finally on vacation. Tonight I will travel outside of Brazil and do not know when and how I will have access to computers and the Internet.

I will try to update this blog whenever possible. On September 20th I return to the normal rhythm. Stay tuned!

Interview with Manoj Saxena: Putting IBM Watson to Work

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Chris Nay, at Building a Smarter Planet Blog, made a great interview with Manoj Saxena, general manager of IBM Watson Solutions. A sample:

What are you looking forward to as the first Watson Solutions General Manager?

Manoj Saxena: Watson provides us an opportunity at a scale and scope that only comes along once in a very long while. One of the things I love the most is shaping and creating markets around disruptive technologies. And I have had the good fortune of being able to do that in the five years I have been at IBM, and the seven years before that through the two software startups I had founded.

With Watson, I envision an entire new class of business solutions and cloud-based services that can interpret natural language; incorporate new structured and unstructured information; and derive associations and patterns that bridge the IT-business gap. CIOs and business executives will have to rethink how to add value to their businesses.

Watson’s capabilities will be particularly powerful for information-intensive industries such as healthcare, government, telecom and financial services — where the volume and variety of information is constantly changing. For example, some of Watson’s potential applications in healthcare include helping doctors and care providers reduce the time needed to evaluate and determine the correct diagnosis for a patient. It can also help create the next generation of electronic medical record systems, as well as diagnostic and decision support tools, to help provide doctors with treatment options tailored to a patient’s needs.

You can read the full interview here!