In recent days, IBM announced more news about Watson Health, the business unit officially opened in April 2015 with the aim of exploiting its Watson cognitive computing system in the medical field. Deborah DiSanzo was named general manager of Watson Health, which will have its headquarters in Kendall Square, an area of Cambridge, Massachusetts. IBM also announced new collaborations and new cloud services.
D-Wave Systems, a company specializing in quantum computers, has announced the general availability of a new model, the D-Wave 2X™. It’s equipped with a new type of processor of which information started getting released some months ago that passes the barrier of 1,000 qubits. This new system is credited of performances unthinkable for classical computers but certainly there will be controversy like the ones that over the years accompanied the D-Wave systems.
Lenovo preinstalled on some models (photo of a Lenovo Yoga 11 3 ©Pierre Lecourt) of its PC a utility called Lenovo Service Engine (LSE) that sends to its servers some information at the first connection to the Internet, according to the company anonymously. LSE automatically downloads another utility, OneKey Optimizer (OKO), which is supposed to optimize the operating system through some operations. LSE was discovered to use a technique that allows it to be automatic reinstalled even when the whole operating system is reinstalled from scratch and that can be a security problem.
Google announced a major corporate restructuring based on the creation of a holding company called Alphabet that will contain the companies now owned by Google. Google’s co-founder Larry Page will be the CEO of Alphabet and the other co-founder Sergey Brin will be its President. Google’s name will continue to exist as one of the new holding’s companies with Sundar Pichai, who’s been working there since 2004 and has been involved in the Android and Chrome projects, as its CEO.
IBM has announced its plans to buy Merge Healthcare, the producer of a medical image management platform. The transaction, which costs a billion dollars that will be paid in cash, aims to provide IBM Watson’s system of cognitive computing the ability to manage medical images as part of the Watson Health project. This ability to “see” can potentially allow the Watson system to make a big leap forward.
