Crowd-sourcing a solar-powered society with World Community Grid
Imagine if we could embed solar power generators into objects and materials around us? And what if the solar cells in these products were as cheap and easy to mass-manufacture as plastic bags, bringing the possibility of affordable solar energy to impoverished areas? These are the dreams of Harvard University’s ‘Clean Energy Project’, which has […]
IBM Service Grants: Ensuring NGOs can afford the best management advice
“Caring for children with a severe illness or disability is a 24-hour job,” says Danielle Huse, director of charitable home Villa Rozerood. “Parents can never ‘switch off’ and brothers and sisters inevitably have to cope with being given less indulgence than most children would get, because so much attention is devoted to the sick child. […]
Building tomorrow’s cities, today
In a June 2013 Le Soir interview, Benoît Lutgen (CDh) proposed a solution to the demographic challenges facing Wallonia (an estimated 400,000 additional inhabitants in the next 10-15 years). “Let’s build a revolutionary, new city; innovative in […] mobility, energy conservation and the use of new materials.” Friedl Maertens, IBM’s Business Development Public Sector, disagrees […]
The IBM Corporate Service Corps: Helping the planet one location at a time
Over the last five years, 2,400 IBM employees have been dispatched on almost 200 voluntary aid engagements around the world. The Corporate Service Corps has provided more than US$70 million worth of skilled, pro-bono services since 2008, directly benefiting 140,000 people. Jeffrey Balrak talks about his recent experiences as a Belgian IBMer sent to an […]
IBM’s 5 in 5: In the Future, Computers Will Learn
Imagine this: Your computer, the one you carry around in your pocket or purse, knows everything about you. With your permission, it knows about your relationships with the people, places and things in your world. It talks and listens to you. And, as your computer interacts with you and with the vast store of data […]
The Top 5 Value Drivers for Cloud
By: Marc Steenbergen and Edwin Schouten As cloud computing continues to be adopted around the world, there is often a tendency to view it in terms of a defined, stand-alone technology, with its own taxonomy. Distinctions between Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service and between public and private clouds are important but […]
The computer as an advisor, not a decision-maker – the vision of IBM Fellow John Cohn
It was over 50 years ago that Thomas Watson Jr. launched the IBM Fellows program, the highest honor that can be awarded to an IBM technical staffer. The accolades are handed out for exceptional contributions to scientific, technical or social initiatives that have helped create a smarter planet. IBM Fellows have been behind some of […]
Improving the innovation value chain: Making academic research accessible
A pilot project by the Flanders government to link information on public research projects with dynamic analysis of the research content itself is building for a bright future – one in which academics and businesses will soon be able to access all research in the region at the click of a mouse. “The basic idea behind […]
Shedding light on the sexiest job of the 21st Century
This article will be published in the next edition of the IBM Inspire Beyond Today’s Technology magazine (ibm.com/inspire/be) When Harvard Business Review announced in October 2012 that the role of “Data Scientist” is the sexiest job of the 21st century, some may have wondered what exactly such a role entailed. Chances are few will still […]