Last Wednesday I participated in IBM’s Federal Summit at the Ronald Reagan Federal Building in Washington DC.
Business aside, it was one scary meeting. There were control systems all over. From the IRS to airports, to National Security, the demos were much more advanced and comprehensive than anything you may have seen in a movie. Big Brother to the Nth degree. They know it all about you. In a second. You either get paranoid-serious about security, encryption and privacy, or you might as well forget completely about your privacy.
Yesterday I started learning and experimenting with quantum computing programming. Its not easy to express the fun and excitement that experience brought me, but Ill try:
Programming a quantum computer is different than programming a binary (0 and 1) “digital” computer. To program a quantum system, you have to map a problem into a search for the “lowest point" in a very large pool of options, which corresponds to the best possible outcome.
On May 6th, having just returned from quick trips to Cleveland and Atlanta, I attended with my wife the round table debate “Curiosity, Understanding, and Utility: Science and the Creative Economy” held at the City University of New York Graduate Center`s Proshansky Auditorium.
William Bialek, director of the Graduate Center`s Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences, moderated a discussion with Jennifer Tour Chayes, distinguished scientist and managing director of Microsoft Research New England and Microsoft Research New York City; Fernando Pereira, research at Google; and Chris Wiggins, chief data scientist at the New York Times and faculty member in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Applied Physics at Columbia University.
March 25 Google NY invited me to their Google Cloud Platform presentation in their Chelsea offices, 8 blocks away from my apartment.
Besides the interesting new features (here are the videos), and the delicious and healthy lunch buffet, I networked quite a lot, and had a few laughs about the highest concentration of Google Glasses per person I have seen so far. One thing is clear: genomics, which is one of the main things my two companies deal with, and the cloud, are closely related, and they will be even more in the near future.
How many times have you tried to access online media that was not available in your country? How many times have you gotten frustrated with proxy services?
How many times have you wished there was an easy way to wirelessly display online content on your TV without paying for expensive privative boxes?
Enter Hola.org + Chromecast
Hola is a free browser extension used by 14 million people to access geographically restricted online media.
On Wednesday January 8th I was asked to hold a meeting regarding the potential involvement of my company (Kanteron Systems) in IBM’s Watson. It was a late night meeting, on the 54th floor of the still under construction World Trade Center. The reason why the meeting took place there is because the IBM team was finishing the set up of the next day’s Watson presentation.
What is Watson, you may ask?
