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.
Last week, although I had torn the ligaments on my right ankle, I travelled on a quick trip to South America for business.
After a 12 hour flight I arrived early in the morning in Santiago de Chile and had to go straight to a business meeting because the hotel did not have my room available and check-in time was 2:00pm. What was worse: when I finally made it back to the hotel, after a full day of flying and another full day of work, I had to stand hammers banging on the wall until after midnight.
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.
The Spanish Consul General in New York, Juan Ramón Martínez Salazar, and the Commander of the Training Ship Juan Sebastián de Elcano invited my wife and I to a gala reception aboard the beautiful sail ship (the third largest four-masted tall ship in the world, built in 1927), which is currently docked in New York`s pier 88.
It turned out to be a spectacular evening. The vessel was filled with celebrities: military, politicians with their secret service bodyguards, diplomats, sports, business and entertainment people.
For my wifes birthday I acquired a piece of art from <a title="https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/pawel-althamer" href="https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/pawel-althamer" target="_blank">Paweł Althamers “The Neighbors”, which run through April 13 at the New Museum in New York city.
Since the early 1990s, Althamer (b. 1967 Warsaw, Poland) has established a unique artistic practice featuring an expanded approach to sculptural representation and consistently experimental models of social collaboration.
It was great to discuss with a museum curator which piece to select (we agreed without a doubt), and it`s a pleasure to have this piece in the living room of our Chelsea apartment.
Since I was in Barcelona last April, I took the opportunity to shoot this video (“Change in the medical imaging computational paradigm”) as an introduction to the classes I teach (“Clinical innovation in networked medical imaging”) at the Telemedicine Master`s Degree, Open University of Catalonia:
