AUSTIN, Texas-This is the first year IBM Corp. has involvement at Austin’s South by Southwest (SXSW) and the company felt the need to become a part of the festival to work with business and innovation, and of course, provide a platform for Watson, the supercomputer that bested Jeopardy’s two highest scoring champions of all time.
Watson will be presented as a platform for business, finance and medical solutions, due to the stance that a supercomputer of Watson’s stature can lead to a strong logical conclusion after weighing numerous variables much faster than human interaction. David Ferrucci, lead researcher and principal investigator at IBM Corp. for the Watson/Jeopardy! project, is scheduled to speak at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival on March 14 from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Austin. Attendance is only open to those with interactive badges and registration is required here.
IBM Corp. is also major player in the first ever SXSW Technology Summit, open to all registered badge holders, taking place following the conclusion of the SXSW Interactive Festival, March 16 and 17 on the sixth floor of the Hilton Hotel in downtown Austin. The company will discuss building collaboration between business partners, venture capitalists, academics, entrepreneurs and IT professionals to create a smarter planet.
In queries why IBM decided to join SXSW this year, the company said that it was time to get more involved.
“When we look to all the social and mobile computing that’s happening in the world and in the industries, we had to look at South by Southwest,” said Dennis Bly, director of development at the IBM Innovation Center in Austin. ”These are the entrepreneurs that are out there creating these market-changing solutions that are making people’s lives better.”
A global survey released in October 2010 from IBM developerWorks states that from responses gleaned from 2,000 IT professionals indicates cloud computing and mobile application development are hot topics today, and are expected to emerge as the most in-demand platforms for software development. The majority of survey respondents, at 55%, see mobile application development for devices such as iPhone and Android, and tablets like iPad and PlayBook, surpassing application development on other platforms throughout the next five years.
Bly stated the applications involved will help facilitate a smarter planet through energy usage, personal health, keeping the food supply safer, and even modern conveniences such as finding local parking within a given area.
IBM Corp. championed the list of U.S. patent winners in 2010 and has had the highest number of patents for the last 18 years in a row nationally. According to data from IFI Claims Patent Services, IBM’s inventors held a record 5,896 patents for 2010, above and beyond second-place Samsung Electronics Co., which had 4,551 patents awarded for the year.
For approximately a dozen years, Austin’s IBM location has garnered more patents than any other IBM location in the U.S., with approximately 950 U.S. patents issued to inventors last year.
