Watson leader highlights list of eight new IBM Fellows |  CNET News

For months, IBM’s “Jeopardy” champion computer Watson has been a major PR win for the company, and tonight, its lead developer was awarded Big Blue’s highest technical honor.

At a ceremony in New York, CEO Samuel Palmisano celebrated Watson team leader David Ferrucci and seven other employees as IBM’s newest Fellows. The eight new Fellows join a group of just 209 previous winners, among whom have been the creators of technologies such as DRAM, the scanning tunneling microscope, Fortran, and relational databases.

And while the other seven 2011 winners include scientists and innovators who have broken important new ground in a variety of fields, it is no surprise that IBM put forth Ferrucci as the face of the group.

“It’s a great honor for me,” Ferrucci told CNET in an interview today, “and something that oddly enough, I’ve been inspired by since high school.”

Ferrucci, whose IBM Grand Challenge project, the Watson supercomputer, gained international notoriety in February by beating “Jeopardy” champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a head-to-head match-up, said that he’d found an ad about the IBM Fellows program in one of his father’s magazines when he was a teenager and had taped it to his wall. Where most high school-age boys dream of being the hero in the World Series, Ferrucci seems to have been inspired by dreams of incredible technological successes.

According to an IBM release, the other 2011 Fellows included:

• Bob Blainey, who for “more than two decades…has focused on ensuring not only that software can exploit hardware capabilities optimally, but also that hardware designs evolve to support higher-performing software.”

• Bradford Brooks, who was recognized for “his sustained achievement and leadership regarding IBM’s involvement with complex materials that are used in the electronics and information technology industries.”

• Nagui Halim, whose “technical vision and leadership launched the era of stream computing at IBM.”

• Steve Hunter, who “is a foremost industry expert in networking technologies and networking computing convergence.”

• Stefan Pappe, who leads IBM’s Specialty Service Area for Cloud Services in the company’s global technology services delivery technology and engineering group.

• Renato Recio, who is seen as a “world renowned technical expert in data center networking server IO, network visualization, and related architectures.”

• Wolfgang Roesner, who IBM calls “an expert in verification and [who] has architected the verification tools and methodologies being used across all IBM systems.”

Stream computing - the breakthrough that could make our planet smarter

As our world becomes increasingly instrumented and interconnected, the amount of digital information produced within our systems—transportation, healthcare, governance, etc.—is growing at rates hard to fathom. Stream computing offers tremendous potential to help a variety of industries become more “real world aware”: able to see, respond and even predict instantaneous changes across complex systems.

Remember not so very long ago how amazed you were that Google could return so many useful search results in just a split-second? Today, that kind of speed isn’t enough for many people. The real-time communications inside social networks and microblogging services such as Facebook, FriendFeed, and most of all Twitter have introduced a new immediacy to online interaction and news. Even Google concedes it’s not yet providing an adequate search experience for such real-time streams of information. (via Collecta Launches *Really* Real-Time Search Engine - BusinessWeek)

IBM System S, which was released on Wednesday, has been in the works for more than 20 years. The software uses a new streaming architecture and mathematical algorithms that can analyze thousand of simultaneous data streams in real-time. Officials say organizations, like those in the healthcare industry, will benefit from the technology’s ability to help them improve decision-making. Traditional computing models retrospectively analyze stored data and don’t have the ability to continuously process massive amounts of incoming data streams, they say. (via IBM unveils “stream computing” software | Healthcare IT News)

In the last week, the two most successful technology companies in the world, IBM (IBM) and Google (GOOG) have announced major new products. These are developments that will probably help the firms take business away from their competitors. The scope of the products’ applications is broad enough that the R&D investment to create them must have been extensive. IBM released “stream computing” applications that allow businesses to look at and analyze huge amounts of data in real time. Describing the product, IBM said “System S is built for perpetual analytics — utilizing a new streaming architecture and breakthrough mathematical algorithms, to create a forward-looking analysis of data from any source — narrowing down precisely what people are looking for and continuously refining the answer as additional data is made available.” The ability to have access to that kind of information will undoubtedly be valuable to governments, the financial industry, and large multinationals with thousands of retail outlets. The new software is unique and does not appear to have any direct competition. (via The Reasons Behind Google and IBM Being Ahead of the Competition - TIME)