A Guinness World Record. A new kind of plastic. Oh, and a chip modeled after the human brain. Here are some of our most popular stories in 2014. It’s been a busy year! Thank you for reading, sharing, and commenting on them. But most of all, thank you for being curious about pushing the limits of science and technology.
IBM scientists partnered with National Geographic Kids to set a Guinness World Records title for the world's smallest magazine cover.
Ballet
or mathematics? Most ordinary eight year olds girls would probably choose
ballet, but Maria Dubovitskaya was anything but an ordinary eight year old.
One day, after ballet lessons in the Moscow suburb of Domodedovo,
Maria’s parents were running a little late. She heard other children,
mostly boys her age, clacking away on IBM 286 PC keyboards in the
classroom next door. Peeking through a crack in the door Maria was
overcome with curiosity.
When
scientists succeed at IBM Research, they tend to stay. Robert
Dennard, the inventor of the DRAM, for instance, had been at IBM for 56
years when he retired earlier this year. But there are researchers at the
opposite end of the seniority spectrum who are already making their marks—on
IBM and the world.
Amid
the chaos of civil war, Abdigani Diriye’s
family fled Somalia in a rush when he was just five years old. Diriye and his
sister escaped to London in the care of a 19-year-old aunt; his father flew to
Sweden; and his mother made her way through the battle zone to Kenya.
Every
year, top U.S. men’s college basketball teams enter a month-long tournament for
a chance to be crowned champion. And it always stirs up fan and pundit
predictions to pick potential winners of all 63 games.
To really give the pot a stir this year, Berkshire Hathaway, Quicken Loans and Yahoo Sports teamed up to create the Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge. Choose every match up correctly and win $1B.
(download a "Bracketology" infographic)
Graphene,
one of the world’s thinnest electronic nanomaterials, has long held the promise
as a wonder material in everything from flexible touchscreens to super-fast
circuits. It’s that interest in semiconductors that led my team to build the
world’s most advanced, fully functional integrated circuit made of wafer-scale
graphene – 10,000 times better performance than previously reported efforts.
 |
Tilted view scanning electron microscopic (SEM) image revealing the integration of key
components in IC with enlarged view showing the advanced gate structure
of the graphene field-effect transistors (GFET). Inset image shows crosssectional
SEM of embedded T-shaped gate. Scale bar, 500 nm. |
“We
need to talk.” Generally not something you want to hear from your PhD advisor.
But when it was followed by, “Have you heard of HBO?”, then-Stanford student,
now-IBM Watson engineer Vinith Misra was intrigued (and as a film enthusiast, a
little amused).
His advisor, Dr. Tsachy Weissman, had been contacted by the technical
advisor for HBO’s Silicon
Valley in 2013 to help the show’s creators develop fictionalized
compression algorithms, and he wanted to bring Vinith on board.
Theseus
was a great hero in Greek mythology known for qualities such as strength,
courage and wisdom.
Therefore it’s no surprise that a team of Greek IBM
scientists in Zurich and Professor Theodore Antonakopoulos and his team
from the University of Patras, Greece, borrowed his name as a codeword for a
groundbreaking new memory technology, which combines flash with phase change memory (PCM)
on a PCI-e card. Initial tests have clocked 12x and 275x improvements — and
that’s no myth.
Tanuja Ganu grew up in a small town in India about
400 kilometers south of Mumbai, where – like much of the country – energy
outages happen all the time.
“The voltage was often so low that the
lights were dim and the refrigerator would burn out.
“I studied for exams by candlelight,
and endured summers without working fans. To deal with this as children, we learned
to time-shift critical things we needed electricity for – like cooking and
cleaning," Tanuja said.
Raise
your hand if you have interests outside of your day job. Probably most
everyone, I imagine. Now, how often do they serendipitously collide? Probably
not that often, right? But that’s what happened for me two years ago when I
applied my computer science skills to my love of the culinary arts as part of
IBM’s Cognitive
Cooking project.
Seven
nanometers. That’s slightly longer than the 2.5 nm circumference of a DNA
double helix. And 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. It’s
also the miniscule dimension that future semiconductors must push past to keep
up with today’s computing demands being put on cloud, big data and cognitive
systems.
What
is a cognitive chip? The latest SyNAPSE chip, introduced in August of 2014, has
the potential to transform mobility by spurring innovation around an entirely
new class of applications with sensory capabilities at incredibly low power
levels. This is enabled by a revolutionary new technology design inspired by
the human brain.
Labels: brain chip, cognitive computing, cognitive cooking, ibm research, nanotechnology, polymer, synapse
