IBM Watson to boost Africa Healthcare

Healthcare:
Sub-Saharan Africa is home to approximately 25 percent of the world’s disease burden; yet the most common form of healthcare outside of cities is delivered by community health workers. CEDD will collect encyclopedic knowledge about traditional and non-traditional diseases in Africa. With access to Watson’s cognitive intelligence, doctors, nurses and field workers will get help in diagnosing illnesses and identifying the best treatment for each patient.
For example, women in sub-Saharan Africa account for 22 percent of all cases of cervical cancer worldwide mainly due to a lack of services and knowledge. Watson could provide new insights into the evolution of cervical cancer in Africa and suggest new approaches for its prevention, diagnosis and treatment. By feeding back valuable clinical data about their field observations, healthcare workers will be able to contribute to improving Watson’s inference abilities.
Education:
Currently, half of African children will reach their adolescent years unable to read, write or perform basic numeric tasks. The key to improving these statistics is a thorough understanding of student performance, teacher expertise, attendance levels, class sizes, linguistic abilities and learning materials. While previous information systems have only provided a limited view of point problems, using Watson technologies, CEDD aims to create new holistic approaches for analyzing data to identify previously unrecorded correlations. For example, Watson could identify the link between a contaminated water borehole, an epidemic of cholera and the subsequent low levels of school attendance in the region. Watson could also help to uncover other causes of low school attendance in a particular region such as a lack of sanitary supplies and cultural traditions placing childcare responsibility on older siblings.
Today’s announcement is part of a broader effort by IBM to advance and share cognitive computing innovations around the world. Nearly three years after its triumph on the television quiz show Jeopardy!, IBM has advanced Watson from a game playing innovation into a commercial technology. The company recently established a new Watson business unit dedicated to the development and commercialization of cognitive computing innovations and is investing more than $1 billion to bring cognitive applications and services to market.
This week IBM is also announcing other investments into the African innovation ecosystem with the opening of new IBM Innovation Centers in Lagos, Nigeria; Casablanca, Morocco, and Johannesburg, South Africa. These new centers aim to spur local growth and fuel an ecosystem of development and entrepreneurship around Big Data analytics and cloud computing in the region. In recognition of its role in driving data-driven growth and opportunity, this week Frost & Sullivan named IBM an Innovation Leader in Big Data and Analytics in Sub-Saharan Africa.
IBM recently organized an initiative asking people from across Africa to submit images which best illustrate Africa’s grand challenges and opportunities and help illustrate the mission of IBM’s new Africa Research Lab. ‘The World is Our Lab – Africa’ project has generated over 1200 images from across 25 African countries helping to tell the other side of the continent’s story. To visit the project website, go to: http://www.theworldisourlabafrica.com/
To view a selection of these images, visit: http://bit.ly/1hJD9QO
For more information on ‘Project Lucy’ and to download the official IBM infographic, go to: http://ibm.co/1eUYH9S
To download images of the IBM Research – Africa lab and its staff, go to: http://bit.ly/MIK2YY
To view a film about Africa’s grand challenges and opportunities visit: http://bit.ly/19ZvXAv
About IBM Research – Africa IBM has had a direct presence in Africa for over 70 years that today spans more than 20 countries, including Morocco, Egypt, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Angola, Kenya and Tanzania. IBM Research – Africa – the continent’s first commercial technology research facility – was inaugurated in by His Excellency, the President of Kenya, Hon. Uhuru Kenyatta in November, 2013. The lab employs researchers from some of the world’s best universities to conduct applied and far-reaching exploratory research into the grand challenges of the African continent by delivering commercially-viable innovations that impact people’s lives.
The 2000m2 facility features one of Africa’s most powerful, cloud-enabled computing hubs giving researchers the ability to analyze and draw insight from vast amounts of data in the search for solutions to Africa’s most pressing challenges.
About Watson Named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, IBM Watson was developed in IBM’s Research labs. Using natural language processing and analytics, Watson processes information akin to how people think, representing a major shift in an organization’s ability to quickly analyze, understand and respond to Big Data. Now delivered from the cloud from a single Power 750 server running Linux and able to power new consumer and enterprise services and apps, Watson is 24 times faster, smarter (with a 2,400 percent improvement in performance) and 90 percent smaller – IBM has shrunk Watson from the size of a master bedroom to three stacked pizza boxes. Watson’s ability to answer complex questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and confidence is transforming decision making across a variety of industries.