The Almaden Institute is held annually at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. The Institute brings together eminent, innovative thinkers from academia, government, industry, research labs and the media for an intellectually charged, stimulating and vigorous dialogue that addresses fundamental challenges at the very edge of science and technology.
All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.
I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.
As a general rule the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.
More and more, companies are seeking new ways to innovate with information. Information is potentially valuable, but how do we unlock that potential in practice? Over the past decade, globalization has removed many of the barriers of business, enabling anyone, anywhere to do the business they choose, placing a higher premium on specialization and collaboration, both of which depend on easy access to information. With the ever-growing proliferation of sensors in all aspects of the environment from RFID tags to GPS to motion detectors and nanosensors, there is tremendously more information available to manage and analyze. What increased insight and innovation can be gained from these new sources of data? At the same time, patent applications have exploded in the U.S. and across the globe. It is imperative to effectively manage and mine Intellectual Property to better leverage IP assets and improve overall patent quality.
In recent years, the ability to capture, analyze and expose new and different types of information has altered economic and social outcomes both positively and negatively. For example, access to information has increased the quality of healthcare through improved diagnostics and more customized, targeted treatment options, but it has also permitted financial markets to create new, more targeted financial instruments such as sub-prime mortgages. Enterprises continue to demand more value to correspond to the greater availability of information. How will this value be realized?
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The Institute will endeavor to construct a collective bird's eye view both of the state of the art of information innovation today as well as exploring where tomorrow's innovations may come from. The goal of the Almaden Institute is to explore information innovation challenges and in the process to identify new research opportunities for the benefit of business and society.
The 2008 Almaden Institute on Innovating with Information aims to explore the following topics and more:
- Life on an Instrumented Planet
- Smart Services and the Information Evolution
- Intellectual Property: A Strategic and Information Service Dilemma
- Asymmetric Information: Spanning the Information Chasm
The Institute format is designed to facilitate and foster discussion, debate, interaction, and networking. For more information about the 2008 Almaden Institute: Innovating with Information, please send a note to: alminst@us.ibm.com..
