IBM’s Watson, the supercomputer that gave our best two Jeopardy-playing humans what-for in three nights of play two years ago, is now showing mortals how to do better at another classic human struggle: curing cancer. Watson has spent the last year parsing data on cancer treatments from the Sloan-Kettering Memorial Center, and is now being offered as a cloud-based application for determining the best course of action for cancer patients. While Watson’s turn at Jeopardy was entertaining and a true battle of man versus machine, the computer’s higher purpose was always in medicine. During a panel discussion of Watson held as the computer did battle with Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, Dr. Chris Welty, a member of Watson’s algorithms team, noted that the computer had a future in helping diagnose medical conditions (as well as in tech support).Niklas Bjorkman wrote: Firstly I agree with your conclusion. NewSQL takes the best of the traditional databases and NoSQL databases to combine the benefits of both worlds. I do not agree that NewSQL vendors focus on giving scale-out features to transactional data. The NewSQL market is focusing on giving true ACID support combined with extreme performance, stepping away from the traditional relational structures in databases. A lot of developers appreciate the ease of accessing data using SQL and I think we will see more and more databases supporting standard SQL.
As you said - NewSQL databases often maintain the...
Apr. 12, 2013 02:56 AM EDT
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