| IBM Think | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Status | Active |
| Genre | IT business |
| Frequency | Annual |
| Venue | Various Online |
| Inaugurated | 19 March 2018 |
| Most recent | 9 May 2023 |
| Next event | 20–23 May 2024 |
| Organized by | IBM |
| Website | www |
IBM Think is an annual business conference organized by IBM. Before 2018, IBM held similar business conferences under different names. Think is seen as a successor to World of Watson that was held in 2017. [1] The conference name is a reference the 'Think' slogan used by IBM.
IBM held a conference named World of Watson, centered around its AI products and Watson, a QA computer AI system in Las Vegas, on October 29 – November 2. [2] IBM delivered several speeches related to Watson's capabilities and its possible integration to health and business sectors, which were criticized 2 years later by IEEE Spectrum to be exaggerated. [3]
IBM rebranded its World of Watson convention as IBM Think to be the company's flagship business conference that includes all major IBM products along with Watson. [1] It was held in Las Vegas, on March 19–22. The topics of the conference were mainly about blockchain, AI, data science, quantum computing and cloud. [4] IBM announced the creation of an AI assistant tool called Watson Assistant, [5] [6] and that they AI-enhanced some of their products such as IBM Cloud with the help of Watson, which was criticized by outsiders to not be practical despite years of development. [7] A partnership between IBM and Apple to enhance apps with Watson's AI was revealed as well. [8] IBM unveiled a 1x1mm chip reportedly compatible with Blockchain and as powerful as microprocessors of 1990s that they dubbed "world's smallest computer". [9] IBM also revealed IBM Q, a family of quantum computers that can be accessed via cloud. [10] Think Campuses, a trade exposition area were also introduced for the first time. [11] [12]
The conference was held in Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA, on February 12–15. [13] Topics included cloud, AI, data, analytics, infrastructure and more, a lot similar to previous year. [14] [15] IBM announced Watson Anywhere, allowing Watson AI tools to be used outside of IBM's own cloud services. [16] Harish Natarajan, a grand finalist in 2016's World Debating Championships, had a debate challenge with IBM's Project Debater and won against it while the debate showed state of AI's advancement. [17] [18] Several big customers of IBM had speeches in the conference as well, talking about the impact of IBM's AI/ML products and Power Systems had on their businesses. [19] This year also included a 4-day training program titled Think Academy that provided certification and hand-on lab experience to participants. [20]
The conference was planned to be held in San Francisco again, on May 4–7. Due to COVID-19 pandemic, the conference was made online along with several locally hosted events and interactive sessions. IBM also put a ban on employees to not attend face-to-face conferences with more than 1000 people. [21] This time topics were heavily centered around AI, data, cloud, 5G and various open technologies that were developed under IBM and its subsidiaries. [22] [23] [24] IBM announced several changes to Red Hat, an open-source software and Linux company that IBM bought for 34 billion dollars a year ago, [25] Changes include shifting company's focus to hybrid cloud and 5G compatibility. [26] IBM revealed Watson AIOps, an AI tool to manage IBM built on Red Hat's OpenShift cloud computing software. [27] [28] Along with other topics, IBM Research unveiled its ambitious roadmap for quantum computing. [29] [30]
Two online conferences were held for different regions, on May 11 for Americas and May 12 for APAC, Japan and EMEA. Topics of this year, albeit similar to the previous ones, were centered around hybrid cloud and AI. [31] [32] [33] During the conference, IBM has announced several new projects such as IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition, a commercialized version of IBM Mono2Micro and Watson Orchestrate, an AI assistant tool that is later renamed Watsonx Orchestrate and became a subfeature of Watsonx in 2023. [34] [35] IBM reported 120x increase in quantum processing speed of Qiskit, an open source quantum computing SDK maintained by the company, and revealed Qiskit runtime to enable traditional computer processing when its desired within the SDK. [36] IBM announced a 1 billion dollars worth of investment to its partnership programs as well. [37] [38]
The conference was held digital and face-to-face in Boston, on May 10–11. Several other conferences in attendance were held in various cities around the world. This time the conference was centered around quantum computing, a field IBM started to be prevalent about along with other usual topics like AI and cloud. In the conference IBM announced its goal to achieve a 4,000+ qubit processor built with multiple clusters of modularly scaled processors. [39] [40] IBM also announced updates regarding Qiskit and company's growth in AI sector. [41] [42] [43] IBM also announced multiple partnerships with other companies including providing SaaS and Red Hat software to AWS, a rival cloud service provider. [44] [45]
The conference was held in Orlando, FL, on May 9–11. [46] The conference was expanded to other regions via one day local events titled Think on Tour. [46] For the main conference, Think Forum was revealed as a platform for atendees to talk with tech business leaders, which shifted Think's definition as an expo to that of a forum. [47] The program of the conference included similar topics to previous years such as hybrid cloud, AI and automation and futuristic quantum computing talks. [48] IBM unveiled many new projects and products such as Watsonx, a generative AI tool and IBM Quantum System Two, a quantum computer. [49] [50] [51]
IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research organization in the world and has twelve labs on six continents.
Quantum programming is the process of designing or assembling sequences of instructions, called quantum circuits, using gates, switches, and operators to manipulate a quantum system for a desired outcome or results of a given experiment. Quantum circuit algorithms can be implemented on integrated circuits, conducted with instrumentation, or written in a programming language for use with a quantum computer or a quantum processor.
IBM Watson is a computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language. It was developed as a part of IBM's DeepQA project by a research team, led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's founder and first CEO, industrialist Thomas J. Watson.
This list compares various amounts of computing power in instructions per second organized by order of magnitude in FLOPS.
International Business Machines Corporation, nicknamed Big Blue, is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York and present in over 175 countries. It is a publicly traded company and one of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. IBM is the largest industrial research organization in the world, with 19 research facilities across a dozen countries, having held the record for most annual U.S. patents generated by a business for 29 consecutive years from 1993 to 2021.
Turbonomic is a resource-simulation software company headquartered in Boston, MA and owned by IBM. The company was originally named VMTurbo.
The Task Force on Rebooting Computing (TFRC), housed within IEEE Computer Society, is the new home for the IEEE Rebooting Computing Initiative. Founded in 2013 by the IEEE Future Directions Committee, Rebooting Computing has provided an international, interdisciplinary environment where experts from a wide variety of computer-related fields can come together to explore novel approaches to future computing. IEEE Rebooting Computing began as a global initiative launched by IEEE that proposes to rethink the concept of computing through a holistic look at all aspects of computing, from the device itself to the user interface. As part of its work, IEEE Rebooting Computing provides access to various resources like conferences and educational events, feature and scholarly articles, reports, and videos.
Cloud-based quantum computing is the invocation of quantum emulators, simulators or processors through the cloud. Increasingly, cloud services are being looked on as the method for providing access to quantum processing. Quantum computers achieve their massive computing power by initiating quantum physics into processing power and when users are allowed access to these quantum-powered computers through the internet it is known as quantum computing within the cloud.
Jay M. Gambetta is a scientist and executive, leading the team at IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center working to build a quantum computer.
Quantum volume is a metric that measures the capabilities and error rates of a quantum computer. It expresses the maximum size of square quantum circuits that can be implemented successfully by the computer. The form of the circuits is independent from the quantum computer architecture, but compiler can transform and optimize it to take advantage of the computer's features. Thus, quantum volumes for different architectures can be compared.
Qiskit is an open-source software development kit (SDK) for working with quantum computers at the level of circuits, pulses, and algorithms. It provides tools for creating and manipulating quantum programs and running them on prototype quantum devices on IBM Quantum Platform or on simulators on a local computer. It follows the circuit model for universal quantum computation, and can be used for any quantum hardware that follows this model.
IBM Quantum System One is the first circuit-based commercial quantum computer, introduced by IBM in January 2019.
Rama Akkiraju is an Indian-born American computer scientist. She is vice president of AI for IT at Nvidia and performs research in the field of artificial intelligence.
Ampere Computing LLC is an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California that develops processors for servers operating in large scale environments. It was founded in 2017 by Renée James.
Nvidia GTC is a global artificial intelligence (AI) conference for developers that brings together developers, engineers, researchers, inventors, and IT professionals. Topics focus on AI, computer graphics, data science, machine learning and autonomous machines. Each conference begins with a keynote from Nvidia CEO and founder Jensen Huang, followed by a variety of sessions and talks with experts from around the world.
Watsonx is IBM's commercial generative AI and scientific data platform based on cloud. It offers a studio, data store, and governance toolkit. It supports multiple large language models (LLMs) along with IBM's own Granite.
Microsoft Azure Quantum is a public cloud-based quantum computing platform developed by Microsoft, that offers quantum hardware, software, and solutions for developers to build quantum applications. It supports variety of quantum hardware architectures from partners including Quantinuum, IonQ, and Atom Computing. To run applications on the cloud platform, Microsoft developed the Q# quantum programming language.
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