IBM And ADA Collaboration

The American cloud computing company partners with the Association to develop tools for helping diabetes patients and their caregivers

IBM Watson Health has collaborated with American Diabetes Association to integrate artificial intelligence in research. The duo intends to develop healthcare providers and diabetes advisor for patients based upon the Association’s repository of research and clinical data, in addition, they’re giving a challenge to cognitive computing-based application developers to enhance diabetes management and prevention.

In recent times, Watson Health signed a similar kind of agreement with the American Cancer Society, intended to better advise oncology patients as well as their providers based upon the AI system’s ACS information analysis. And it has also signed a series of agreements for the application of cognitive computation to clinical trials as well as oncology genomics data.

The ADA venture intends to meet the needs of 3 main groups:  patients and caregivers, researchers and healthcare providers. It’s designated to enable the cognitive diabetes database development to guide healthcare treatment decision as well as the research database population health management and tools, which can offer personalized details depending upon a number of variables. These include treatment regimen, disease stage, behaviors and demographics.

Population health management is a research database designed to elicit concealed patterns for guiding therapeutic discovery.  CEO of ADA Kevin Hagan stated . "By combining the Association's enormous body of valuable data with Watson's cognitive computing capabilities, we will empower people living with diabetes, clinicians and researchers with better data and better insights, which ultimately can lead to better outcomes."

In their demand for cognitive applications, the partners are considering to include Watson- analyzed, ADA data. The aim of the challenge is to play a helpful role for the integration of the data into lives of persons with prediabetes or diabetes; it starts this summer. 

Beyond ADA and Medtronic, the AI system is also involved in a number of other diabetes ventures.

In 2015, data was presented by IBM Research on a predictive model to offer individualized ranks of risk factors of diabetes. And it just developed a research tie up with the Israel based HMO Maccabi for studying the prediction of diabetic retinopathy based on 2 decades of data for over than 2 million members.

In other news, the American cloud computing service provider has opened its IBM Watson center in Singapore. Mobile Health news has reported that the New York based company is also working with Medtroninc to help the cause of diabetes patients as the two organizations are working to use Watson's Cognitive computation abilities along with data from the medical tech development company to predict hyperglycemic -and hypo events and provide diabetes guidance and coaching to people for avoiding those events.

Uber Forwards Commendable Gestures For Drivers

\

The American application based cab service provider will charge passengers for the time its drivers need to wait for them

Uber has received quite negative criticism over how it treats its driving partners. Now, the American application based cab service provider is amending its ways and expanding a few goodwill gestures to the drivers, in form of quicker payment options, worker-loyalty coupons along with other new features.

In most of the cities, driving partners will be allowed to stop incoming requests from passengers before the completion of their shifts. To log off in the present system, they should manually refuse ride requests until they’ve dropped their last consumer. Also, passengers in a larger number of cities will begin getting charged 2 minutes following the arrival of their car to compensate drivers for long waiting. The organization had been conducting experiments with shorter time periods in certain cities and will extend the same to 12 more in June 2016.

On the road, driving partners can look for gas prices from Uber’s application at proximate stations and search for lower priced options. The California based organization stated that in the future, it could hold negotiations with gas stations to provide discounts in return for promotions inside the application. The American search engine developer Google’s navigation application Waze that is famous amongst Uber driving partners shows gas prices as well as provides coupons in a similar manner.

The changes tell us that Uber –$68 billion market valuation following its recent investment –is interested in simultaneously appeasing the two sides of its market: drivers and riders. In January, the company reduced fares in many US cities, a change not popular with a large number of drivers. The organization had been finding out means to win drivers without raising prices. CEO of Uber Travis Kalanick, pledged shareholders that his organization would become lucrative in the North American region by this year’s second quarter, an attainment it stated it has reached in Canada and US.

In the meantime, last week the taxi company received a sum of $5.5 billion from the soverign wealth fund of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to help finance aggressive growth in the Asian region. Harry Campell, who is a writer of a famous blog relating to Uber, stated the changes do not address the top priorities of drivers. They are interested in the tipping option for riders inside the application and higher fares, he stated.

Uber agreed under a planned $100 million settlement in the states of Massachusetts and California to permit drivers to ask for cash tips, but employees have stated in complaints with the US court that the plans do not go that much far way. Whereas the changes in the future might not put address the biggest complaints of drivers, Campbell stated they must positively affect them.

Samsung Takes The Role As Tesla's Supplier

The South Korean battery maker has turned into Tesla's new supplier in the competitive market

Samsung SDI and Tesla Motors have entered into a business relationship. The South Korean giant has become the new battery supplier for the electric car maker. For a long time, Japanese battery maker Panasonic Corporation has been Tesla Motors battery cell partner. The supplier has been unchanged till last year when the Palo Alto Calif. firm gave an approval to another cell maker, LG Chem. The deal has been for a short time and only to upgrade its Roadster 3.0.

At the Oakland port, a bill of lading between Samsung SDI and the California based company shows that the car maker received a delivery of Samsung SDI 18650 battery cells weighing over 120 tones- the same format the electrically powered car maker sources from the Osaka based organization. Electrek contacted the automaker’s representatives, but hasn’t received a response yet, and asked them if the organization could confirm which cells will be used for as the number seems to be extreme for testing (sufficient for more than 100 vehicles) or a venture such as the upgrade of the Roadster battery pack( though possible).

The acquired battery cells could also be used in Tesla Energy devices such as Powerwalls as well as Power packs. On 19^th April 2016, the deliveries reached Oakland. Unconfirmed reports regarding the battery delivery negotiation between the South Korean electronics maker and Tesla came into lime light in October last year- right when the organization confirmed that it was using LG’s cells for upgrading its Roadster battery pack.

In May 2016, latest report published in the South Korean region suggested that in recent times the car manufacturing organization’s executives had a meeting with the nation’s leading 3 battery suppliers, SK Innovation, Samsung SDI and  LG Chem, for negotiating new battery delivery contracts. Whereas Panasonic continues to be the automaker’s main battery partner and vendor in the huge Gigafactory, the car maker always clarified that the organization will look to expand its battery supply chain.

Since in 2015, the automaker has filed to the SEC its capability to acquire battery cells from a number of suppliers. It believes on its capability to change cell chemistry and vendors of batteries whereas retaining its current investments in manufacturing equipment, electronics, software, testing and automobile packaging, will enable it to rapidly deploy a variety of battery cells into its products and leverage the recent progresses in battery cell tech.

The organization has also filed that it had currently chosen many battery cell sources, but qualified just 1 cell  (18650 from the Corporation) for its battery pack and the automaker expects qualifying extra cells from the rest of the makers.  LG chem’s cells for the Tesla Roadster were probably amongst those.        

Alibaba invests in an Isreali E-commerce startup

The Chinese online retailer is investing in Twiggle to help its online shoppers shop on its marketplaces

Alibaba Group Holding Limited is funding an Israel based tech company that intends to enhance item searches on its online trading websites.  On 31^st May 2016, the Chinese E-commerce company participated in its recent investment round, being headed by South African company Naspers. The round will bring aggregate financing for the E-commerce search engine operator to around a sum of $20 million, revealed sources aware of the deal.

Twiggle will use the funding to expand its R&D team. Before investment by the online retailer, Twiggle had received a total equity funding of $14.7 million. The online retailer, which runs the Chinese large online marketplace Taobao, refused to specify the money or state why it’s investing in the organization. Twiggle is not the only organization backed by the online retailer as it has previously backed a QR start- up in which it invested a small amount of money in 2015.

Amir Konigsberg, co-founder and CEO of Twiggle stated that the company was hoping to collaborate with an investor who can assist Twiggle in having better understanding of the industry. He added, “With nine million different sellers, Taobao is one of the biggest and most challenging sites out there.”

Twiggle’s largest appeal for the web retailer is its own query language tool, which uses artificial intelligence and behavioral data to narrow down search results to help online shoppers shop on the marketplaces. “What our system is able to do is adapt itself to specific retailer data and structuring patterns,” Mr Amir stated. That could amend the means employed by consumers to find what they are interested in buying amongst over 1 billion items for sale on Alibaba’s TMall and Taobao marketplaces.

An improved query tool could do result refining so that when a search would be conducted for, say “camera” would not return results for lenses or camera cases. The search tool will be also able online buyers to further narrow down results- say, to cameras equipped with innovative night- shooting abilities.

The importance of Better-target search results is rising as mobile turns into the web retailer’s larger source of revenue. Twiggle also could help the Hangzhou based organization spin off its growing cloud-computation facility to other online trading website, analysts state.

Mr Amir stated Twiggle, established 3 years ago by Ex Google workers will use money to build its Israeli engineering group and set up its offices inside the United States. He stated it will begin collaborating with 2 big organizations in late 2016 to use the newly introduced query language, though he refused to elaborate.

Twiggle is also mapping to find out how items relate to each other as well as their attributions, to help lower down the mistake rate in product search results.