IBM Earns Over 800 Patents In 2018; India 2nd Highest Contributor

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IBM inventors from India earned over 800 patents – the second highest contributor to the company’s global record of 9,100 patents in the US in 2018 – with nearly half in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, cyber security, blockchain and quantum computing.

One of the patents filed from India went to IBM inventors Shivali Agarwal, Gaargi B Dasgupta, Shripad J Nadgowda and Tapan K Nayak, the company has said in a statement. They developed an AI-based approach for structured representation and classification of noisy and unstructured data in tickets used in service delivery.

Ticket analysis helps create problem diagnostics, prediction of outages and prevention of issues in service delivery, for example for help desks.

“IBM is committed to leading the way on the technologies that change the way the world works – and solving problems many people have not even thought of yet,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM Chairman, President and CEO.

Among more than 1,600 AI patents included “Project Debater” that, with the use of Machine Learning, can debate humans on complex topics — identifying evidence such as relevant text segments in unstructured text data, which supports or opposes a claim or topic under consideration.

IBM inventors received more than 2,000 cloud computing and over 1,600 AI patents.

The new patents were granted to a diverse group of more than 8,500 IBM inventors in 47 US states and 48 countries.

Source: https://www.expresscomputer.in/artificial-intelligence-ai/ibm-earns-over-800-patents-in-2018-india-2nd-highest-contributor/31472/ (Accessed on January 16, 2019)

New research could allow fast diagnosis of viruses like Ebola and Zika

A new development in molecular biology is a step towards enabling mobile and instant diagnosis of viruses like Ebola or Zika in the field. The Oxford Nanopore MinION device can sequence DNA and RNA in real time, and researchers at the French agriculture research center CIRAD have found a way to use the device as a tool for identifying plant viruses and potentially animal and human viruses too.

The researchers at CIRAD were searching for a way to diagnose viruses quickly and early in the infection process, so they could avoid the time consuming and potentially dangerous process of transferring contaminated samples to a lab. They struck on using the portable sequencer MinION device, which in the last few years since its development has become a common tool for biological analysis techniques like de novo sequencing, targeted sequencing, metagenomics, and epigenetics. The CIRAD team were able to both test and validate that the device could be used in plant virology, making it an invaluable potential tool for diagnosing viruses in real world outbreaks.

“Using a diseased yam plant, it took us just a few hours to sequence the entire genome of two single-strand RNA viruses, a macluravirus and a potyvirus,” CIRAD researcher Denis Filloux said in a statement. This fast and accurate diagnosis technique is a first step to providing real time detection of chronic viruses with a mobile device which can be used even in isolated and remote areas.

A new technique will make it possible to detect viruses in the field. In this case, a yam plot in Guadeloupe. D. Filloux, Cirad

A key aspect of virus outbreak management is shortening the time between taking a sample of a possibly infected plant and diagnosing it as carrying a particular virus. With this development, this process can be achieved in a shorter time to help public health officials to detect potentially harmful outbreaks at an earlier stage than was previously possible. With the new technique, the device will be able to examine the whole genetic structure of a virus quickly: “The technology is characterized by the production of long nucleotide sequences, which makes it possible to sequence the entire viral genome,” Philippe Roumagnac, a virologist with CIRAD, said in the statement.

This technology would be especially valuable in developing countries where there is often a lack of laboratories which can diagnose viruses and limited understanding of how to manage outbreaks and transport contaminated samples.

 Source: https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/mobile-virus-diagnosis/ (Accessed on January 16, 2019)