Only two years after appearing on the game show Jeopardy! IBM’s Watson supercomputer is making startling progress in advancing the future of health care. In the past week, three new Watson-related “cognitive” technologies have been unveiled.(Two at the Cleveland Clinic and one at The Anderson Cancer Center in Dallas.) “WatsonPaths” incorporates feedback from the physician…

It has been said that “Big Data” is the “oil” of the new economy. Is this true? I believe it is and I’ll explain using oil as an example. Like me, you were probably instructed to change the oil in your automobile every 3,000 miles or so. This was solid advice in the past but…

Late last year, I released my annual list of predictions for 2012. In Trend #3 on “Augmented Political Reality” I wrote: “a new wave of social media political consultants will monitor live Twitter streams and use the feedback to adjust candidates’ teleprompter speeches in real time.” To this end, this article (Why Viewers Could Soon…

Data mining is going to be big business in the near future. To understand why, consider that the food retailer, The Schwan Food Company, has used data mining to bolster its revenue by 3 to4 percent. That might not sound like a lot but in the retail industry, it’s huge. According to this insightful article,…

Over the past few months, I have delivered a number of insurance oriented keynotes and, later this week, I’ll be addressing the LOMA Conference on Emerging Technologies for the Insurance Industry. While I cover a wide variety of trends in the information technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology sectors, here are five trends already impacting the insurance…

Last week, fellow futurist Simon Anderson and I posted a chapter from our forthcoming book, Foresight 2020, which discussed the future of crime and law enforcement. It was entitled Crime By Design. One of the trends we outlined was the application of predictive analytics (or data-crunching) to deter crime. To emphasize this point, I’d like…

In 2010, I outlined a list of 10 jobs of the future. Number 3 on the list was “data analyst.” In today’s Wall Street Journal, it was reported that business schools across the country are “unveiling analytics electives, certificates and degree programs, and other courses and programs” in the field. The reason is obvious. In…