Pictures of the Future     Spring 2008

In Brief

? Medical diagnostic systems provide physicians with so much data that decision support assistants have become essential. New programs are helping doctors interpret data — for example, by recognizing anomalies and possibly cancerous structures, by pinpointing key differences between images taken at different times, and by predicting outcomes based on different treatment scenarios   ^more

? The Theseus research program is intended to develop both basic technologies and standards for the semantic Web. The objective is to teach computers to understand logical connections. Siemens experts in the Medico project are, for example, working on software that will find medical images in databases, interpret them, compare them. and recognize similarities between them   ^more

? In industry, intelligent assistants use sophisticated sensor technology to keep an eye on wind farms, road tunnels, and pipelines — around the clock and under harsh conditions such as those encountered on the open sea and in the Siberian tundra   ^more

? To provide an overview of up to ten million external payments per year, Siemens Financial Services relies on IT systems developed in-house. These digital assistants also help financial experts evaluate stock and loan deals worth billions of euros ^more

? Intelligent control systems monitor and manage complete power and water networks. They inform power plant operators of the current operating state of a network and coordinate numerous decentralized generating facilities to form a single, virtual power plant. In fact, such a system from Siemens currently controls the entire water supply for the Brazilian megacity of São Paulo   ^more

? According to Prof. Tom M. Mitchell, Head of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, by 2015 computers will advance to such an extent that they will be able to read and understand 80 % of the information on the Internet ^more