Tomorrow's computers will constantly improve their understanding of the data they work with, which in turn will help them provide users with more appropriate information, predicted the software mastermind behind IBM's Watson system.

Computers in the future "will learn through interacting with us. They will not necessarily require us to sit down and explicitly program them, but through continuous interaction with humans they will start to understand the kind of data and the kind of computation we need," said IBM Fellow David Ferrucci, who was IBM's principal

Big data , and the need to analyze data that's collected from every interface and sensor imaginable, is increasing the demand for people with statistical and mathematics backgrounds.

The range of companies hiring people with mathematical skills of some type is on the rise, and it is a trend that prompted a top IBM official this week to boast about its hiring.

"We are the largest employer of Ph.D mathematicians of any company in the world," said Steve Mills, senior vice president at IBM and group executive for software and hardware.

Mills was speaking at the Goldman Sachs

Health care and pharmaceutical company Roche Group will standardize its email and calendaring system on Google Apps for about 90,000 employees worldwide, the companies announced on Thursday.

Roche has had two different email and calendaring platforms for the past two and a half years, a situation that has created "interoperability issues" that have harmed collaboration, according to a blog post from Roche's CFO and CIO Dr. Alan Hippe.

This will be the second-largest Google Apps deployment to date, after the also recently announced

The idea that any number of federal institutions are watching your every move on social networks like Facebook, Twitter is unnerving at best. The Department of Homeland Security is one of those agencies and today it testified before a House subcommittee to define and defend its role in social media monitoring.

Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-Pa.), the House Committee on Homeland Security, Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence subcommittee's chairman, opened the hearing by saying it was reported that DHS had instituted a program to produce short