From left: John Kelly, Susan Stuard of Taconic Health Information Network, John Cronin of the Beacon Institute, and Arthur Kressner, of ConEd

POUGHKEEPSIE - IBM unveiled initiatives Thursday that will help keep the Hudson River vital and alive.

There are plans to create a supercomputer named Watson that is supposed to play Jeopardy and be able to correctly answer a question in three seconds, and IBM wants to make the medical industry more efficient and create technologies that will better manage our energy grids.

IBM has been doing research for nearly a decade in the region on these applications, but as Big Blue looks to future, it does so competitively by making changes in its workforce, laying off workers in the region, and causing those over 50 to worry, fearful of losing their jobs.

Despite layoffs, the company continues to invest “heavily” in New York State, the Hudson Valley and R&D, said IBM Senior Vice President and Director of Research John Kelly.

“We always retrain people as best we can – but we’re in a very competitive market and technologies change. So, as a business, we must remain competitive, but our employees remain our most valuable resource.”

Kelly brought media and business leaders to the Poughkeepsie facility Thursday to talk about the future of computing capabilities. “We recognized about a decade ago, around 2000, that computing capabilities were going to be distributed everywhere, and the nature of the problems were facing were changing,” he said.  “We’ve made tremendous progress with computing capabilities. The timing is great to be ready now.”

After Kelly touted IBM’s plans to save the planet, he let John Cronin, the president and CEO of the Beacon Institute, a guest panelist, discuss how Big Blue will help provide sensor technology to what’s going on real time in the Hudson River.