IBM made two announcements this week that could benefit its Big Data projects. The company confirmed its acquisition of Pittsburgh-based Vivisimo, which it expects to help advance its analytics programs and assist groups including health care providers in assessing and navigating structured and unstructured data. IBM also confirmed the use of its analytics program by the University at Buffalo in New York to research more than 2,000 environmental and genetic elements to see how they relate to multiple sclerosis.