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IBM has recently delivered a string of disappointing quarters, and announced recently that it would take a multibillion-dollar hit to offload its struggling chip business. But Will Knight writes at MIT Technology Review that Watson may have the answer to IBM's uncertain future.
IBM's vast research department was recently reorganized to ramp up efforts related to cognitive computing. The push began with the development of the original Watson, but has expanded to include other areas of software and hardware research aimed at helping machines provide useful insights from huge quantities of often-messy data. “We’re betting billions of dollars, and a third of this division now is working on it,” says John Kelly, director of IBM Research, said of cognitive computing, a term the company uses to refer to artificial intelligence techniques related to Watson.
The hope is that the Watson Business Group, a division aimed making its Jeopardy winning cognitive computing application more of a commercial success, will be able to answer more complicated questions in all sorts of industries, including health care, financial investment, and oil discovery; and that it will help IBM build a lucrative new computer-driven consulting business.
But Watson is still a work in progress. Some companies and researchers testing Watson systems have reported difficulties in adapting the technology to work with their data sets. “It’s not taking off as quickly as they would like,” says Robert Austin. “This is one of those areas where turning demos into real business value depends on the devils in the details. I think there’s a bold new world coming, but not as fast as some people think.”
IBM needs software developers to embrace its vision and build services and apps that use its cognitive computing technology. In May of this year it announced that seven universities would offer computer science classes in cognitive computing and last month IBM revealed a list of partners that have developed applications by tapping into application programming interfaces that access versions of Watson running in the cloud. Big Blue said it will invest $1 billion into the Watson division including $100 million to fund startups developing cognitive apps. “I very much admire the end goal,” says Boris Katz adding that business pressures could encourage IBM’s researchers to move more quickly than they would like. “If the management is patient, they will really go far”.
(Score: 1) by WillAdams on Monday November 10 2014, @01:12PM
I've often thought that what was really needed was a way to use A.I. on a CMS --- Simson Garfinkel made an interesting beginning on this w/ his sbook.app (an address book for NeXTstep which used an internal A.I./pattern recognition system to recognize address fields): http://simson.net/ref/sbook5/ [simson.net] (source code is available for the curious).
The problem w/ a CMS is the interface and the need for discipline on the part of the users --- it wouldn't be so bad if everyone were trained as a librarian and willing to look up where a particular item should be stored, or find a bit which needs to be edited, but most users aren't willing to do that. Instead, one needs a dynamic CMS which would constantly update itself, so one would instead of demanding user interaction and editing and updating, instead have the CMS update itself constantly by having it serve as the corporate e-mail server and have the A.I. parsing every e-mail (and voice mail?) for content which would then be applied to a corporate wiki detailing all records, projects, &c.