SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Interesting) by scruffybeard on Monday November 10 2014, @02:59PM
IBM trained and tuned the algorithms specifically for Jeopardy! clues. Consider the two following "questions": "This tower, built for the 1889 World's Fair in Paris, is 1063 ft. tall.", and "What is the height of the Eiffel Tower in Paris?" My experience is that Watson will accurately respond to the first, but has great difficulty with the second. The difference is that the first is filled with clues, allowing it to cross reference multiple documents that all frequently mention the Eiffel Tower. The second question forces Watson to parse documents about the Tower, looking for the height, something that it does not do well. This is the reason why it is being applied to medical research. It can assimilate millions of medical records, looking for commonalities. The response that the doctor will likely get from this kind of system is a list of patients who had similar symptoms, but it will be up to the doctor to review those previous cases and see if past treatment applies to his current case.