IBM Pushing Watson Through Video Marketing: A Good Thing?

April 23, 2012

Watson, IBM’s supercomputer, triggered media furor when it defeated two of the world’s best Jeopardy players in the much-publicized “Man vs. Machine” challenge early last year. Now, the same supercomputer system is being pitched by the company as a valuable healthcare resource that would help diagnose medical conditions and recommend treatments.

Wall Street Technology Association’s abstract of the webcast “Rebroadcast IBM Watson and Medical Records Text Analytics” reports the following:

With IBM Content Analytics and its healthcare-specific solution called Medical Records Text Analytics, the Natural Language Processing technologies used in Watson are available to unleash the content traditionally locked in doctor’s notes, clinical records, journal articles, desk references, drug uses / interactions, and many other medical content sources.

This move by IBM to embrace videos to promote its products and services is effective, but will only work on video-oriented IT procurement managers who don’t have the time and patience to read through pages upon pages of product manuals. The problem with videos is that they are not the real thing. Similar to the three-part Jeopardy episode that shows a machine trumping the best human players, video marketing relies heavily on post-production. Expertly done post-production will easily allow you to forge and optimize the ambiance, background, music, and other elements.

While we know that Watson is from the technology mogul IBM and uses proven search technologies like Lucene, SPARQL, and Indri, it needs more than a winning streak in a popular game show and videos with testimonials merely from healthcare industry professionals to prove its worth in providing solutions for businesses belonging to different industries.

Tell me, IBM. How else can you convince us to purchase your costly POWER7 servers and adapt Watson if there are other proven and inexpensive natural language processing solutions out in the market?

Lauren Llamanzares, April 23, 2011

Comments

Comments are closed.

Search the site
Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive

Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.