Weekly Watson: In the Real World
January 2, 2016
I want to start off the New Year with look at Watson in the real world. My real world is circumscribed by abandoned coal mines and hollows in rural Kentucky. I am pretty sure this real world is not the real world assumed in “IBM Watson: AI for the Real World.” IBM has tapped Bob Dylan, a TV game show, and odd duck quasi chemical symbols to communicate the importance of search and content processing.
The write up takes a different approach. In fact, the article begins with an interesting comment:
Computers are stupid.
There you go. A snazzy one liner.
The purpose of the reminder that a man made device is not quite the same as one’s faithful boxer dog or next door neighbor’s teen is startling.
The article summarizes an interview with a Watson wizard, Steven Abrams, director of technology for the Watson Ecosystem. This is one of those PR inspired outputs which I quite enjoy.
The write up quotes Abrams as saying:
“You debug Watson’s system by asking, ‘Did we give it the right data?'” Abrams said. “Is the data and experience complete enough?”
Okay, but isn’t this Dr. Mike Lynch’s approach. Lynch, as you may recall, was the Cambridge University wizard who was among the first to commercialize “learning” systems in the 1990s.
According to the write up:
Developers will have data sets they can “feed” Watson through one of over 30 APIs. Some of them are based on XML or JSON. Developers familiar with those formats will know how to interact with Watson, he [Abrams] explained.
As those who have used the 25 year old Autonomy IDOL system know, preparing the training data takes a bit of effort. Then as the content from current content is fed into the Autonomy IDOL system, the humans have to keep an eye on the indexing. Ignore the system too long, and the indexing “drifts”; that is, the learned content is not in tune with the current content processed by the system. Sure, algorithms attempt to keep the calibrations precise, but there is that annoying and inevitable “drift.”
IBM’s system, which strikes me as a modification of the Autonomy IDOL approach with a touch of Palantir analytics stirred in is likely to be one expensive puppy to groom for the dog show ring.
The article profiles the efforts of a couple of IBM “partners” to make Watson useful for the “real” world. But the snip I circled in IBM red-ink red was this one:
But Watson should not be mistaken for HAL. “Watson will not initiate conduct on its own,” IBM’s Abrams pointed out. “Watson does not have ambition. It has no objective to respond outside a query.” “With no individual initiative, it has no way of going out of control,” he continued. “Watson has a plug,” he quipped. It can be disconnected. “Watson is not going to be applied without individual judgment … The final decision in any Watson solution … will always be [made by] a human, being based on information they got from Watson.”
My hunch is that Watson will require considerable human attention. But it may perform best on a TV show or in a motion picture where post production can smooth out the rough edges.
Maybe entertainment is “real”, not the world of a Harrod’s Creek hollow.
Stephen E Arnold, January 2, 2016
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