Computerworld Becomes ComputerWatson

October 22, 2016

I followed a series of links to three articles about IBM Watson. Here are the stories I read:

Watson’s the Name, Data’s the Game, dated October 10, 2016
Milestones Along the Way in Watson’s Colorful History, October 10, 2016
It’s (Not) Elementary: How Watson Works, October 10, 2016

The publication running these three write ups is Computerworld, which I translated as “ComputerWatson.”

Intrigued by the notion of “news,” I learned:

Watson uses some 50 technologies today, tapping artificial-intelligence techniques such as machine learning, deep learning, neural networks, natural language processing, computer vision, speech recognition and sentiment analysis.

But IBM does not like the idea of artificial intelligence even though I have spotted such synonyms in other “real” news write ups; for example, “augmented intelligence.”

There are factoids like “Watson can read more than 800 pages a second.” Figure 125 words per “page” and that works out to 100,000 words per second which is a nice round number. Does Watson perform this magic on a basic laptop? Probably not. What are the bandwidth and storage requirements? Oh,not a peep.

Computerworld—I mean ComputerWatson—provides a complete timeline of the technology too. The future begins in 1997. Imagine that. Boom. Watson wins at chess.

The “history” of Watson is embellished with a fanciful account of how IBM trained via humans assembling information. How much does corpus assembly cost? ComputerWatson—oh, I meant “Computerworld”—does not dive into investment.

To make Watson’s inner workings clear, the “real” news write up provides a link to an IBM video. Here’s an example of the cartoonish presentation:

These three write ups strike me as a public relations exercise. If IBM paid Computerworld to write and run these stories, the three articles are advertising. Who wrote these “news stories”? The byline is Katherine Noyes, who describes herself as “an ardent geek.” Her beat? Enterprise software, cloud computing, big data, analytics, and artificial intelligence.

Remarkable stuff but I had several thoughts:

Not much “news” is included in the articles. It seems to me that the information has appeared in other writings.
IBM Watson is working overtime to be recognized as the leader in the smart software game. That’s okay, but IBM seems to be pushing big markets with no easy way to monetize its efforts; for example, education, cancer, and game show participation.
The Computerworld IBM Watson content party strikes me as eroding the credibility of both outfits.

Oh, I remember. Dave Schubmehl, the fellow who tried to sell on Amazon reports containing my research without my consent, was hooked up with IDG. I have lost track of the wizard, but I do recall the connection. More information is here.

Yep, credibility for possible content marketing and possible presentation of “news” as marketing collateral. Fascinating. Perhaps I should ask Watson: “What’s up?”

Stephen E Arnold, October 22, 2016

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Marketing, News, Publishing

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.