The IBM Watson Hype Machine Shouts Again
October 28, 2016
The IBM Watson semi news keeps on flowing. The PR firms working with IBM and the Watson team may bring back the go go days of Madison Avenue. Note, please. I wrote “may.” IBM’s approach, in my opinion, is based on the Jack Benny LSMFT formula. Say the same thing again and again and pretty soon folks will use the product. The problem is that IBM has not yet found its Jack Benny. Bob Dylan, the elusive Nobel laureate, is not exactly the magnetic figure that Mr. Benny was.
For a recent example of the IBM Watson buzz-o-rama, navigate to “IBM Watson: Not So Elementary.” I know the story is important. Here’s the splash page for the write up:
I will definitely be able to spot this wizard if I bump into him in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky. I wonder what the Watson expert is looking at or for. Could it be competitors like Facebook or outfits in the same game in China and Russia?
The write up begins with an old chestnut: IBM’s victory on Jeopardy. No more games. I learned:
IBM’s cognitive computing system is through playing games. It’s now a hired gun for thousands of companies in at least 20 industries.
I like the “hired” because it implies that IBM is raking in the dough from 20 different industry sectors. IBM, it seems, is back in the saddle. That is a nifty idea but for the fact that IBM reported its 18th consecutive quarter of revenue declines. The “what if” question I have is, “If Watson were generating truly big bucks, wouldn’t that quarterly report reflect a tilt toward positive revenue growth?” Bad question obviously. The Fortune real journalist did not bring it up.
The write up is an interview. I did highlight three gems, and I invite—nay, I implore—you to read and memorize every delicious word about IBM Watson. Let’s look at the three comments I circled with my big blue marker.
Augmented Intelligence
at IBM, we tend to say, in many cases, that it’s not artificial as much as it’s augmented. So it’s a system between machine computing and humans interpreting, and we call those machine-human interactions cognitive systems. That’s kind of how it layers up….it’s beginning to learn on its own—that is moving more in the direction of what some consider true artificial intelligence, or even AGI: artificial general intelligence.
Yikes, Sky Net on a mainframe, think I.
Training Watson
there isn’t a single Watson. There’s Watson for oncology. There’s Watson for radiology. There’s Watson for endocrinology…for law…for tax code…for customer service.
I say to myself, “Wow, the costs of making each independent Watson smart must be high. What if I need to ask a question and want to get answers from each individual Watson? How does that work? How long does it take to receive a consolidated answer? What if the customer service Watson gets a question about weather germane to an insurance claim in South Carolina?”
The Competition
The distinctness of the Watson approach has been to create software that you can embed in other people’s applications, and these are especially used by the companies that don’t feel comfortable putting their data into a single learning system—particularly one that’s connected to a search engine—because in effect that commoditizes their intellectual property and their cumulative knowledge. So our approach has been to create AI for private or sensitive data that is best reserved for the entities that own it and isn’t necessarily ever going to be published on the public Internet.
I ponder this question, “Will IBM become the background system for the competition?” My hunch is that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and a handful of outfits in backwaters like Beijing and Moscow will think about non IBM options. Odd that the international competition did not come up in the Fortune interview with the IBM wizard.
End Game
these systems will predict disease progression in time to actually take preventive action, which I think is better for everybody.
“Amazing, Watson will intervene in a person’s life,” blurt my Sky Net sensitive self.
Please, keep in mind that this is an IBM Watson cheer which is about 4,000 words in length. As you work through the original Fortune article, keep in mind:
- The time and cost of tuning a Watson may cost more than a McDonald’s fish sandwich
- The use of “augmented intelligence” is a buzzword embraced by a number of outfits, including Palantir Technologies, a competitor to IBM in the law enforcement and intelligence community. Some of IBM’s tools are ones which the critics of the Distributed Common Ground System suggest are difficult to learn, maintain, and use. User friendly is not the term which comes to mind when I think of IBM. Did you configure a mainframe or try to get a device driver for OS/2 to work? There you go.
- The head of IBM Watson is not an IBM direct hire who rose through the ranks. Watson is being guided by a person from the Weather Channel acquisition.
How does Watson integrate that weather data into queries? How can a smart system schedule surgeries when the snow storm has caused traffic jams. Some folks may use an iPhone or Pixel or use common sense.
Stephen E Arnold, October 28, 2016
IBM: Financial Report Keeps Up with Its Predecessors
October 25, 2016
IBM’s financial results for 2015-2015 third quarter kept up with their predecessors.
The Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2016, said “IBM Profit, Sales Slip But New Units Grow.” (See page B1 in the Harrod’s Creek edition of the venerable business newspaper.) I noted this passage:
The Armonk, NY Company said Monday that third quarter revenue was $19.23 billion, down 0.3%…Big Blue said its profit fell 4% to $2.9 billion during the quarter ended in September amid weakness in its systems segment, which includes mainframe computer hardware and operating system software.
According to “Barclays Says IBM’s Q3 Not Much to Get Excited About”:
Going by the weakness in third quarter margins, Barclays said it’s led into believing that the company’s cloud business doesn’t have the scale to achieve margin at or above the corporate average. The firm termed it as not good, as the company’s strategic imperatives, including cloud, are starting to reaccelerate.
Here in Harrod’s Creek, the fans of blue chip stocks are wondering when IBM will reverse its 18th consecutive quarters of revenue decline.
I suggested to the folks hanging out at the local car repair shop that they should ask Watson. Their response:
What’s Watson. Ain’t he the guy who lives in the next town over?
I was going to explain but decided to put oil in my old car. It is getting old. I don’t think it can hang on much longer. I call it “Big Blue 2 too.” That sounds like blue tutu, doesn’t it?
Stephen E Arnold, October 25, 2016
Rocket Software: Video Marketing Moment
October 23, 2016
0I did a quick, routine check of Rocket Software’s search and text analytics Web page at this link. I saw a snippet of text and then a link to a new video:
Rocket is a player in the five day IBM Watson conference later this month. What’s interesting about the WOW 2016 event is that no list of participating companies is available via a search on IBM.com or via public Web search systems. Interesting. A five day event with many luminaries I surmise.
Stephen E Arnold, October 23, 2016
IBM Watson Is Just More of Everything Except Revenue
October 11, 2016
I read “IBM Watson’s CMO Predicts the Future of Data and AI.” I thought that the article would report what IBM Watson had to say about this question: “What is the future of data and AI, Watson?” Wrong. The article presents IBM’s current thinking about what its humanoids desperately want IBM Watson to become.
There was one startling omission in the article, but I will save that until the final paragraph of this mini report.
I noted several points of interest to me in the write up which is essentially an IBM wizard answering some slightly worn questions about the sprawling brand known as Watson. (Keep in mind that I know Watson as Lucene, home brew code, and acquired technologies.)
Point One: Watson understands human language. So Watson is like the film “2001” and HAL? No, here’s what the write up says Watson is:
It’s not speech recognition like Siri, not speech synthesis like Alexa, but actually understanding human languages…
Point Two: Why use IBM Watson and not some other smart system? Answer:
We’ve invested $6 billion in our idea, a third of that is dedicated to cognitive.
Point Three: IBM made a big deal about Twitter in 2014. IBM’s position:
Twitter specifically, is interesting.
You get the idea. Superficial generalizations about how capable IBM Watson is.
What’s the big omission? Revenue. Not a peep about how IBM Watson is going to generate sustainable revenue this quarter. What’s frightening to me is that the humanoid answers about Watson are sketchy. Since Watson did not answer the questions or address the topics in the title of the source article, I conclude that IBM Watson’s answers are even more sketchy.
I love that multi billion investment, however. Now about the financial payoff. Watson, any answers?
Stephen E Arnold, October 11, 2016
HonkinNews for October 11, 2016 Now Available
October 10, 2016
The most recent HonkinNews video is now available at this link. Stories include Yahoo’s most recent adventure: A purple light Y-Mart discount of $1 billion dollars on the Verizon purchase offer. Learn how Google Translate handles a Chinese poem about ospreys, not government administration. Included in the seven minute program is information about IBM Watson in the third grade and Bing’s secret to revenue success. These stories and more like the diffusion of the idea of “good enough” search. Direct from Harrod’s Creek in rural Kentucky… HonkinNews for the week ending October 11, 2016.
Stephen E Arnold, October 10, 2016
MIT Embraces Google DeepMinds Intuitive Technology Focus
October 6, 2016
The article on MIT Technology Review titled How Google Plans to Solve Artificial Intelligence conveys the exciting world of Google DeepMind’s Labyrinth. Labyrinth is a 3D environment forged on an open-source platform where DeepMind is challeneged by tasks such as, say, finishing a maze. As DeepMind progresses, the challenges become increasingly complicated. The article says,
What passes for smart software today is specialized to a particular task—say, recognizing faces. Hassabis wants to create what he calls general artificial intelligence—something that, like a human, can learn to take on just about any task. He envisions it doing things as diverse as advancing medicine by formulating and testing scientific theories, and bounding around in agile robot bodies…The success of DeepMind’s reinforcement learning has surprised many machine-learning researchers.
Of the endless applications possible for intuitive technology, the article focuses on the medical, understanding text, and robotics. When questioned about the ethical implications of the latter, Demis Hassabis, the head of Google’s DeepMind team, gave the equivalent of a shrug, and said that those sorts of questions were premature. In spite of this, MIT’s Technology Review seems pretty pumped about Google, which makes us wonder whether IBM Watson has been abandoned. Our question for Watson is, what is the deal with MIT?
Chelsea Kerwin, October 6, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
IBM Watson: Cut! Cut! You Will Never Work in This Town Again
September 9, 2016
I read “Watson Made a Movie Trailer, Paving the Way for Police Worn Body Cameras.” The idea is that IBM Watson can convert images into a story line. There are quite a few video editors who may be following IBM Watson’s new functionality. Who needs to sit in an edit bay, eating pizza at 2 30 am, trying to make the tweaks which calm down a wild and crazy Hollywood director? This is a job for Watson.
I learned in the write up:
producers at Fox nonetheless thought it might be a good idea to get a real artificial intelligence involved in preparing it for release (the movie came out on Friday). So they asked a research team at IBM to leverage their multitasking AI, Watson, to pick the scenes for a movie trailer.
This artificial intelligence technology is definitely of interest to the Hollywood crowd. Hey, if humans can’t figure out that Ben Hur is a loser from the dailies, maybe IBM Watson can do the job. Even better is Watson’s doing a good job so the moguls can fire some expensive folks with a penchant for spending weeks, if not months, in an edit bay with the aforementioned pizza.
The write up revealed:
The team used systems that they had already developed, known as the visual recognition services part of the IBM Watson Developer Cloud, which allows companies tap into the abilities of this particular AI. Watson already understood how to process video footage, and can interpret emotional content. All the team needed to do was teach Watson about the horror genre, specifically. After feeding the AI roughly 100 horror movies from various eras (including the 1976 classic The Omen), it didn’t take much for the software to begin picking out patterns.
I interpret this to mean that movie moguls can pay IBM to produce with the denizens of the edit bay once did. The idea, of course, is that Watson performs better than the team behind the box office disappointment — possibly disaster — of the summer. Giddy up, Ben.
The article reveals that the payday for IBM Watson may be processing police videos from body camera. IBM Watson would make sense of these. My recollection is that for London authorities to locate suspects of the tube and bus bombings, humans had to look at surveillance camera footage. The humans got the job done.
But if IBM Watson were on the job, the intrepid sleuth Watson might have done the job better, faster, and cheaper. Oh, pick two of these attributes.
The possibilities boggle my tiny goose brain. Visualize a feature film created entirely by IBM Watson. The source would be raw footage from a crew of videographers using the nifty 8K technology.
One question: How long will it take to train Watson on “great” film? Then how long will it take Watson to process the dailies for a two month shoot? Next how long will it take Watson to select scenes, order them in a semi coherent fashion, and output a motion picture? It might be less complex and more economical and stick to the old mogul formula: Pick a script with inputs from a person 22 years old. Add money. Pray.
The formula almost worked for Ben Hur.
Stephen E Arnold, September 9, 2016
Revenue Takes a Backseat to Patent Filings at IBM
September 9, 2016
The post on Slashdot titled IBM Has Been Awarded an Average of 24 Patents Per Day So Far in 2016 compares the patent development emphasis of major companies, with IBM coming out on top with 3,617 patent awards so far in 2016, according to a Quartz report. Patents are the bi-product of IBM’s focus on scientific research, as the report finds,
The company is in the middle of a painful reinvention, that sees the company shifting further away from hardware sales into cloud computing, analytics, and AI services. It’s also plugging away on a myriad of fundamental scientific research projects — many of which could revolutionize the world if they can come to fruition — which is where many of its patent applications originate. IBM accounted for about 1% of all US patents awarded in 2015.
Samsung claimed a close second (with just over 3,000 patents), and on the next rung down sits Google (with roughly 1,500 patents for the same period), Intel, Qualcomm, Microsoft, and Apple. Keep in mind though, that IBM and Samsung have been awarded more than twice as many patents as Google and the others, making it an unstoppable patent machine. You may well ask, what about revenue? They will get back to you on that score later.
Chelsea Kerwin, September 9, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden Web/Dark Web meet up on September 27, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233599645/
Weekly Watson: IBM Watson Plays Tennis
September 8, 2016
My recollection is that IBM has provided a range of services to various sporting activities. I did not know that IBM Watson could serve, volley, and deal with love. Advantages, yes. Love, not so much. I learned that IBM Watson will be attending the US Open in “IBM Watson’s Next Match? The U.S. Open.” The story appeared on USA Today’s Web site along with a number of compelling pop up pleas for me to subscribe to the dead tree version of the Gannet newspaper. Err, no thanks.
I learned:
IBM has collaborated with the United State Tennis Association on technology for more than a quarter-century, but Watson, IBM’s self-proclaimed cognitive computer, is a newbie at the Open. IBM is leveraging Watson’s machine learning smarts and cloud-based analytics to try and bolster the fan experience during the tournament–while simultaneously raising Watson’s profile.
Just imagine. IBM is trying to raise Watson’s profile.
I highlighted another knowledge nugget from the McPaper online write up; namely:
Behind the scenes at the U.S. Open, Watson’s speech-to-text technology is “listening” to interviews with players and video clips of tennis action to generate transcripts and subtitles for videos published to the tournament’s website and other digital platforms.
I have always wondered if squeaky clean female tennis players from Eastern Europe cursed on court after losing a point. Perhaps Watson will monitor, translate, and display what real players say in natural language.
Even more interesting, USA Today revealed:
Through Watson’s natural language capabilities, fans can use the artificial intelligence-infused U.S. Open mobile app to ask such questions as, “Where can I get a hamburger?” or “Where are the bathrooms?”
Right. The facilities’ question. The crack journalism outfit was not, it appears, swept game, set and match by Watson.
I noted this statement:
I consider this one to be a fault.
Clever. The fault referenced informed McPaper that its social media alter ego was Pamela Anderson. Does Ms. Anderson play a vigorous game of tennis?
Stephen E Arnold, September 8, 2016
Watson Ads for Branded Answers to the Little Questions of Life
September 6, 2016
Here is a potent new way for brands to worm their way into every aspect of consumers’ lives. “IBM Watson Is Now Offering AI-Powered Digital Ads That Answer Consumers’ Questions,” we learn from AdWeek. Watson Ads will hook users up with answers to their everyday questions—answers supplied by advertisers. Apparently, IBM’s Weather-Company acquisition supplied the tools behind this product. Writer Christopher Heine explains:
IBM’s relatively new ownership of The Weather Company’s digital properties is coming into play in a serious fashion: Watson Ads will first appear on Weather.com, the Weather mobile app and the company’s data-driven WeatherFX platform. Later, IBM plans to allow them to appear on third-party properties.
Campbell Soup Company, Unilever and GSK Consumer Healthcare are some of the brands that will run the ads in the coming days. Watson Ads’ pricing details were not disclosed.
Jeremy Steinberg, global head of sales, The Weather Company, described how they work, stating that ‘machine learning and natural-language capabilities will allow it to provide accurate responses. What we’re doing is moving away from keyword searches and towards more natural language and well-reasoned answers.
Heine outlines Campbell’s plan as an example—their Watson Ads will present “Chef Watson,” the helpful AI which suggests recipes based on criteria like available ingredients, the time of day, and what the weather is like. Those recipes will be pulled from Campbell’s existing site Campbell’s Kitchen. Not surprisingly, their ingredient lists rely heavily on Campbell’s product line (which goes well beyond soup these days).
Another Watson Ads client is GSK Consumer Healthcare, which plans to use the tech to help users make better real-time health decisions—a worthy project, I’ll admit. I am curious to see how Unilever, and other companies down the line, will leverage their digital voices of authority. See the article for more details on the project.
Cynthia Murrell, September 6, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden Web/Dark Web meet up on September 27, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233599645/
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