IBM: Winning Is Everything in Cloud Computing and Revenues
August 11, 2016
I love testosterone charged sports talk. I wish there were more of it from large companies with an enviable record. Consider IBM. I think it is 16 consecutive quarters of revenue declines. Yes, a crown of sorts.
I read “IBM’s Cloud CTO: We’re in This Game to Win.” I read these thrilling words of hope and revenue optimism:
“We knew it was a massive opportunity for IBM, but not in a way that necessarily fit our mold,” said Jim Comfort, who is now CTO for IBM Cloud. “Every dimension of our business model would change — we knew that going in…. Our platform is cloud,” Comfort said. “It’s not just that we’re doing some cloud services, but that everything we do will be cloud-delivered. That’s a declarative statement — that’s fundamental…. “We understand what matters from the perspective of industries,” Comfort said. “AWS and Google don’t; Microsoft does in certain domains.”
The only hitch in the git along is everyone’s favorite world’s smartest person, Jeff Bezos, quant and space enthusiast. It appears that Amazon’s cloud business is either number one or very close to being number one. (It depends on how one counts, of course.)
The fact is that IBM is into the mainframe thing. IBM has Watson to answer this question, “How can IBM close the gap with Amazon?” And “How can IBM thwart the new Oracle NetSuite cloud thing?” And “What happens if Google shifts its attention from solving death and flying loon balloons to its cloud services?
IBM is in the game to win. Yep, the only problem is that IBM is losing revenues. Hope springs eternal even at ageing technology companies trying really hard to find substantial, sustainable, and profitable revenue streams. The race may be between IBM and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Knocking off Amazon because it doesn’t understand the customer is like the junior college coach who thinks he can run an NFL coaching operation. Long shot. What do you think Watson? Watson, Watson, come here I need you.
Stephen E Arnold, August 11, 2016
IBM Cognitive Storage Creates a Hierarchy of Data Value
August 5, 2016
The article titled IBM Introduces Cognitive Storage on EWeek reveals the advances in storage technology. It may sound less sexy than big data, but it is an integral part of our ability to sort and retrieve data based on the metric of data value. For a computer to determine a hierarchy of data value would also enable it to locate and archive unimportant data, freeing up space for data of more relevance. The article explains,
“In essence, the concept helps computers to learn what to remember and what to forget, IBM said… “With rising costs in energy and the explosion in big data, particularly from the Internet of Things, this is a critical challenge as it could lead to huge savings in storage capacity, which means less media costs and less energy consumption… if 1,000 employees are accessing the same files every day, the value of that data set should be very high.”
Frequency of use is a major factor in determining data value, so IBM created trackers to monitor this sort of metadata. Interestingly, the article states that IBM’s cognitive computing was inspired by astronomy. An astronomer would tag incoming data sets from another galaxy as “highly important” or less so. So what happens to the less important data? It isn’t destroyed, but rather relegated to what Charles King of Pund-IT calls a “deep freeze.”
Chelsea Kerwin, August 5, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Weakly Watson: The Possibilities Are Limitless
July 31, 2016
Hyperbole? Nah, just another fascinating chunk of content marketing by IBM, the proud owner of Watson. You know Watson. The “system” consisting of goodies from open source, acquisitions, and home brew IBM code.
Navigate to “It’s Elementary, Says (IBM) Watson!” The write up shouts:
Given such abilities, the possibilities of what IBM Watson can do in every industry, are limitless!
The possibilities, enumerated below, contain hashtags to make certain that the word diffuses through hashtaggy social media channels. I bet those Pokémon Go players are thrilled to get these items in their “news” stream too. The possibilities are:
- Send Watson to school. This is a nice way of saying that one must create valid training sets. Then the training sets are provided to the content processing system, the results verified, and then the intake process tuned. Does this sound like Autonomy IDOL’s method? It sure does. Plus, it is an expensive and time consuming process when done with rigor. Take a short cut and the system goes off the rails.
- Oversee Watson’s study. Yep, this is fine tuning, and it involves humans, who want money, time off, benefits, and managerial love. Is this expensive? Yep.
- Getting a grip on things. Now this is a possibility which makes the others in this list appear to be semi coherent. Watson uses “artificial intelligence” to “understand” what’s being said in text entering the system. Okay, I think this means Watson is now indexing content in a useful manner. Isn’t that what IBM iPhrase purported to do a decade ago?
- Solve complex problems in a real world. Okay, now we are getting something. What does Watson suggest to IBM, a company which has reported more than four years of declining revenue? What? I did not hear the answer.
- Learning from experience. I think this means that as Watson solves real world problems like IBM’s declining revenues, Watson bets “better.” How long will stakeholders wait? Yahoo’s stakeholders became unsettled and look what happened? Fire sale at a fraction of what Microsoft offered a few years ago.
I am not convinced about the logic of the write up nor about the “endless possibilities” Watson creates. I am more inclined to think about Amazon, Facebook, and Google as big companies likely to deliver results from smart software. What’s not to like about Amazon drones in the UK, Facebook filtering Wikipedia content, and Google solving death. Smart stuff is everywhere. One doesn’t need Sherlock Holmes to figure this out.
Stephen E Arnold, July 31, 2016
Stephen E Arnold,
Weakly Watson: IBM Watson and a Department Store
July 28, 2016
I have fond memories of selling men’s shirt at a department store in Illinois when I was a wee, thin lad. At the end of the year, the place was jammed with people. On a slow day, there were three or more folks riffling through the men’s shirts. Department stores have fallen on hard times. There is the Amazon thing. Social media sites like the Needs.com wants to become a storefront.
Macy’s is a well known vendor. We have one in Louisville, Kentucky, but I think my last visit was in 2011. Too much hassle with the parking, the traffic, and the clutter in the men’s department.
Macy’s labeled its 2015 Annual Report and its 2016 Fact Book with the title “The Agility to Adapt.” I love marketing mantras and the lingo of MBAs. Yep, adapt. Macy’s seems to be struggling to generate sustainable top line revenue and healthy profits. My take on the company’s financial performance is that flat lines suggest mucho efficiency think. At some point, Macy’s has to find a way to jump start growth.
I read “Macy’s Taps IBM Watson to Improve In-Store Shopping App.” The idea is:
The retailer will use Watson’s machine-learning and cognitive-computing technology to assist shoppers as they wander through Macy’s department stores
Millennials, let’s assume, love apps. (I think apps are a bit of disappointment for some folks.) Millennials love to shop (I think online appeals to some of these fine lads and lasses.) Millennials love their smartphones. (I know this is a fact because two of them bumped into me as I walked into an eatery yesterday.)
What could be better? A retailer and Big Blue?
The write up informs me:
The app will apply Watson’s natural language processing (via its Natural Language Classifier API) in order to let shoppers ask questions like “Where can I find the swimsuits?”, and then it’ll find answers based each store’s unique products, services, and layout. Navigation is being provided by Satisfi’s location-based software, which accesses Watson’s technology from the cloud to make the whole experience come together. As time goes on, the app will get smarter as it learns more about each store’s customers and the frequently asked questions for each location.
When I read this, I thought about Pokeman Go. Perhaps the way to generate traffic in a department store is to entice the potential buyers with digital egg hunts. Instead of creatures, one could hunt for bargains with cute digital personas and clever graphics.
IBM Watson does not seem to have the zeitgeist of Pokeman Go. Apps strike me as a little 2007, but I am out of touch. Why not ask Watson?
Stephen E Arnold, July 28, 2016
The Watson Update
July 15, 2016
IBM invested a lot of resources, time, and finances into developing the powerful artificial intelligence computer Watson. The company has been trying for years to justify the expense as well as make money off their invention, mostly by having Watson try every conceivable industry that could benefit from big data-from cooking to medicine. We finally have an update on Watson says ZDNet in the article, “IBM Talks About Progress On Watson, OpenPower.”
Watson is a cognitive computer system that learns, supports natural user interfaces, values user expertise, and evolves with new information. Evolving is the most important step, because that will allow Watson to keep gaining experience and learn. When Watson was first developed, IBM fed it general domain knowledge, then made the Watson Discovery to find answers to specific questions. This has been used in the medical field to digest all the information created and applying it to practice.
IBM also did this:
“Most recently IBM has been focused on making Watson available as a set of services for customers that want to build their own applications with natural question-and-answer capabilities. Today it has 32 services available on the Watson Developer Cloud hosted on its Bluemix platform-as-a-service… Now IBM is working on making Watson more human. This includes a Tone Analyzer (think of this as a sort spellchecker for tone before you send that e-mail to the boss), Emotion Analysis of text, and Personality Insights, which uses things you’ve written to assess your personality traits.”
Cognitive computing has come very far since Watson won Jeopardy. Pretty soon the technology will be more integrated into our lives. The bigger question is how will change society and how we live?
Whitney Grace, July 15, 2016
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden Web/Dark
Web meet up on July 26, 2016. Information is at this link: http://bit.ly/29tVKpx.
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
July 13, 2016
After reading The Atlantic’s article, “Technology, The Faux Equalizer” about how technology is limited to the very wealthy and does not level the playing field. It some ways new technology can be a nuisance to the average person trying to scratch out a living in an unfriendly economy. Self-driving cars are one fear, but did you ever think bankers and financial advisors would have to compete with algorithms? The International Business Times shares, “Will Financial Analysts Lose Their Jobs To Intelligent Trading Machines?”
Machine learning software can crunch numbers faster and can extrapolate more patterns than a human. Hedge fund companies have hired data scientists, physicists, and astronomers to remove noise from data and help program the artificial intelligence software. The article used UK-based Bridgewater Associates as an example of a financial institute making strides in automizing banking:
“Using Bridgewater as an example, Sutton told IBTimes UK: ‘If you look at their historic trading strategies, it’s been very much long-term bets around what’s happening at a macro level. They have built their entire business on having some of the best research and analytics in the industry and some of the smartest minds thinking on that. When you combine those two things, I would definitely expect artificial intelligence to be applied to identify large-scale trades that might not be evident to an individual researcher.’”
Developing artificial intelligence for the financial sector has already drawn the attention of private companies and could lead to a 30% lose of jobs due to digitization. It would allow financial companies a greater range of information to advise their clients on wise financial choices, but it could also mean these institutes lose talent as the analysts role was to groom more talent.
These will probably be more potential clients for IBM’s Watson. We should all just give up now and hail our robot overlords.
Whitney Grace, July 13, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
The Computer Chip Inspired by a Brain
July 6, 2016
Artificial intelligence is humanity’s attempt to replicate the complicated thought processes in their own brains through technology. IBM is trying to duplicate the human brain and they have been successful in many ways with supercomputer Watson. The Tech Republic reports that IBM has another success under their belt, except to what end? Check out the article, “IBM’s Brain-Inspired Chip TrueNorth Changes How Computers ‘Think,’ But Experts Question Its Purpose.”
IBM’s TrueNorth is the first computer chip with an one million neuron architecture. The chip is a collaboration between Cornell University and IBM with the BARPA SyNAPSE Program, using $100 million in public funding. Most computer chips use the Von Neumann architecture, but the TrueNorth chip better replicates the human brain. TrueNorth is also more energy efficient.
What is the purpose of the TrueNorth chip, however? IBM created an elaborate ecosystem that uses many state of the art processes, but people are still wondering what the real world applications are:
“ ‘…it provides ‘energy-efficient, always-on content generation for wearables, IoT devices, smartphones.’ It can also give ‘real-time contextual understanding in automobiles, robotics, medical imagers, and cameras.’ And, most importantly, he said, it can ‘provide volume-efficient, unprecedented neural network acceleration capability per unit volume for cloud-based streaming processing and provide volume, energy, and speed efficient multi-modal sensor fusion at an unprecedented neural network scale.’”
Other applications include cyber security, other defense goals, and large scale computing and hardware running on the cloud. While there might be practical applications, people still want to know why IBM made the chip?
” ‘It would be as if Henry Ford decided in 1920 that since he had managed to efficiently build a car, we would try to design a car that would take us to the moon,’ [said Nir Shavit, a professor at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory]. ‘We know how to fabricate really efficient computer chips. But is this going to move us towards Human quality neural computation?’ Shavit fears that its simply too early to try to build neuromorphic chips. We should instead try much harder to understand how real neural networks compute.’”
Why would a car need to go to the moon? It would be fun to go to the moon, but it doesn’t solve a practical purpose (unless we build a civilization on the moon, although we are a long way from that). It continues:
” ‘The problem is,’ Shavit said, ‘that we don’t even know what the problem is. We don’t know what has to happen to a car to make the car go to the moon. It’s perhaps different technology that you need. But this is where neuromorphic computing is.’”
In other words, it is the theoretical physics of computer science.
Whitney Grace, July 6, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Watson Weekly: IBM Watson Service for Use in the IBM Cloud: Bluemix Paas, IBM SPSS, Watson Analytics
July 5, 2016
The article on ComputerWorld titled Review: IBM Watson Strikes Again relates the recent expansions of Watson’s cloud service portfolio, who is still most famous for winning on Jeopardy. The article beings by evoking that event from 2011, which actually only reveals a small corner of Watson’s functions. The article mentions that to win Jeopardy, Watson basically only needed to absorb Wikipedia, since 95% of the answers are article titles. New services for use in the IBM Cloud include the Bluemix Paas, IBM SPSS, and Predictive Analytics. Among the Bluemix services is this gem,
“Personality Insights derives insights from transactional and social media data…to identify psychological traits, which it returns as a tree of characteristics in JSON format. Relationship Extraction parses sentences into their components and detects relationships between the components (parts of speech and functions) through contextual analysis. The Personality Insights API is documented for Curl, Node, and Java; the demo for the API analyzes the tweets of Oprah, Lady Gaga, and King James as well as several textual passages.”
Bluemix also consists of AlchemyAPI for ftext and image content reading, Concept Expansion and Concept Insights, which offers text analysis and linking of concepts to Wikipedia topics. The article is less kind to Watson Analytics, a Web app for data analysis with ML, which the article claims “tries too hard” and is too distracting for data scientists.
Chelsea Kerwin, July 5, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Supercomputers Have Individual Personalities
July 1, 2016
Supercomputers like Watson are more than a novelty. They were built to be another tool for humans, rather than replacing humans all together or so reads some comments from Watson’s chief technology officer Rob High. High was a keynote speaker at the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. The Inquirer shares the details in “Nvidia GTC: Why IBM Watson Dances Gangam Style And Sings Like Taylor Swift.”
At the conference, High said that he did not want his computer to take over his thinking, instead he wanted the computer to do his research for him. Research and keeping up with the latest trends in any industry consumes A LOT of time and a supercomputer could potentially eliminate some of the hassle. This requires that supercomputers become more human:
“This leads on to the fact that the way we interact with computers needs to change. High believes that cognitive computers need four skills – to learn, to express themselves with human-style interaction, to provide expertise, and to continue to evolve – all at scale. People who claim not to be tech savvy, he explained, tend to be intimidated by the way we currently interact with computers, pushing the need for a further ‘humanising’ of the process.”
In order to humanize robots, what is taking place is them learning how to be human. A few robots have been programmed with Watson as their main processor and they can interact with humans. By interacting with humans, the robots pick up on human spoken language as well as body language and vocal tone. It allows them to learn how to not be human, but rather the best “artificial servant it can be”.
Robots and supercomputers are tools that can ease a person’s job, but the fact still remains that in some industries they can also replace human labor.
Whitney Grace, July 1, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
IBM Cloud Powers Comic-Con Channel
June 30, 2016
The San Diego Comic-Con is the biggest geek and pop culture convention in the country and it needs to be experienced to be believed. Every year the San Diego Comic-Con gets bigger and more complex as attendees and the guests demand more from the purveyors. If you are at Comic-Con, then you need to think big. Thinking big requires thinking differently, which is why it would seem “IBM And Comic-Con HQ Make Strange Bedfellows” says Fortune.
IBM announced that they have teamed with Lionsgate to run a Comic-Con HQ video channeled powered by IBM’s cloud. The on-demand channel will premiere during 2016’s Comic-Con. Comic-con attendees and those unfortunate not to purchase a ticket have demanded video streaming services for years, practically ever since it became possible. Due to copyright as well as how to charge attendees for the service have kept video on-demand on the back burner, but now it is going to happen and it is going to be a challenge.
Video streaming is:
“Video is a demanding application for cloud computing. Storing and shipping massive video files, often shot in ultra-high-definition 4k format, is a useful testbed to show off cloud services.”
Anything new related to Comic-Con always proves to be a hassle and troublesome. One of the cases in point is when the SDCC launched its digital waiting room to purchase tickets and had way more traffic than their servers could handle. The end result was a lot of angry fans unable to buy tickets. Another challenge was handling the massive crowds that started flocking to the convention halls around the mid-2000s (attendance swelled around 2011 with the Twilight movies).
Anything that will improve the Comic-Con experience and even allow non-attendees a taste of the magical July event would be welcome.
Whitney Grace, June 30, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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