So Where Are You? Come Here! Hello, Hello

January 24, 2012

Maybe it is I, but fatigue washes over me each time I read about Lucene-based Watson. Quite a bit of PR chatter and very little online demo.

All Things D recently reported on IBM’s new super computer Watson in the article “Seven Questions With IBM’s Manoj Saxena About Watson and Cancer.”

According to the article, IBM is planning on using Watson as a reference tool to assist human physicians in the treatment of breast, lung and colon cancer.

The write up provides readers with the text from an interview between All Things D and Manoj Saxena, general manager of the Watson program at IBM, to talk about what Watson will — and won’t — be doing in helping doctors treat humans with cancer, and what that might mean for the future of medicine.

In response to the question, will Watson be directly involved in treatment? Saxena replied:

Watson doesn’t make the decisions. It’s a physician’s assistant. But before it becomes that, it has a lot to learn. Out of the box, Watson has the knowledge of a first-year medical resident. That is where it’s at today. With Cedars-Sinai and Wellpoint, we’re going to teach it all about cancer during the next six months.

A couple of observations:

NLP on a medical corpus is a piece of cake compared to colloquial blog posts in Arabic
Talk is not search; talk is baloney
Wrapping layers of code around Lucene does not inspire confidence in high speed throughput on large content collections.
Updates? And what about updates?

Watson still has a lot to learn to be able to be utilized to solve the problem of cancer. After utilizing the super computer in the medical field, IBM plans to apply Watson to financial services.

Jasmine Ashton, January 24, 2012

Comments

One Response to “So Where Are You? Come Here! Hello, Hello”

IBM Watson, does it have a future? « Flying like a banana blog on February 2nd, 2012 3:28 pm

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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.