
Ask HN: Is anybody doing something productive with IBM Watson or is it just BS? - maxxxxx
I have lately been through several pitches from companies and &quot;architects&quot; where they were talking about using IBM Watson but they rarely get into detail what they get from it. Is this just a buzzword for sales guys or are people doing something productive with it?
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danso
I've posted my results with using their speech-to-text system:

[https://github.com/dannguyen/watson-word-
watcher](https://github.com/dannguyen/watson-word-watcher)

I think it's actually very good and could be of great use to people needing to
mine and organize audio -- not for perfect transcriptions, but as a first pass
solution...but I don't think that's the small vision that Watson purports to
cater to...that is, if you fed the results of the speech-to-text into Watson's
various language processing APIs, you'd get diminishing returns, though to be
fair, I haven't really used those other APIs in bulk programmatic fashion yet
[1]

[1]
[http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...](http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/alchemy-
language.html)

~~~
chishaku
This is great, thank you.

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ohhoe
Yeah. People are using it.

\-- For starters, Watson has taken residence at three of the top cancers
hospitals in the US -- Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, University of
Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and the Mayo Clinic -- where it helps with
cancer research and patient care.

\-- In Australia, the company ANZ Global Wealth is focused on the latter. The
company uses the Watson Engagement Advisor Tool, an NLP SaaS offering, to
observe and field customer questions. Similarly, DBS bank in Singapore uses
Watson to ensure the proper advice and experience for customers of its wealth
management business.

etc etc. -- [http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-watson-what-are-
companies-u...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-watson-what-are-companies-
using-it-for/)

~~~
maxxxxx
"helps with cancer research and patient care."

What does that mean? I only hear good sounding phrases but nobody ever gives
me any detail.

~~~
ohhoe
What kind of details? Like exactly what it's doing?

~~~
nkw
I think that is what the above poster is asking and the root of the original
inquiry. Most press and IBM originated information about Watson reads like
vague sales collateral or PR puff. The first link I get on google when I type
in "watson" is titled "IBM Watson - The platform for cognitive business" [1]
which is pretty meaningless. I click "What is Watson?" and get this page [2]
which says "IBM Watson is a technology platform that uses natural language
processing and machine learning to reveal insights from large amounts of
unstructured data" which is great but that could describe anything from Siri
to Google to Yelp to Microsoft Word and Excel.

The above post saying "it helps with cancer research and patient care" is the
perfect example of this. Yeah it sounds good, but what is it doing? Keeping
patients warm? Writing publications for researchers? Churning through raw
experimental data? Rationing healthcare (er, making treatment decisions) with
sophisticated mathematics? Generating a quick summary of new research papers
for treaters? I have no idea..

It may be super cool technology, but IBM has done an impressive job of
completely obfuscating its nature and capabilities with sales speak
gobbledygook.

[1]
[http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/](http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/)

[2] [http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/what-is-
wat...](http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/what-is-watson.html)

~~~
tormeh
The PR speak a while ago was that it would sift through research papers and
books looking for relevant answers to a query - a much smarter Google Scholar.
Nobody can keep track of all the cancer research, apparently, so machine
analysis makes sense, IBM says.

~~~
ChristianBundy
Right, but is that what it's doing? It sounds like PR is all that exists.

~~~
fabiobruna
I've worked with some people from IBM, doing some cancer analyses with Watson.
I think the goal was to compare US/EU results(cancer get different treatments
in different regions I guess). We "fed" Watson with actual patient data /
diagnostics(getting/selection data was my job) and reviewed the resulting
suggested treatment plans. Watson would suggest different plans, with results
stats, links to pubmed, datasets etc. I'm no medic, but it looked nice. I
wouldn't mind a "second opinion" like that.

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clavalle
I've helped IBM explore some consumer applications around Watson.

We were basically using it as a recommendation engine. In contrast with
regular recommendation engines which require other users to feed it data on
preferences and then try to match you with similar users, the project we were
working on had Watson build a feature space on its own (something it is very,
very good at) then match a user profile within that space. In short, it cut
out the 'similar person' middleman. It showed what 'shape' a user was in a
feature space, the overall shape of the full feature space, and where that
user was in that space. Thus, if a person wanted to get from where they are to
somewhere else in that feature space, Watson provided a map, more or less.

Why is that important? Well, building a proper recommendation engine when it
depends on a network of people is hard. Think Amazon and Netflix -- part of
their competitive advantage is that recommendation network effect built by
their users. The more people, the more value. The fewer people and it might be
way off base and turn off your early users. What if you didn't need to move
through the preliminary steps of building that network? What if you could jump
to the end? Suddenly that moat dries up. That's what Watson offers, at least
for that particular application type.

~~~
tedmiston
This sounds really interesting. Do you have a paper or more details?

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davismwfl
Outside of some niche areas right now I think what you are hearing is people
trying to pitch others to pay for their time to experiment and build something
with Watson. Not that they already have a solution, again except for some
niche industries and groups.

Overall, IBM is having to reinvent itself (again), and IBM people themselves
are pushing in new directions and pitching new ideas which fit their longer
term plan. At the same time they have this huge legacy dragging behind them,
so it can't be easy. Personally, I have never been a huge fan of some of the
total crap (consulting mainly) they put out there, but then they do some crazy
amazing stuff with their research groups. And I have seen a few really stellar
software consulting gigs they have done too, but that seems to be the
minority. But at least I'll say for them, they aren't Oracle, and they will
complete a project.

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alexc05
I am _aware of_ some groups that are (at least planning to) use IBM Watson to
analyse the outcomes and impacts of social policy research.

As a (made up) example: feeding the AI data-sets of various social investments
made (eg: education, mental health, social & medical support) alongside health
and societal outcomes (crime, hospital intake, suicides, etc..) then
overlaying it on a map and maybe getting Watson to "tell you" which
investments had the best impacts.

That particular example is actually an amalgam of a number of projects my
girlfriend has undertaken recently in her career as a social-policy analyst
_BUT_ she is also enrolled in a university Master's program next year where
one of the possibilities for her placement is to work supporting the Watson
team in figuring out how to use Watson to improve lives & outcomes in the real
world.

I've also _heard_ about using Watson in analyzing health data (detecting
cancers based on mass x-ray analysis) - but I don't know how much of that is
currently working.

Hope that helps - I know it's all anecdotal from my side and I can't link you
to anything published on the topic, but you can take the example for what it
is worth :)

EDIT - I'll try and ask her if she got any more information about what she was
going to do for Watson.

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meesterdude
I had one company that used Watson flat out tell me that it was purely for
marketing - they could have built their own solution just as easily, but used
Watson because it had more marketability.

From what I understand, it's really just a wrapper around IBM, or a collection
of things IBM has built or offers.

I have not yet seen anything particularly interesting - but i'm glad you asked
this question! Hopefully someone will chime in with something worthwhile.

~~~
giancarlostoro
If what you're saying is correct then it could be seen as a sort of framework,
though for marketing reasons that wouldn't sound as attractive I suppose? I
have no experience in this field, though I would love to get into it someday.

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daveloyall
I dunno about Watson, but it is my (inspecific) opinion that at least one
state government and at least one upper-middle-sized corporation have a bunch
of IBM big iron laying around that they don't need.

The real burn is, that's not JUST an upfront cost... You pay per month.

At the corp, I could not find _anyone_ except the CEO that thought the
investment was a good idea. I figure IBM gifted him a car or something.
Complete speculation, but it's the only thing that makes sense!

Elsewhere, inspecifically... At least the machines are used. But honestly how
many giant black modern IBM boxes does it take to fully emulate every single
AS/400 machine that existed within the entity back in 1996? A quick look at
the specs tells me: 1. There's no way it would take more than one.

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xutopia
My brother is creating new chocolate confections with Watson's ingredient
pairing. :-D It's called Chocolat Monarque and it's in Montreal.

~~~
guiomie
Can you share more please? merci

~~~
dragontamer
[https://www.ibmchefwatson.com/community](https://www.ibmchefwatson.com/community)

Chef Watson is allegedly very good at what it does.

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primaryobjects
I've used it for a prototype project for the news industry, though not in
production.

IBM Watson: Building a Cognitive App with Concept Insights

[http://www.primaryobjects.com/2016/02/01/ibm-watson-
building...](http://www.primaryobjects.com/2016/02/01/ibm-watson-building-a-
cognitive-app/)

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Irishsteve
From what I've seen watson is just the branding and they put a bunch of
companies they've acquired working in the general data / analytics space under
the hood.

It's not the solely the setup that won on jeopardy all those years ago.

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nikkwong
I personally thought their tradeoff api was pretty interesting, but until I
hear/see some real world results, I will continue to be skeptical. If anyone
here could shine some light on something that would be awesome.

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martinni
[http://www.rossintelligence.com/](http://www.rossintelligence.com/) they use
watson AI to simplify the legal system.

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nl
This should answer your questions:
[http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/dced8150-b300-11e5-8358-9a82b43f6b...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/dced8150-b300-11e5-8358-9a82b43f6b2f.html#axzz479GitlGt)

Tldr: mostly hype. The "solve cancer" claims haven't worked out. Now there are
lots of big data/machine learning APIs being branded as "Watson" and some are
quite good.

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cwe
I've looked into it for some past hackathon projects and a side project.
Watson can take care of some of the heavy lifting of NLP, categorization, or
parsing large volumes of text, et, in different ways, but it's not some
jeopardy-winning AI you can just plug into something you already have (at
least not yet). It can abstract away some tricky challenges if your needs fit
what it can do.

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larrydag
Here is a recent Dallas R Users meetup on the very of topic of using IBM
Watson

[http://www.meetup.com/Dallas-R-Users-
Group/events/229283377/](http://www.meetup.com/Dallas-R-Users-
Group/events/229283377/)

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chatmasta
The coolest thing I've seen is an internal IBM project that organizes the
news:

[http://news-explorer.mybluemix.net/](http://news-explorer.mybluemix.net/)

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sutro
It's just BS.

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meeper16
I'm successfully using it to supply a hedge fund with a new kind of edge.

~~~
_spoonman
Are you hiring? :)

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MattyMc
ITT: People who have not used IBM Watson for something productive..

