
IBM Watson’s Next Venture - nikunjk
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/42451.wss#!
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feralmoan
"it will make its IBM Watson technology available as a development platform in
the cloud".

Future tense, and no bucket to drop an email into for notifications :( Would
take no time at all to buy the parked watsoncloud.com domain (or something!)
and flip up a launchrock page (... or something!).

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pazimzadeh
I wonder if this could be used in conjunction with Wolfram's new project,
mentioned yesterday.

[http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2013/11/13/something-very-
big-i...](http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2013/11/13/something-very-big-is-
coming-our-most-important-technology-project-yet/)

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christiangenco
If anyone from Watson every wanders through HN, I - and everyone that have
replied to this comment - am interested in API access.

christian [dot] genco (at) gmail

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netvarun
Me too :) varun [at] semantics3 [dot] com

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bluedino
Why haven't Google, Microsoft, etc built a similar machine to Watson and play
a fully-computerized version of Jeopardy? Ken Jennings optional.

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jahewson
Because they aren't selling supercomputers?

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wmf
I would estimate that Google and Microsoft each operate more servers than IBM
and they are definitely in the analytics business. (I consider Watson more
analytics than HPC.)

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utopkara
Not true. Watson style analytics requires HPC, the kind that Google and
Microsoft do not (need to) build. Although, that might change with time as
(cheaper) computers get faster.

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mtgx
With the troubles they are having in non-US markets, along with other American
companies, thanks to NSA, they need something else to survive.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-leaks-hurting-us-tech-
sal...](http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-leaks-hurting-us-tech-sales-in-
china-2013-11)

~~~
einehexe
That is wishful thinking, the US dominates the internet now more than ever.

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bhousel
Glad to see that they've finally backed off from the "Watson will
revolutionize healthcare" pitch.

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mikeyouse
I honestly believe it will. Maybe not Watson per se, but a distributed Waston-
like system that can provide cutting edge diagnostic / treatment suggestions
to the entire world will be hugely beneficial.

Just imagine if anywhere on earth with cell-phone service can have 'first-
world' medicine without the need for dedicated doctors. That'll probably be
worth a few years of life-expectancy by itself.

~~~
hellrich
According to a presentation I heard two month ago it's not good enough yet.
They can make accurate predictions in many cases, yet not in all/enough. At
the moment they see more potential in analyzing health insurance claims, as
falling back to a human expert is easier.

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hershel
Do you still have a link to the presentation ? It sounds interesting.

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hellrich
I'm sorry, it was a presentation of an IBM researcher during the BioASQ
workshop. Perhaps you can find the slides/a summary on the BioASQ.org website.

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p1esk
So, will they actually let you run your code on Watson supercomputer? Or is it
just an access to API documentation?

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Queue29
You call an API, and it returns a result. The Watson hardware is nothing more
than a Power 7 box.

~~~
p1esk
Actually, it's many Power 7 boxes (original Watson had 90) clustered together.
But it's really cool if they provide access to their hardware (via API).

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jackhammons
I can't wait for the Watson API.

