

IBM's Watson For Business: The $1 Billion Siri Slayer - shuaib
http://www.fastcompany.com/3024604/ibms-watson-for-business-the-1-billion-siri-slayer

======
hooande
Watson could be described as a natural language search engine. This is no
small thing. It's linguistic abilities were showcased on jeopardy, though it's
wins might have had more to do with speed of processing and "buzzing in" than
it did with being really smart. Watson is quite possibly the most
sophisticated specific use natural language program to ever exist (as opposed
to general use nlp, which is star trek level problem).

That said, the approach and subsequent utility might not live up to the hype
that IBM is pumping out. It's one thing to search very quickly. Being able to
discover patterns that lead to new levels of understanding and predictable
relationships is another thing entirely. IBM is more search vs predict in part
because they only have so much data to work with. All of the medical books in
the world are a drop in the bucket in terms of algorithmic understanding.
Watson has mastered working with all available information. Collecting and
processing massive data sets is another challenge that IBM hasn't been willing
to tackle yet.

IBM is billing Watson as the all singing, all dancing solution to the world's
data problems. They're tackling a lot of problems in diverse areas. I hope it
works out, the world needs as much help as it can get. But IBM has shifted
their core mission to be consulting and I wonder if Watson's purpose will be
to support that more than becoming a Super Siri type software project that
could do the most good.

~~~
bnegreve
> _That said, the approach and subsequent utility might not live up to the
> hype that IBM is pumping out. It 's one thing to search very quickly. Being
> able to discover patterns that lead to new levels of understanding and
> predictable relationships is another thing entirely._

I don't get this, Watson might not be able to provide new _levels of
understanding_ but it still does a much better job than current search
engines, so why do you think it cannot live up to the hype? Why do you think
that it is not a significant improvement? What makes you think the approach is
wrong? I need some clarifications :)

~~~
macspoofing
>but it still does a much better job than current search engines

Does it?

~~~
bnegreve
If you query Google with a Jeopardy style question you won't have a valid
answer as the first result, so at least for this particular application, yes
it does a better job.

I'm sure there are plenty of reason to believe that this cannot be generalized
to real world problem but no one here has given these reasons. So I am not
really sure why people claim that it might not live up the the hype. (And I
would genuinely like to understand).

~~~
jijiwaiwai
Watson is trained for answering those questions ,google is not. this is why
some one can pee all his urine into a small cococola bottle on the ground from
upstairs while others can,t:he trained himself and practiced a lot. if you
need Watson help you with other things, you need to train him again.that's why
you need apps for: do the training. you will find there's nothing different
with training a SAS or R program. you are still on your own. there's no help
you can get from Watson

------
eggoa
_“allows business users to send natural language questions and raw data sets
into the cloud, for Watson to crunch, uncover, and visualize insights; without
the need for advanced analytics training. After analyzing the data, Watson
will deliver results to its users through graphic representations that are
easy to understand, interact with, and share with colleagues; all in a matter
of minutes.”_

This sounds a lot like my present job description.

~~~
tsunamifury
Remember, no one cares about data, they want a story and the evidence to back
that up. Watson may just make it easier for you to focus on the story telling
and evidence rather than the crunching.

------
nl
I'm currently working on an my own open source version of Watson/Siri/Google
Now. (It can answer "What is the capital of Brazil" Yay!).

As part of that I've been leaning as much as I can about how Watson actually
works.

The most useful information can be found by Googling "Deep QA" which is what
IBM has dubbed their question answering pipeline.

A slide deck like [2] is a good place to start if you are interested in this.

[1] Yeah, I know that is kind of a crazy thing to work on. It's actually even
more stupid than you may think, because I want it make it self-hostable, with
the ability to keep your own data separately to the rest of the application
(ie, enforcing privacy).

[2]
[http://www.cs.hku.hk/news/2011/WatsonHongKong_talk_ppt.pdf](http://www.cs.hku.hk/news/2011/WatsonHongKong_talk_ppt.pdf)

~~~
xerophtye
Not crazy at all. I have been dreaming on working on something similar even
before watson was announced (though i was just a Freshmen back then). And was
hellishly jealous of that team. So I can totally understand your motivations
for this.

Do hit me up if you'd welcome help with this. Email is in HN profile

~~~
nl
You have to fill in you email in the about section for it to be visible. Mine
should be showing up though - feel free to get in touch.

------
fortepianissimo
I really don't appreciate the media's blood thirst - the slayer of this and
the killer of that. Why can't we just have something that contributes in a
non-zero-sum game?

~~~
normloman
You never had journalistic training. Journalists frame stories to satisfy
criteria of "newsworthiness," a combined measure of the story's importance,
urgency, and entertainment value. Just like a good novel has a dramatic
conflict, journalists are taught to report on stories with conflict (which are
often more interesting to read than dull, peaceful hum-drum). And if the story
doesn't have conflict built-in, they make conflict by framing the story to
include a conflict narrative. Journalists refer to the way they frame a story
as their "angle." Anything can be news with the right angle.

Real life example: in the 90s, journalists reported on the "Great Hacker War,"
a "virtual gang war" between two competing hacker groups, LOD & MOD. In
reality, the event was a scuffle between some hackers in a chat room, which
resulted in some minor hacking, name calling, and prank phone calls. But that
didn't make for a great headline.

~~~
milhous
The headline is so absurd that I'm not reading it. But an excellent analysis.

------
ar7hur
So far Watson for developers/business is 100% PR and 0% real. In November they
announced the Watson API. Where is the API? Where is the documentation? Where
are the examples? Google it and you'll get a torrent of PDF press release and
incentives to call their sales team.

I'm afraid Watson is just a PR stunt. Was it oversold by IBM engineers to
their executives? Or by the executives to the PR team? Or by the PR team to
the press? I don't know. But they lost control of it.

~~~
Spooky23
Students at RPI have access to it, I saw a student app using it at a hackathon
awhile back.

[http://watson.rpi.edu/](http://watson.rpi.edu/)

------
pervycreeper
I wonder if the medical profession's refusal to adopt Watson has more to do
with its performance or with guild protectionism.

~~~
gamegoblin
My field of research is in machine learning, and upon chatting with medical
folks about recent machine learning breakthroughs that outperform panels of
experts at making diagnoses, they are all extremely resistant and think that
using AI in medicine is somehow immoral.

I'd personally want to be diagnosed by a panel of experts with access to said
AI.

~~~
wil421
It may not be immoral but I doubt the malpractice insurance companies are
going to back Doctors who rely on an AI to make diagnoses.

I agree that a combination of a panel and AI would make me feel better about a
diagnoses.

~~~
ghshephard
Kaiser makes use of an expert system when determining whether to schedule an
appointment. I once called in with the the symptoms, "Excruciating pain in the
chest, left arm just went completely numb at the same time" \- and the
admitting nurse (under the guidance of an expert system) determined with three
quick questions that it wasn't urgent. (Any shortness of breath, are you light
headed, if you press your fingernail down, how long does it take to return
from white to red)

So, expert systems are already here and helping make decisions...

~~~
mikenuman
Shame the "expert system" was wrong!

With that history you should have been seen urgently. There are a number of
serious things that are possible with those symptoms.

Plus, the nurse was relying on your accurate reporting of symptoms. Things are
often very different face to face than over a telephone. People very often
under/overplay their symptoms.

~~~
ghshephard
Presumably those people who've developed the kaiser system have come to a
different conclusion than you. It may be the case that there is no scenario in
which "Excrutiating Chest Pain + Numb Left Arm" is urgent when you have a full
return to red on when pressing your fingernail (blood pressure check?)

Also, presumably, if I was having any shortness of breath, it could be
determined just by talking to me. They may have also taken my age into account
(32) and decided that 32 year olds don't have heart attacks in the way I was
describing.

I came in for a checkup a week later, and all was well (except for a RSI issue
that was contributing to the completely numb left arm)

------
bhouston
Seems like a lot of hype still. It needs a killer app and I haven't yet seen
one.

~~~
kylemclaren
Something like this?

[http://youtu.be/8lGJ0h_jAp8](http://youtu.be/8lGJ0h_jAp8)

~~~
elwell
That doesn't look like a prototype, just cgi.

------
scotty79
Watson in its original incarnation could be already quite useful. It could
provide workers with valuable input on what their manager has in mind when he
babbles incomprehensibly throwing his favorite buzzwords at random.

At least 20% of full-stack programmers job is to figure out how people want
the computer to behave and all we have to work with is chaos of words that
flow from their mouths and fingers.

------
wil421
So Siri is for consumer devices and Watson is going to be for businesses. I
dont think they are going to be killing each other since they are targeting
different markets.

~~~
taopao
Most of Siri's Watson-style smarts are just Wolfram Alpha queries, no?

~~~
RandallBrown
I'm not sure.

I asked Siri "Did Michigan win its bowl game?" and it gave me the right answer
and said "Michigan lost to Kansas state in the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl.

Wolfram Alpha, with the same query, just gave me information about the state
of Michigan.

Bing gave me search results about Michigan Football, and Google's top results
were an article about the actual bowl game. I don't have an Android phone to
try Google Now.

------
balozi
Looks like IBM might be trying to buy good press. Plus, it's just over a week
till Q4 earnings report. I bet Rometty has seen the numbers.

------
robg
Best part? What was living room-sized is now three pizza boxes. It's less
hardware, more software. That's exciting! AWS for AI.

~~~
lingben
I heard this as well, any idea how this was accomplished?

~~~
mbesto
[http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1ushn7/ibms_wats...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1ushn7/ibms_watson_the_computer_that_beat_humans_on/)

 _Comment 1 - Most likely it 's not a full "Watson" but rather a network
appliance that slots into a rack. Watson is powered by 2,880 8-core IBM POWER7
processors, which AFAIK haven't received a core bump or a die shrink since
their introduction in 2011.

Comment 2 - POWER7 (which came out in 2009) was replaced by POWER7+ in 2012.
IBM shrunk the lithography but kept the die size the same, so they used the
extra space for more cache, a crypto accelerator, a compression/decompression
accelerator, and some other goodies. There were able to bump up the clock
speed as well. Core for core, POWER7+ is about a 20% improvement, but you're
right, no more cores per socket so there is no way they would see the kind of
shrink described in the article if they kept the same amount of compute power.
IBM did come out with a new blade design (Flex Systems) with denser packaging,
but that combined with the faster CPU will still only get them about 2/3rd of
the way there (still impressive)._

------
hipaulshi
Wow. I wish they could provide an open source library. But that was probably
too much to ask for. Still, this is amazing news.

~~~
isaacpei
it was funny that just 3 days ago wallstreet journal talked about this: IBM
Struggles to Turn Watson Computer Into Big Business
[http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230488710...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304887104579306881917668654)

It would be more convincing if Watson accomplished some real knowledge
archievment such as finding a cure for a specific disease, or publish some
papers enhance our understanding of some research topics ...

Unix starts small, it works. Google starts small, it helps us tremendously.
Haven't seen something starts as a big business plan can success greatly? even
Microsoft started small ...

------
nathan_f77
This is awesome. It really makes me feel like we're taking one more step into
the future.

