

IBM Sees Broader Role for Watson in Aiding Research - codelion
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/08/27/ibm-sees-broader-role-for-watson-in-aiding-research/

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fiatmoney
I'm reaaaally getting tired of IBM's PR department plastering Watson press
releases all over the place in the guise of "news". Especially when "Watson"
is more of a brand name, and there's next to no evidence that whatever "it" is
is actually better or more cost-effective than off-the-shelf techniques (let
alone the frontier of research) at any particular machine learning
application.

"Ford sees broader role for Taurus in aiding transportation networks of the
future!" Of course they do.

~~~
Houshalter
Watson may be overhyped, but it isn't a replacement for off the shelf machine
learning algorithms. Watson is more like a search engine that takes advantage
of _a lot_ of natural language processing. It is for answering questions in
natural language and searching through huge amounts of literature
automatically.

~~~
fiatmoney
So, like Solr?

I don't mean to be glib; and I do understand that "answering natural language
questions" is distinct from "search engine". But I have the feeling that it's
a capability distribution that is much more impressive in the context of a
full-court IBM sales pitch to an executive who saw it on Jeopardy once and
wants to get in on this machine learning thing that everyone's talking about,
than as a tool used by experts to do a task or set of tasks better. Their
shameless press release marketing isn't exactly dispelling that notion.

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pesenti
The article is scarce in details but this is a real product with real
applications. The software uses NLP and ML techniques to sift through large
amount of scientific documents, i.e., patents or publications, and extracts
relevant entities, e.g., proteins, drugs, genes and their relationships, e.g.,
how a protein acts on a gene, and lets the user visualize all this and query
it using natural language.

I can give more details if anybody is curious. (Disclaimer: I work for Watson)

~~~
toomuchtodo
Is there an API for Watson? Is it possible as a developer to obtain access?

More abstract: Watson, based on this article
([http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/11/ibm-watson-
me...](http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/11/ibm-watson-medical-
doctor)), can already diagnose cancer better than a human doctor. Will we see
more of this functionality rolled out publicly? Or will it be reserved for use
by healthcare organizations?

~~~
pesenti
Platform 2.0 is coming in October. It will have many new APIs, the docs and
code examples will be public, and we will start opening out for beta testing
to a much larger set of developers. The goal ultimately is to offer all these
capabilities through APIs to anybody.

~~~
techdragon
I went through the paperwork pile to apply to round one access of the Watson
APIs and discovered the shocking restrictions/requirement that the system
apparently "needs" unstructured text, and if your dataset is more structured
than unstructured they won't accept you into to the program.

Needless to say I was a bit annoyed, because I was already using fact
extraction in the system I wanted to test Watson's query 'skill' on. I'm in no
position to store the raw text. That would require over a hundred times more
storage, probably closer to a thousand times the storage costs, making it
fiscally untenable for me to even build the database let alone a product with
it. Any idea if release 2 in October will change this restriction and give
people who aren't sitting on GB of unstructured text, like myself, a chance to
apply.

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biomimic
Other companies focused on genes related to extending human life span are
Google's Calico
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_(company)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_\(company\))
and [http://genopharmix.com](http://genopharmix.com) and
[http://www.humanlongevity.com/](http://www.humanlongevity.com/)

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pseudometa
As awesome as it was watching it play Jeopardy, it feel like that is all it
has ever done. So many press releases boast about the areas it could improve,
however the real-life tangibles seem disparate at best. It would be great if
the PR department touted its actual, real-life, in-the-field results rather
than hypotheticals. Next up, Watson considered for role in improving food
production!

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mark_l_watson
I am very interested in the IBM Watson platform but so far I am still on the
waiting list for being considered for early access.

Hint to IBM: at least make all documentation, example code, etc. available for
perusal.

~~~
pesenti
It will happen on October 7th.

~~~
mark_l_watson
Thanks for the information. I put October 7 on my calendar as a reminder.

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digbata
What a terrible, terrible article. Why is this blog-able information, there is
nothing substantial here. Everything is future possibilities and no concrete
details.

There have been many people working on similar projects to this in academia
and otherwise. "Identifying the proteins that modify p53" is incredibly easy
with the database information in Medline and doesn't require a "Watson" to do
so. That being said, finding connections within medical literature could be
interesting, but only if it is combined with other public databases that
describe protein interactions and gene information. This blog post could be
much more detailed in this sense.

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jostmey
Nice Try....

As someone who works in the biological sciences and who has played around with
various machine learning algorithms (ann, k-nn) this sounds like an
advertising gimmick. I am all for using computers to process and analyze data,
but frankly machine learning has not reached a point yet where algorithms can
"identify" new hypotheses by sifting through the scientific literature.

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hiddencost
sorry, but, ... playing with KNN/ANN and claiming insight into ML is like
playing with a nerf gun and claiming knowledge of advanced tactics.

