IBM. We Bought a Big Time Player.
October 29, 2018
I read “IBM to Acquire Cloud Computing Firm Red Hat for $34 Billion.” Note that CNN Web page plays truly annoying and unrelated media when one attempts to figure out the article.
I noted
The companies called the deal, which still needs approval from shareholders and regulators, the “most significant tech acquisition of 2018.” The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2019.
Three observations:
- Watson is obviously not doing much for IBM other than roviding marketers with a flow of funds to create spectacular ads.
- IBM appears to know that it is going to be breating Amazon and Microsoft exhaust fumes in the cloud sector unless it does something that sort of makes sense.
- The management decision comes too late for some major procurement wins.
Remarkable. Watson, what’s up? Oh, right.
Stephen E Arnold, October 29, 2018
IBM Inventor A Minority, Female, And An Anomaly
October 27, 2018
Women and minorities in the technology industry are underrepresented and often white whales, purple giraffes, pink elephants, and even black swans. The Dallas News reports on one of these colorful creatures in the article, “Star IBM Inventor Fears Emails Can Be Brutal, So She Built A Tool To Fix It.”
Romelia Flores is Latina, female, and one of IBM’s top worldwide technologists. She holds 38 patents, including several “high-value patents” that have impacted IBM’s revenue stream, and she has 30 more pending. Flores works with clients to help design products and solutions to their problems in imaginative and innovative ways.
IBM has named Flores an IBM master inventor and she is extremely proud of that title. One of her favorite inventions is an email tone checker. Flores said that email is often impersonal and brutal, so her tone analyzer. She designed it after she was criticized for being too blunt in her communications.
The tone analyzer is apparently very smart:
“‘So before I hit send on my email, it flags to me, ‘Hey, Romelia, you didn’t put any courtesy verbiage at the front,’ or ‘Gee, Romelia, you were pretty direct at giving orders, so you might want to add a please here.’ “It even factors in the personality traits of the IBM recipient. ‘It’ll say, ‘Hey, she doesn’t respond well to directness, so maybe you should be a little nicer and lighten up your email.’ It’ll even propose verbiage for me. Is that cool or what?’”
The rest of the article is an empowering puff piece about an extremely intelligent female and minority engineer at IBM. It makes you wonder if this piece was written to demonstrate how progressive IBM is. Is Flores an anomaly at IBM? Let’s ask Watson? Well, Watson seems to be a male. Is that an issue?
Whitney Grace, October 27, 2018
Cognos Gets a Rework
October 25, 2018
Cognos? Cognos?
Oh, right, that’s the Canadian analytics company founded in 1969. I think that works out to 49 years young. IBM has owned Cognos since 2008, Now after a decade of vast investment, savvy upgrades, and stellar management decisions, Cognos is going to get even better. Think of it as a US professional football player from the 1960s, suiting up and starting for the Kansas City Chiefs or the Chicago Bears. That’s a strategy that the opposing teams will find surprising.
Same with advanced analytics. Quid, Palantir, Recorded Future! Are you nervous about the new and improved Cognos revealed in “IBM Integrates Business Intelligence and Data Science with New Major Update to Cognos Analytics.”
What’s the fountain of youth?
According to the write up:
… Storytelling… allows users to create interactive narratives by assembling visualizations into a sequence and then enhancing it with media, web pages, images, shapes, and test.
And:
Smart exploration will help users be able to better understand what’s behind their results by analyzing it with machine learning and pattern detection.d then enhancing it with media, web pages, images, shapes, and test.
And:
advanced analytics that include predictive analytics, the ability to identify data patterns and variables driving a certain outcome, smart annotation, and natural language generated insights of data.
But the number one enhancement is… wait for it….
The key new features of this release are a new AI Assistant and pattern detection capability. The AI Assistant enables users to make queries and then receive results in natural language. According to IBM, this makes it easier to not only look for answers, but understand where they come in.
Ah, IBM. Making a product that is half a century young even more appealing to millennials.
Stephen E Arnold, October 25, 2018
IBM Watson: Amping Up Its Marketing with Hockey Harmony, Earthquake Coping, and World Surf League Insights
October 25, 2018
IBM’s dip in revenues may have contributed to the step up in IBM Watson marketing. The Beyond Search goose noted several interesting examples. These are long on assertions and short on facts about training time, cost, and support. But, hey, this is marketing in 2018, so the approach can be a bit like the two step on Dancing with the Stars.
ITEM ONE: Influential, a company using IBM Watson to power its revenues, has hired a new business officer. Andrew Pelosi (does the name sound familiar?) will be go to smart software champion. His preparation for the job? VP of biz dev at the World Surf League. Sounds like a good fit.
ITEM TWO: What do you do when an earthquake strikes your child’s school? The correct answer, “Trust IBM Watson.” Yep, IBM is in the earthquake amelioration business. “When an Earthquake Hits, Watson Solution Helps Schools Cope” reveals:
“Frida [a Watson powered solution] mitigates natural disasters by combining emergency data with AI technology using IBM IoT platform, Watson Studio, and Watson Services,” said Lin Ju, Watson Studio senior development manager at IBM Canada Lab who led the team. “For our proof of concept, we focused on earthquakes in schools, but this solution can be applied to other areas.”
Rest easy. Frida Watson will help schools cope. Parents? Maybe.
ITEM THREE: How will a company manufacturing athletic gear find a sports personality? The answer, as you might have guessed, is IBM Watson. According to “Fizziology Employs Watson Linguistic Analysis to Match Endorsing Athletes”:
In Fizziology’s endeavor, which it says is the first brand-to-celebrity matching employing the supercomputer’s linguistic analysis, Watson examines the social media posts of a given brand’s fans to determine the personality traits they assign to the brand, as well as the traits indicated by the athletes’ own posts. In both cases, the posts were made to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Do athletes write their own social media posts? My hunch is, “Maybe.” If this is true, Watson will extract from a PR person’s posts the data needed to perform a match. Watson has many talents, including figuring out an athlete’s Closeness, Curiosity, Self Expression, and Harmony score. Yep, hockey players in the Harmony department.
Ah, IBM Watson. Interesting stuff.
Stephen E Arnold, October 24, 2018
IBM: Watson, What Happened?
October 18, 2018
I read “IBM Surprises Investors with Quarterly Revenue Decline.” The write up states:
The company broke its three-quarter string of revenue growth with a 2 percent drop in total revenue to $18.76 billion, down from $19.15 billion a year ago.
The article pointed out:
Most notably, Cognitive Solutions revenues fell 5 percent, to $4.15 billion, against analyst estimates of $4.3 billion. That division, which includes IBM’s analytics business as well as the Watson cognitive computing platform, was pulled down by weakness in some horizontal categories such as collaboration, commerce and talent management.
Watson, what happened?
But IBM pointed out that it is starting to see “green shoots.” I think this means that growth is evident in some sectors.
IBM is a consulting company which still sells mainframes. Enough said.
Stephen E Arnold, October 18, 2018
Google and IBM: Me Too Marketing or a Coincidence?
October 15, 2018
I noted this article: “Google AI Researchers Find Strange New Reason to Play Jeopardy.” What caught my attention was the introduction of the TV game show which featured IBM Watson stomping mere humans in a competition. I dismissed the human versus machine as a Madison Avenue ad confection. IBM wanted to convince the folks in West Virginia and rural Kentucky that Watson smart software was bigger than college basketball.
I think it worked. It allowed me to crank out write ups poking fun at the cognitive computing assertion, the IBM billion dollar revenue target, and the assorted craziness of IBM’s ever escalating assertions about the efficacy of Watson. I even pointed out that humans had to figure out the content used to “train” Watson and then fiddle with digital knobs and levers to get the accuracy up to snuff. The behind the scenes work was hidden from the Madison Avenue creatives; the focus was on the sizzle, not the preparatory work in the knowledge abattoir.
The Googlers have apparently discovered Jeopardy. I learned that Google uses Jeopardy to inform its smart software about reformulating questions. Here’s a passage I highlighted:
Active Question Answering,” or Active QA, as the TensorFlow package is called, will reformulate a given English-language question into multiple different re-wordings, and find the variant that does best at retrieving an answer from a database.
I am not going to slog through the history of query parsing. The task is an important one, and in my opinion, without providing precise indexing such as “company type” and other quite precise terms, queries go off base. The elimination of explicit Boolean has put the burden on query processors figuring out what humans mea when they type a query using the word “terminal” for instance. Is it a computer terminal or is it a bus terminal. No indexing? Well, smart software which looks up data in a dynamic table will do the job in a fine, fine way. What if one wants to locate a white house? Is it the DC residence of the president or is it the term for Benjamin Moore house paint when one does not know 2126-70?
Well, Google has embraced Jeopardy to make its smart software smarter and ignore the cost, time, and knowledge work of creating controlled term lists, assigning and verifying index accuracy, and fine grained indexing to deal with the vagaries of language.
So, Google seems to have hit upon the idea of channeling IBM Watson.
But I recalled seeing this article: “Google AI Can Spot Advanced Breast Cancer More Effectively Than Humans.” That reminded me of IBM Watson’s message carpet bombing about the efficacy of Big Blue cancer fighting. The only problem was that articles like “IBM Pitched Its Watson Supercomputer As a Revolution in Cancer Care. It’s Nowhere Close” Continue to Appear.”
Is Google channeling IBM’s marketing?
My hypothesis is that Google is either consciously or unconsciously tilling an already prepped field for marketing touch points. IBM did Jeopardy; Google does Jeopardy with the question understanding twist. IBM did cancer; Google does a specific type of cancer better than humans and, obviously, better than IBM Watson.
So what? My thought is that Google is shifting its marketing gears. In the process, the Google-dozer is dragging its sheep’s’ foot roller across the landscape slowly recovering from IBM’s marketing blitzes.
Will this work?
Hey, Google, like Amazon, wants to be the 21st century IBM. Who knows? I thank both companies for giving me some new fodder for my real live goats which can walk away from behemoth smart machines reworking the information landscape.
Here’s a thought? Google is more like IBM than it realizes.
Stephen E Arnold, October 15, 2018
Has Amazon Kicked IBM Watson into Action?
October 2, 2018
Amazon’s policeware, based on Sagemaker and other Amazon innovations, makes it easy to de4ploy machine learning applications. Amazon delivers, as we report in our DarkCyber video about Amazon’s machine learning approach, a Blue Apron approach to smart software intended to make sense of Big Data. You can view our four part series beginning later this month. Watch Beyond Search for details.
IBM seems to have noticed what Amazon has been doing for the last four or five years. With a bit of a late start, IBM is, it appears, emulating the Bezos buzz saw. Some information about the more pragmatic approach to rule based smart software is revealed in “IBM Launches Pretrained Watson Packs for Industries.”
I learned:
IBM outlined prepackaged Watson tools pretrained for various industries use cases such as agriculture, customer service, human resources, manufacturing and marketing.
One of Watson’s more amusing characteristics is that human subject matter experts have to figure out what questions Watson is to answer and then build a collection of text to instruct Watson on the who, what, why, etc.
Expensive, time consuming, and usually a surprise to licensees who assume that IBM Watson is a product. Ho ho ho.
Like Amazon, IBM wants to deliver ready to use packs for specific business sectors like marketing.
Now Amazon is delivering its Sagemaker meals ready to eat, microwavable data burritos, and the Blue Apron “any fool can fix dinner” smart software. IBM is sort of moving in that direction. I noted this passage:
Each Watson pack is in different states of release but take best practices and training knowledge from various IBM engagements. For instance, IBM said its Watson Decision Platform for Agriculture is generally available. IBM has integrated its weather data as well as Internet of things end points in agriculture and images to provide a “predictive view of a farm.” Farmers would get an app for real-time decision support.
Just think. Amazon is selling to a large covert government agency its smart software. IBM is working on similar initiatives but it has the farm thing nailed. Can IBM fix John Deere tractors?
Will IBM Watson beat Amazon Sagemaker?
I am not sure the two are in the same game.
Stephen E Arnold, October 2, 2018
IBM Watson: Chug, Chug, Chugging Along
September 12, 2018
Beyond Search does feel a little sad for IBM. You know. The Watson thing.
IBM really, really wants their AI to cure cancer. We’ve reported on recent findings that the famous AI is, as of yet, falling short of that goal; Information Magazine adds some details in its opinion piece, “IBM’s Watson Hasn’t Beaten Cancer, but AI May Win.” Writer Faye Flam points to the revelations from internal IBM documents as reported by Stat News (registration required) that the software had made some “unsafe and incorrect” recommendations for cancer patients. Flam seems sure this is a temporary state and that, eventually, some form of machine-learning AI will come to permeate healthcare because medicine is, at heart, a data problem. She also notes, however, why cancer treatment is a particularly tough area to master—for one thing, humans ourselves haven’t quite mastered it yet. She writes:
“Cancer treatment is more complicated, because humans are still figuring it out. Patients get multiple treatments that may result in remission periods, but whether there’s a remission and how long it lasts depends on a host of variables. ‘It’s something we struggle with a lot,’ Beam said. ‘You want a ground-truth gold-standard correct answer for a given patient, and 99 percent of the time that doesn’t exist.’ Only a small fraction of cancer patients have their information recorded in a systematic way, said Isaac Kohane, a doctor and chairman of the biomedical informatics program at Harvard Medical School. That’s now starting to change. ‘Those of us in the AI community are extremely optimistic about how these techniques are going to revolutionize medicine,’ he said. But with Watson, ‘it’s just unfortunate that the marketing arm got ahead of the capabilities.’”
That marketing issue right there is the problem in a nutshell; salespeople gotta sell. AI, even Watson, holds great promise for better medical outcomes, but we mustn’t get ahead of ourselves. In the meantime, IBM is pursuing some less consequential AI projects, like delivering coffee by drone at just the right moment. TechAcute reports, “IBM Files a Patent for Coffee Delivery Drone Which Knows You Want Your Coffee.” Reporter Kate Sukhanova tells us the service monitors users’ biometric data and delivers them their cup of joe before they even know they need it. Just what we (or, perhaps Watson’s public relations) needed!
Cynthia Murrell, September 13, 2018
Smart Software and Old School Technology
August 22, 2018
It feels strange to say that anything analog is a trend in artificial intelligence, but that certainly seems to be the case in one segment. According to reports, there’s actually a way for AI to get faster and more accurate by indulging in some old timey thinking. We learned more from a recent Kurzweil article, “IBM Researchers Use Analog Memory to Train Deep Neural Networks Faster and More Efficiently.”
According to the story:
“IBM researchers used large arrays of non-volatile analog memory devices (which use continuously variable signals rather than binary 0s and 1s) to perform computations. Those arrays allowed the researchers to create, in hardware, the same scale and precision of AI calculations that are achieved by more energy-intensive systems in software, but running hundreds of times faster and at hundreds of times lower power…”
This is an intriguing development for AI and machine learning. Next Platform took a look at this news as well and found: “these efforts focused on integrating analog resistive-type electronic memories onto CMOS wafers, they also look at photonic-based devices and systems and how these might fit into the deep learning landscape.” We’re excited to see where this development goes and what companies will do with greater AI strength.
Patrick Roland, August 22, 2018
Wake Up Time: IBM Watson and Real Journalists
August 11, 2018
I read “IBM Has a Watson Dilemma.” I am not sure the word “dilemma” embraces the mindless hyperbole about Vivisimo, home brew code, and open source search technology. The WSJ ran the Watson ads which presented this Lego collection of code parts one with a happy face. You can check out the Watson Dilemma in your dead tree edition of the WSJ on page B1 or pay for online access to the story at www.wsj.com.
The needle point of the story is that IBM Watson’s push to cure cancer ran into the mushy wall composed of cancerous cells. In short, the system did not deliver. In fact, the system created some exciting moments for those trying to handcraft rules to make Dr. Watson work like the TV show and its post production procedures. Why not put patients in jeopardy? That sounds like a great idea. Put experts in a room, write rules, gather training data, and keep it update. No problem, or so the received wisdom chants.
The WSJ reports in a “real” news way:
…Watson’s recommendations can be wrong.
Yep, hitting 85 percent accuracy may be wide of the mark for some cognitive applications.
From a practical standpoint, numerical recipes can perform some tasks to spin money. Google ads work this magic without too much human fiddling. (No, I won’t say how much is “too much.”)
But IBM believed librarians, uninformed consultants who get their expertise via a Gerson Lehrman phone session, and from search engine optimization wizards. IBM management did not look at what search centric systems can deliver in terms of revenue.
Over the last 10 years, I have pointed out case examples of spectacular search flops. Yet somehow IBM was going to be different.
Sorry, search is more difficult to convert to sustainable revenues than many people believe. I wonder if those firms which have pumped significant dollars into the next best things in information access look at the Watson case and ask themselves, “Do you think we will get our money back?”
My hunch is that the answer is, “No.”
For me, I will stick to humanoid doctors. Asking Watson for advice is not something I want to do.
But if you have cancer, why not give IBM Watson a whirl. Let me know how that works out.
Stephen E Arnold, August 11, 2018
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