IBM: Watson, What Is Happening?
May 22, 2020
I like to think about the wisdom of IBM Watson. A large company developed smart software able to beat mere humans in a TV game show. Amazing, but I asked myself after Watson “won” jeopardy, “What about that post production process?”
Now IBM’s actual production process is visible. A new Big Blue dog Arvind Krishna is controlling the pack of huskies. Such is the success of the racing sled in a time of Covid that IBM will not cut its five percent dividend, according to the “real news” service Fox Business.
IBM hedged by declining to make a forecast for 2020. IBM’s future is bright, but apparently it is not that bright.
“IBM to Cut Thousands of Jobs As Coronavirus Plays Out” reveals that some surplus employees will be reduced in force. Fox reported:
“IBM’s work in a highly competitive marketplace requires flexibility to constantly remix to high-value skills, and our workforce decisions are made in the long-term interests of our business. Recognizing the unique current conditions, IBM is offering subsidized medical coverage to all affected U.S. employees through June 2021” a company spokesman said in a statement.
If one is not terminated, what’s the people process at IBM look like? Think bare knuckles boxing maybe? “IBM Says It’s Giving Employees the Opportunity to Compete for Positions” explains:
“As part of IBM’s regular assessment of how we work, we are simplifying how we operate to position our business for high value growth opportunities and better meet client demand,” a spokesperson said. “Employees will have the opportunity to re-skill and compete for positions where roles are available.”
Unlike some Silicon Valley outfits, having employees work from home is the first step (a generally gentle one) in eliminating surplus. The office space will go and then the less productive work from homers will be invited to a Zoom meeting for a “Find Your Future” elsewhere session.
Big Blue is more direct, more gladiatorial: Get terminated or get into the octagon. Fight Ralph, the slightly overweight and near sighted OmniFind expert for a paycheck.
Wouldn’t it be more interesting to have Watson battle Facebook, Google, and Microsoft in a smart software battle to prove which company is Number One?
Watson, what do you think of my suggestion? IBM’s approach to returning to glory is interesting, but it seems old fashioned: Layoffs and internal competition. Very Darwin.
Watson, you know about Darwin, right?
Stephen E Arnold, May 22, 2020
IBM Watson: Now Thinking Critically
May 21, 2020
The Watson AI Lab with a team from Harvard and MIT developed a new AI dubbed Clevrer that reasons and recognizes casual relationships. Venture Beat shares the details in the article, “MIT Researchers Release Clevrer To Advance Visual Reasoning And Neurosymbolic AI.”
Clevrer is built on the data set Clevr developed in 2016 by Stanford and Facebook AI Research. It was designed to analyze visual reasoning abilities of neural networks and Neuro-Symbolic Concept Learner was added in 2019. The data set includes a 20,000 synthetic videos of colliding objects paired with over 30,000 natural language questions and answers about objects in the videos. The data set is important about for building smarter AI:
“MIT-IBM Watson Lab director David Cox told VentureBeat in an interview that he believes the data set can make progress toward creating hybrid AI that combines neural networks and symbolic AI. IBM Research will apply the approach to IT infrastructure management and industrial settings like factories and construction sites, Cox said.
‘I think this is actually going to be important for pretty much every kind of application,’ Cox said. ‘The very simple world that we’re seeing are these balls moving around is really the first step on the journey to look at the world, understand that world, be able to make plans about how to make things happen in that world. So we think that’s probably going to be across many domains, and indeed vision and robotics are great places to start.”
Clevrer consists of two AI that are complimentary. It will build better and reliable models that will require less data to “train” them and they will also be more energy efficient.
AI are being designed to handle huge data streams, but it is better if they are designed to solve problems. AI systems needs to have a logical components, be able to reconfigure themselves, act on environment, interpret information, and define their own mental models. AI systems need to be smarter than a calculator and better than the modern enterprise system.
Wasn’t there an IBM patent for a “Clever” system? Yes, gentle reader, there was. Hence, clevrer. Clever, right?
Whitney Grace, May 21, 2020
IBM: Rapprochement, Pragmatism, Survival?
May 18, 2020
Just a tiny decision. Probably nothing. The thwarted time sharing warp drive machine is sputtering. Gone are the days of IBM mainframes and those pesky plug compatible pretenders. Online meant IBM, by golly.
Then IBM drifted from the data centers, wandered in the PC wilderness, and ended on the shores of Lake Craziness in the Adirondacks chanting the mantra “Watson, Watson, Watson, come here I want you.”
IBM has a new president able to make decisions different from the previous chiefette. Gone are the daily stock buybacks. Terminations of those over 55 have slowed. Ads, although still a little wacky, no longer explain that IBM is a winner (a game show winner, that is).
The future of the company may be rapprochement. With what company? Microsoft, the devil in the OS/2s? Google? The company IBM understands according to a letter an IBM executive wrote me years ago. Huawei? Oracle, the mere database company which bought Sun Micro? No. No. No.
The “let’s be friends” is explained in “Red Hat and AWS launch OpenShift, a Joint Kubernetes Service.” DarkCyber noted:
According to Red Hat vice president of Hosted Platforms Sathish Balakrishnan, the fully managed service will help IT organizations to more quickly build and deploy applications in AWS on Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes platform, using the same tools and APIs. In addition, developers will be able to build containerized applications that integrate natively with the more than 170+ integrated AWS cloud-native services.
Yes, small news.
However, maybe Big Blue and the cagey orange smile may extend their relationship. IBM’s cloud and IBM itself might benefit from becoming BFFs with the FAABG least likely to kick Big Blue off the revenue bus.
The Bezos bulldozer chugs along, and even IBM can run fast enough to jump on the somewhat indifferent money scraper.
Stephen E Arnold, May 18, 2020
IBM and Ethical AI: Are Wrong Answers Acceptable? But What Is Incorrect?
April 28, 2020
IBM can be surprising. A new president, the fizzle of IBM Watson’s Houston cancer initiative, and the blaming of the firm’s financial woes on Covid19.
Have these issues dampened IBM’s taste for grandstanding?
“IBM’s Pandemic Plan: Supercomputing, New Inventions and Tracking Employees” illustrates what may be the company’s fresh, new approach to becoming really, really relevant.
According to the write up, IBM signed the Pope’s call for AI Ethics. The IBM executive tapped to be the thought leader for ethics, a murky, contentious Philosophy 101 concept, is John Kelly III, an executive charged with making the IBM Watson Health unit perform like a Seal Team 6 professional.
Here are a couple of observations Mr. Kelly made in an interview, which comprise the core of the article cited above:
Here’s one about the value of AI, supercomputing, and great leadership:
We said, “Here’s more compute power than anybody’s ever had access to, for free: Go find solutions to the problems.” They told us that the rate of discovery is just off the charts.
The only hitch in the git along is that none of the AI wizards, including IBM’s and its computing power, has delivered a fix for the virus. In fact, the lack of tangible results makes the virtue signaling claims of IBM and others look silly.
How about this statement?
The trouble is that when you lift the hood, everybody’s reporting it in a different way. We used artificial intelligence two to four times a day to scrape all of their data, which is in different formats — sometimes it’s an Excel file, sometimes it’s a PDF, sometimes it’s a handwritten piece of paper — we scrape it, and then we post it, just like we post a weather map. We post a coronavirus map by county in the U.S.
The problem is that one of the more useful methods of displaying virus-related data comes from Avi Schiffmann, a teenager in Seattle, developed NCoV2019.live. Also the founders of Instagram have delivered Rt Covid 19, which is quite useful. Neither service has supercomputers, Watson, or the Weather Channel to help. Maybe IBM should hire these people? The bottom-line is that IBM can do sort of what social media innovators and a high school junior did. Come on, IBM.
I circled this IBM statement in yellow:
We’ve taken the position that it has to be an opt-in. We should not — based on those ethical principles from the Vatican — track people’s locations, and I should not try to find out that you were next to Adam last Tuesday night, for example. It’s not ethical.
Maybe Mr. Kelly has not read the email about IBM’s cyber division, checked out the Analyst Notebook feature set, or probed into the IBM CyberTap system? DarkCyber wonders, “Are there different definitions of ethics for each unit of IBM?”
And, finally, this statement is intriguing:
The coronavirus, as bad as it is, it’s not Ebola, as an example.
With research data in flux, it is interesting to consider why an IBM VP would offer this clear differentiation. What other distinctions can IBM draw between Covid19 and Ebola? In fact, what did IBM do in the midst of the Ebola outbreaks?
Is IBM ethical? Just ask one of the professionals over 55 RIFFed in the last few years? Is Watson ethical if it outputs incorrect or misleading information about a cancer protocol? Is it ethical to buy back stock to put a shine on a pick up truck designed to deliver mainframes?
Let’s go back to the teen in Seattle. Maybe he could be hired to put IBM Watson to work?
Stephen E Arnold, April 28, 2020
IBM Suffers a Setback in South Africa: Datawalk Stomps on Big Blue
April 21, 2020
IBM Analyst’s Notebook at one time enjoyed near total market dominance for investigative software, what I call policeware. IBM owns Analyst Notebook, and it has a sustainable revenue stream from some governments. Once installed — even though there may be no or very few qualified operators who can use the system — the money continues to roll in. Furthermore, IBM has home-grown technology, and Big Blue has acquired smaller firms with particularly valuable technology; for example, CyberTap.
Maybe not in South Africa? Datawalk has strolled into the country’s key integrator and plopped itself down in the cat-bird seat.
Under the original i2 founders’ leadership, losing South Africa was not in the game plan. IBM may have misplaced the three ring binder containing the basic strategy of i2 Ltd. To make matters worse, IBM could have asked its Watson (right, the super smart technology tackling cancer and breaking its digital ankle in a wild play) about the South African account.
Also, affected are downstream, third party products and services. Analyst’s Notebook has been available for more than two decades. There are training and support professionals like Tovek in Prague; there are add ins; there are enhancements which like Sintelix could be considered an out-and-out replacement. What happened?
If the information reported by ISB News is accurate, a company headquartered in Poland captured the account and the money. The article asserts that a key third party reseller doing business as SSG Group and its partner TechFINIUM (a Datawalk partner in South Africa) have stepped away from IBM and SAS. These are, in the view of DarkCyber, old school solutions.
The Datawalk replacement, according to John Smit, president of SSG Group, allegedly said:
“DataWalk is a powerful solution that will allow us to combine all data in one repository and then conduct detailed investigations. We often use unstructured data that we receive from our partners. DataWalk will provide us with the previously unattainable ability to view this data in the full context of our own databases “
Datawalk is characterized as a solution that is “more suited to current challenges.”
According to the article:
DataWalk (formerly PiLab) is a technological entity that … connects billions of objects from many sources, finding application in forensic analytics in the public and financial sectors, including in the fight against crime (US agencies), scams (insurers) and fraud identification (central administration).
These are aggressive assertions. IBM may well ask Watson or maybe a human involved with Analyst’s Notebook sales, “What happened?”
Stephen E Arnold, April 21, 2020
IBM: Free Cobol, Commission Payment Allegations, and Trust
April 14, 2020
I noticed that the IBM Web site providing information about the virus contains the word “trust”. Here’s the screen snap of the assertion:
I found this interesting. IBM is offering “free” Cobol training. The idea is to get the struggling mainframe systems used for state unemployment calculations up to snuff. (Why are these stalwarts not up to snuff?) Doesn’t one “trust” mainframes to just chug away as the machines have often for decades. Obviously Ruby and python coders are not much help. I can imagine this statement, “Why does this IBM keyboard have so many weird keys.” Ah, youth.
The more interesting story is “Guess What’s Heading to trial? IBM and Its Tactic of Yoinking Promised Commissions after Sales Reps Seal the Deal.” I learned:
IBM appears to be able to adjust awards to salespeople at its discretion because it doesn’t have a solid contract with them. Its Incentive Plan Letter, used for such contracts, contain a disclaimer stating that the letters are not commission contracts in a very real and legally binding sense.
What makes this interesting is that:
The IT giant does not always revise commission payments, it is claimed. Two of Beard’s colleagues who worked on similar deals got paid in full. Both were white; Beard is African American. That said, Beard’s complaint contends the practice is common enough that IBM has saved itself a substantial amount of money by capping sales commissions. The lawsuit claims that from 2013 to 2015, IBM secretly underpaid its sales representatives more than $40,000,000 nationwide.
Now about that word “trust”: Mainframe support, sales commissions, and IBM Watson addressing the virus problem. How’s that going, Watson?
Stephen E Arnold, April 13, 2020
Smart Software Is Changing Work: But What about Actual Facts? Maybe the Pandemic? Maybe Revenue Misses?
March 31, 2020
“AI Is Changing Work and Leaders need to Adapt” is a remarkable analysis of what seems to be taking place IRL (in real life) as opposed to the Ivory Tower world of a university business school. Just as economic departments missed the boat on certain economic developments, the business schools are doing their best to make statements oddly out of step with what’s shakin’ and bakin’ here and now.
This write up is an excellent example of what happens when data lag behind actual events. The notion of time is a problem for outfits like Google, but one would assume that the esteemed Harvard Business School would be zippier.
The article appeared on March 24, 2020. The information in the report was a “recent survey.” Yep, that date and time thing seems to elude the reader.
What does the article report?
The advent of AI poses new and unique challenges for business leaders.
Who holds this idea?
Harvard business school alumni.
But who, pray tell, gathered the insights from this “elite group”?
The answer is “A team at the MIT IBM Watson AI Lab.”
Now that’s a research team to respect: A frenemy university and a large US outfit which has become a punch line for wild and crazy assertions about Watson, the cancer curing TV game show winner.
Academic excellence? Objectivity? Substantial research achievements?
Let’s look at what’s reported about the survey of the elite, shall we?
ITEM 1: Job Data
our MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab team analyzed 170 million online job posts between 2010 and 2017. The study’s first implication: While occupations change slowly — over years and even decades — tasks become reorganized at a much faster pace.
So the research team examined online classifieds? What percentage were real jobs? What percentage were placed in order to obtain competitive intelligence? What percentage were red herrings intended to identify disgruntled employees? Those job listings appear to have been assumed to be valid. Okay. Let’s move on.
ITEM 2: Training
Millions of workers will need to be retrained or reskilled as a result of AI over the next three years, according to a recent IBM Institute for Business Value study.
What no data? That’s right. The findings are a marketing and PR pitch for another IBM study. My goodness, I used to think the McKinsey Award was a PR play. IBM has upped the ante: Harvard, MIT, and home grown research blend for a “finding.” This is academic excellence? This is intellectual honesty? Yeah, right. Remember MIT accepted funds from an interesting character, and Harvard. Right, Harvard. Fine outfit harboring consultants who do commercial work while conducting “research.”
ITEM 3: Educate
Our research shows that technology can disproportionately impact the demand and earning potential for mid-wage workers, causing a squeeze on the middle class. For every five tasks that shifted out of mid-wage jobs, we found, four tasks moved to low-wage jobs and one moved to a high-wage job. As a result, wages are rising faster in the low- and high-wage tiers than in the mid-wage tier.
Data? Nope. The finding is that graduating from an “elite” school delivers contacts, good employment and investment opportunities, and a lever to widen wage gaps. Do elite managers pay themselves and their colleagues less? But the interesting point is that there are zero data.
But who wrote this marketing fluff? An MIT tenured professor? A team of Harvard elite after making a podcast and enjoying ever so much one another’s company?
No.
The write up was written, according to the article, by Martin Fleming, IBM’s chief economist and vice president.
The survey data? The connection with the real world? Ha ha.
When Mad Magazine went out of business, I wondered what would fill the gap?
I now know. It is smart software, not the pandemic, and the demonstration that economists are as prescient as ever.
Stephen E Arnold, March 31, 2020
Fours Hours to Learn IBM Watson and Microsoft Azure. Believe It or Not. Hint: Not
March 26, 2020
DarkCyber believes that online instructional videos are useful. However, DarkCyber believes that overstatement, hyperbole, and general buzzword craziness undermine the credibility of those offering a program.
An excellent example of basic marketing information packaged like a six figure F.P. Journe Tourbillon Souverain Vertical watch, navigate to “Machine Learning with Watson and Azure.” You can download a four hour chunk of video which presents 20 lectures. That works out to 12 minute videos at which time, you
would be able to develop and deploy your applications over IBM Cloud- Bluemix. and having command over the Watson services and tools available.
Now what will you learn? Here’s the line up:
- Cognitive Computing and how Watson changes the game
- Using Watson Visual Recognition to tag and classify visual content using machine learning
- Capabilities of the Watson API and how to choose the best features for your task
- Using Watson Assistant to build an AI assistant (ChatBot)
- Using Watson Watson Discovery to unlock hidden values to find answers , monitor trends and surface patterns
- Using Watson Natural Language Understanding for advanced text analysis
- Using Watson Knowledge Studio to discover meaningful insights in unstructured text.
- Using Watson Speech to Text to easily convert audio and voice into written text
- Using Watson Text to Speech to convert text into natural-surrounding audio
- Using Watson Language Translator to translate from one language to another
- Using Watson Natural Language Classifier to interpret and classify natural language with confidence
- Using Watson Personality Insights to predict personality characteristics through text
- Using Watson Tone Analyzer to understand emotions and communications style in text
- Text Analytics
- Detecting Language
- Analyze image and video
- Recognition handwritten from text
- Generate Thumbnail
- Content Moderator
- Custom Vision
- Translate
But wait!
The programs will also explain Microsoft Azure services; for example:
- Computer Vision
- Content Moderator
- Custom Vision
- Text Analysis
- Translator.
You will not need an IBM account, but you will need a Microsoft Azure account.
This seems like an interesting program. Perhaps the overselling contributes to some of IBM’s more interesting deployments?
Stephen E Arnold, March 26, 2020
Amazing PR with an IBM Spin
March 24, 2020
Who made the supercomputer? Give up.
IBM did.
What software did the scientists at ORNL use?
IBM’s.
Did IBM pump out the crowning glory of a story itself?
Nope, allegedly ORNL professionals did.
This is a summit of sorts. PR for IBM and a news story to circulate among the appropriation committee at budget time.
Opportunistic? Of course not. Just keeping those competitors like LANL at bay.
Stephen E Arnold, March 24, 2020
IBM: A Leader in Following?
March 16, 2020
DarkCyber spotted “IBM Prepares To Advance Watson’s Language Ability.” The story appeared in Capital FM, an online publication in Nairobi. That’s okay. What’s interesting is that IBM has announced “the first commercialization of key Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities to come from IBM Research’s Project Debater, the only AI system capable of debating humans on complex topics.”
What’s new, aside from the Kenya coverage? Here’s a sampling of the technologies that will allegedly make Watson a superhero: Natural language processing. Watson will understand sentiment which can “identify and analyze idioms and colloquialisms for the first time.” [Emphasis added]
Plus:
IBM is bringing technology from IBM Research for understanding business documents, such as PDF’s and contracts, to also add to their AI models.
Where’s the technology originate? Project Debater. There’s also “deep learning based classification which
can learn from as few as several hundred samples to do new classifications quickly and easily. It will be added to Watson Discovery later this year.
Also, there’s another innovation:
It will also exploit natural language through Clustering or Advanced Topic Clustering. Building on insights gained from Project Debater, new topic clustering techniques will enable users to “cluster” incoming data to create meaningful “topics” of related information, which can then be analyzed.
Okay, let’s step back. NLP, quick deep learning, clustering, and the other technologies. My recollection is:
- IBM’s Dharmendra Modha was writing about text clustering in “Large Scale Parallel Data Mining” which is about a decade after the Endeca crowd fired up their functional facets for “Guided Navigation”. Now this clustering is coming to IBM Watson. What?
- In 2003 IBM researchers filed a patent application for “US7130777, Method to hierarchical pooling of opinions from multiple sources.” Now Watson is doing what commercial vendors have been offering for many years; for example, Lexalytics in 2003. Not exactly a text book case of using home grown technology or emulating a competitor, is it?
- And NLP dates back to 1993 and the work of Vincent Stanford, Ora Williamson, Elton Sherwin, and Frank Castellucci. See US5615296. These are IBM professionals. And 1993 was more than a quarter century ago.
Net net: Kenya, Watson, and technologies that have been around for decades are part of IBM’s preparations to add functions to Watson. “Prepares”, year, pretty speedy.
Watson? What are you doing? Maybe DarkCyber should ask Alexa?
Stephen E Arnold, March 16, 2020
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