Does Watson Have the Answer To Big Blue's Uncertain Future?

HughPickens.com writes: IBM has recently delivered a string of disappointing quarters, and announced recently that it would take a multibillion-dollar hit to offload its struggling chip business. But Will Knight writes at MIT Technology Review that Watson may have the answer to IBM's uncertain future. IBM's vast research department was recently reorganized to ramp up efforts related to cognitive computing. The push began with the development of the original Watson, but has expanded to include other areas of software and hardware research aimed at helping machines provide useful insights from huge quantities of often-messy data. "We're betting billions of dollars, and a third of this division now is working on it," says John Kelly, director of IBM Research, said of cognitive computing, a term the company uses to refer to artificial intelligence techniques related to Watson. The hope is that the Watson Business Group, a division aimed making its Jeopardy!-winning cognitive computing application more of a commercial success, will be able to answer more complicated questions in all sorts of industries, including health care, financial investment, and oil discovery; and that it will help IBM build a lucrative new computer-driven consulting business.

But Watson is still a work in progress. Some companies and researchers testing Watson systems have reported difficulties in adapting the technology to work with their data sets. "It's not taking off as quickly as they would like," says Robert Austin. "This is one of those areas where turning demos into real business value depends on the devils in the details. I think there's a bold new world coming, but not as fast as some people think." IBM needs software developers to embrace its vision and build services and apps that use its cognitive computing technology. In May of this year it announced that seven universities would offer computer science classes in cognitive computing and last month IBM revealed a list of partners that have developed applications by tapping into application programming interfaces that access versions of Watson running in the cloud. Big Blue said it will invest $1 billion into the Watson division including $100 million to fund startups developing cognitive apps. "I very much admire the end goal," says Boris Katz, adding that business pressures could encourage IBM's researchers to move more quickly than they would like. "If the management is patient, they will really go far."

Comments

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[phantomfive]

IBM used to be a company based on three things, in this order:

1) Keep customers happy
2) Keep employees happy.
3) Keep stockholders happy

Somewhere along the way, they've forgotten about #1 and #2, which means #3 will fail eventually. Will Watson save IBM? No, of course not. If IBM wants to turn around, they need to focus on making their customers happy. How long have they let the problems in Lotus Notes fester? Why do they think customers have left Lotus Notes for any alternative they could find? If they'd focused on fixing the things that annoy customers, it could be a really great product by now. But they didn't, and it's not. That's why IBM will die if they don't change.

Re:GOFAI doesn't work

[timeOday]

I think the opposite. First, Watson is not really GOFAI because it uses so much machine learning to populate its knowledge base. But second, I don't think any conceptual breakthrough is coming, or needed, in AI. Deep Learning is a great example of this - it achieves super-human levels of performance on some recognition tasks (such as street signs) despite being almost devoid of any conceptual progress compared to, say, 1970. (At least, no conceptual breakthrough). The fact that it outperforms an entire generation of advances in statistical machine learning (which supposedly obsoleted conventional AI by being vastly more rigorous) is stunning.

The basic reason there cannot be a conceptual breakthrough is because intelligence is not anything in particular. It is just a level of proficiency in a bunch of various areas, and the integration between them. Just a bunch of different hacks.