Slashdot Mirror
IBM Pitched Its Watson Supercomputer as a Revolution in Cancer Care. It's Nowhere Close (statnews.com)
IBM began selling Watson to recommend the best cancer treatments to doctors around the world three years ago. But is it really doing its job? Not so much. An investigation by Stat found that the supercomputer isn't living up to the lofty expectations IBM created for it. It is still struggling with the basic step of learning about different forms of cancer. Only a few dozen hospitals have adopted the system, which is a long way from IBM's goal of establishing dominance in a multibillion-dollar market. And at foreign hospitals, physicians complained its advice is biased toward American patients and methods of care. From the report: The interviews suggest that IBM, in its rush to bolster flagging revenue, unleashed a product without fully assessing the challenges of deploying it in hospitals globally. While it has emphatically marketed Watson for cancer care, IBM hasn't published any scientific papers demonstrating how the technology affects physicians and patients. As a result, its flaws are getting exposed on the front lines of care by doctors and researchers who say that the system, while promising in some respects, remains undeveloped. [...] Perhaps the most stunning overreach is in the company's claim that Watson for Oncology, through artificial intelligence, can sift through reams of data to generate new insights and identify, as an IBM sales rep put it, "even new approaches" to cancer care. STAT found that the system doesn't create new knowledge and is artificially intelligent only in the most rudimentary sense of the term.
Until now.
Watson, you will not cure cancer! -it is infinitely complex and beyond computing.
Stick to simple things like playing games. Oh...Right.
*slips back under a rock*
Massively over-hyped 'AI' system fails to do very much.
In other news -- bear found to excrete in woods; Pope found to be Catholic etc.
I'm curious, after a few dozen hospitals adopted Watson, did the "revolution" it created cause a negative impact to the massive amounts of revenue created by maintaining the status quo within the Cancer Industrial Complex?
If so, you have your answer as to why adoption would die off faster than someone mentioning a cure...
And at foreign hospitals, physicians complained its advice is biased toward American patients and methods of care.
Are you seriously telling me that they sold a multi-million dollar machine and didn't even include a goddamn machine learning step to adapt to local variations? Aren't the IBM guys supposed to be experts? Or at least guys that know how to pick up a fucking phone and dial an expert?
This is the kind of rookie mistake I see in my undergrads...
I sure hope I'm reading this wrong, because it sounds like people might die from maltreatment over this.
At its heart, Watson for Oncology uses the cloud-based supercomputer to digest massive amounts of data — from doctor’s notes to medical studies to clinical guidelines. But its treatment recommendations are not based on its own insights from these data. Instead, they are based exclusively on training by human overseers, who laboriously feed Watson information about how patients with specific characteristics should be treated.
Ahh I guess I was wrong. There is no machine learning at all yet.
In the case of Watson for Oncology, those human operators are a couple dozen physicians at a single, though highly respected, U.S. hospital: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Doctors there are empowered to input their own recommendations into Watson, even when the evidence supporting those recommendations is thin.
But hey, looks like the dying part could be correct. I only hope those doctors know what the variations across the world requires, because they will be giving recommendations both for japanese highschool girls and African village elders without even knowing it, and I don't think those groups have the same contextual issues.
The latest book on IBM Watson is "Learning IBM Watson Analytics" by James D Miller. Highly recommended with four stars out of five stars.
This is just about every tech company out there. Hell this is possibly most companies in existence. They promise you the moon and the stars, but what they deliver is moderately better than a lump of coal.
Despite the hype, computers don't learn anything. They run programs in the same way they always have. The term "AI" is just hype to attract venture capital and avoid doing real work.
Where is Weird Al on this?
I know it's AI Doom and Gloom, but Winter is Coming
Does Watson actually do anything intelligent other than word association on large data sets? Sort of what Google does, but with [probably highly flawed] summarization?
The people at IBM thought it was about "caring about people who are cancer (astrological sign)".
#DeleteFacebook
saying that doctors were going to be out of work because AI
FTA: https://www.statnews.com/2017/...
Pilar Ossorio, a professor of law and bioethics at University of Wisconsin Law School, said Watson should be subject to tighter regulation because of its role in treating patients. “As an ethical matter, and as a scientific matter, you should have to prove that there’s safety and efficacy before you can just go do this,” she said.
Norden dismissed the suggestion IBM should have been required to conduct a clinical trial before commercializing Watson, noting that many practices in medicine are widely accepted even though they aren’t supported by a randomized controlled trial.
“Has there ever been a randomized trial of parachutes for paratroopers?” Norden asked. “And the answer is, of course not, because there is a very strong intuitive value proposition. So I believe that bringing the best information to bear on medical decision making is a no-brainer.”
What an ass-hole. If the good doctor has a license to practice medicine, it should be revoked! Yes ass-hole they do clinical trails for medical treatments but thanks for the Faulty Comparison...
When captains of industry are talking about cancer treatment in terms of "establishing dominance in a multibillion-dollar market", does any rational person believe we're going to have an actual cure for cancer any time soon?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
For something this critical, I would want the AI to explain itself. If an "expert" tells me that I need to that I need to take a pill for my cholesterol (intentionally choosing something rather minor), I will first ask her why this medicine and how does it work. I will expect to get a cogent explanation before paying for the drug. If I'm being asked to pay thousands of dollars for a cancer treatment, I'd expect someone to explain how the medicine works, and show me how it has been successful in other cases.
There are AI solutions that will show how they arrived at a recommendation. Intel has some AI that uses the feature as a selling point. Why would anyone just say, "Hmm? The computer says to give 'em hypocholoroacetiminophin. Wonder why? Where's my needle.", without getting an explanation?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
First of all, Jeopardy Watson has almost nothing to do with the Watson product IBM is selling. That system was largely NLP based and the team disbanded afterwards. From what I can tell, the only thing still alive from that project is Apache UIMA. Watson isn't even a single product. It's a collection of about a dozen disjoint products with the word "Watson" in front of their name.
The current iteration of "Watson" is not interesting at all. Their machine learning portion is just SPSS. Their next-gen machine learning is just Apache Spark. Their UI to setup hardware and submit spark jobs is very unreliable. When you get an error, it's generally a "An error has occurred" or something just as useless.
Jeopardy Watson was interesting, but the big players are doing much more interesting things these days. Google and Microsoft have very good public machine learning and AI platforms. Amazon's is OK, nothing special. If you want to work at a lower level, Stanford maintains a set of libraries with implementations of their cutting edge algorithms. Especially their NLP group. Theirs are actually user-friendly compared to many other research level projects.
Most of the complaints are that you have to give Watson the answer first and then it gives you the question. Doctors were hoping for something the other way around.
Is this a good example of sales overselling a product or engineering underdelivering features? Or both?
That's what the so-called 'AI' everyone keeps trotting out to us is like.
We'll just put a bunch of facts and cause-effect relationships and shit into a computer, turn it on, and *hope* that it learns how to think
..or, very likely, this is the real truth:
..well, shit, we've spent TWENTY YEARS and HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS designing and building this Iron Idiot, and the damned thing still can't put two and two together as well as a human being. The Board of Directors are breathing down our necks, and the Marketing department is chomping at the bit to have product to sell. Guess we'll just let them hype it all up to the media so we can keep our jobs. Let's just be sure it'll at least be able to perform some party tricks so we're not totally sued for fraud
..so guess what, kids?
If you can't understand how the human brain is able to "THINK" then how the ever-loving *fuck* do you expect anyone to build a machine that can do the same thing? Spoiler Alert: YOU CAN'T EXPECT THAT AT ALL.
Stop believing so-called 'AI' is everything they claim it is.
Stop *referring* to it as "Artificial Intelligence", because only one of those words apply.
Stop thinking so-called, inaccurately-named "AI" is going ot take over the world/destroy the world/kill all the humans (Elon Musk, I am looking at YOU).
Really, seriously, everyone, just STOP already.
All this 'AI' nonsense is SHIT. You're ALL being conned.
Anyone who's worked at IBM in the last 20 years should not be surprised by this. Clueless leadership.
Search on "oncologists would not have chemotherapy".
Boosting the bodies own defenses against cancer in various ways (including nutrition, intermittent fasting, immune-system tuning, etc.) is another approach at least generally without negative side effects -- wonder if Watson has been fed enough alternative data to recommend it (especially for prevention)?
Example: https://www.drfuhrman.com/lear...
"Cancer screening is promoted as preventive health, and while this may detect early forms of cancer so it can be treated earlier, it does not prevent the development of cancer and has minimal effects on reducing cancer deaths. A Nutritarian diet has the power to repair defects that can lead to cancer, detoxify carcinogens, cause cancer cell death, cut off blood supplies to growing tumors , and stimulate the immune system to recognize, repair abnormalities, and even fight and kill cancer cells. The vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, and antioxidants found in a diet rich in vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, and seeds is the key to prevention and even can play an important role in the treatment of various cancers."
Good luck with your own health care choices. It is hard to wade through all the conflicting information and conflict-of-interest. I wanted to make free software to help people make sense of conflicting health information -- but just not enough time given a need to earn money in other ways. What I could do with Watson hardware and that project's budget... (When I was at IBM Research around 2000 I proposed making an interactive display wall powered by an AI-like system to help people make complex decisions and better designs -- but as a contractor the idea did not go that far beyond a proof-of-concept with nine old Thinkpads that looked a lot like a Jeopardy screen, made when my supervisor went on a long vacation...)
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Just another glorified menu tree.
all posts about AI are completely overblown.
Machine learning algorithms can be powerful when used on a narrowly focused problem or goal, but curing cancer is definitely not a narrowly focused problem. There are aspects of machine learning that might prove to be useful but it's not a catch all solution whereby we simply say, "Hey Watson, cure cancer" and expect it to churn out a cure. What is sounds like they are doing is inputting doctor notes and hoping for Watson to apply treatment plans based on historical success of past similar patients. Firstly, let me say that that approach is flawed due to the simple fact that it's data can be biased or inaccurate. Without unbiased inputs machine learning is useless. Their approach is an attempt to deliver a quick marketing gimmick in order to profit from it. A better approach would be to find measurable unbiased inputs and use the outputs based on those findings to build on top of a larger neural network. Your average computer scientist would be able to write the code but they probably don't have the Medical expertise to make it useful. They would need to work with experts in the Oncology field to solve simple problems with a larger goal in mind. A deeper understanding on the subject might find that mapping genetic sequences and modeling chemical reactions based on a brute force of all possible chemical compounds would be the way to go. However, machine learning wouldn't need to be used in this situation and current computing power wouldn't be able to process usable results within a realistic time frame, unless of course you consider quantum computers which last I checked were still in their infancy.
Large Corporation in the IT sphere making Grand Claims.
Turns Out IT is all a Bug Marketing campaign of hodgepodge technologies.
I still remember their Lies around VisualAge graphical programming.
Hopefully this time it'll kill off Python and we can go back to using a real language like Common Lisp.
Remember the source. It is related to a left-leaning news paper. If you look at the site there are no non-antagonistic articles. These kinds of articles they call hard hitting. I call them junk. You know the slant of the article towards tearing something down before you even read it - this is based on its source.
I see two fundamental problems with Watson.
The first is that Watson is performing non-radomized post hoc analysis. For example, if you took a look at *every* lung cancer patient who receives a particular chemotherapy. You might notice a pattern than people below a certain BMI don't do very well. You might also notice that the same regiment works well for people born in March with even numbered birthdays, or brown haired men over 5'8" tall. If you look for enough correlations, you will find them. In fact, you will find a *lot* of them. However, almost all of them are statistical anomalies instead of meaningful connections. You can't tell the difference without a prospective, randomized study, and this simply isn't something that Watson brings to the table.
The second problem is magnitude. Changing how, and to whom, we give a certain treatment can definitely improve outcomes. However, the magnitude of this effect is pretty small. Researches have been tweaking treatment regimens for years, and while there have been definite improvements, they have been pretty modest. Watson isn't going to be any different that regard. If we want revolutionary treatments, we need to fund better basic science.
It's not clear that Watson brings anything to the table that couldn't be gleaned by visiting the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) website and downloading the appropriate guideline.
Cancer - The Forbidden Cures
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
An AI system delivering well below what was promised. Must be a world first.
The tiniest cock goes to EditorDavid in place of kdawson the old champion.
Watson's main job is to prop up the share price of a company with -- how may is it? -- 19, 20? consecutive quarters of losses.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ibm+quarterly+losses&oq=IBM+quarterly+l&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0l2.12590j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8