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IBM creating pocket-sized Watson in $16 billion sales push
- kevinalexbrown 14y agoIt also takes a while for Watson to do the “machine learning” necessary to become a reliable assistant in an area. This could make a great pay-per-package product. Matlab and Mathematica do this, for instance, by making easy-to-use statistical or signal processing packages by subfield. To expand on the example in the article, taking this into an easier to use interface for people like medical professionals would be awesome. A friend of mine who worked in an ER told me Wikipedia is actually used quite frequently. A program that could intelligently parse medical documents could be a great next step. It doesn't need to make actual diagnoses, but to jog the memory, an intelligent "these symptoms are consistent with pneumonia, bronchitis, or whooping cough" would probably be well-used. Or for double-checking contraindications at pharmacies. Or for advising lawyers about applicable case-law. Or for reminding me about relevant studies as I do literature searches. Cool. Edit: I imagine this will draw some comparisons to Siri, or its factual backend, wolfram Alpha. While wolfram Alpha is pretty sweet, I imagine context-specific question-parsing and machine learning would be much more powerful here (although I suppose wolfram Alpha/Mathematica could get into that game, too).
- CodeCube 14y ago"A friend of mine who worked in an ER told me Wikipedia is actually used quite frequently" God help us, God help us all
- shardling 14y agoYes, surely a random internet commenter is in a better position to understand what is useful than someone who actually works in ER.
- CodeCube 14y agoIt wasn't a comment on the ER doctor's ability to extract value out of wikipedia. It was a comment on the fact that Wikipedia is the wild west. Far as I can tell, most erroneous edits on popular subjects are quickly caught. But I wonder how vigilant those wikipedia editors are on obscure medical topics that require an expensive medical education to truly understand. I'd feel better about it if Wikipedia was innovating above and beyond the implementation of a wiki ... even if the solution is still crowdsourced. For example I would love to see the application of machine learning to the process of moderation, not unlike what Stackexchange is working on these days (http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/08/stack-exchange-machine-learning-contest/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/08/stack-exchange-machine...). Circling back to the topic at hand, I would actually love it if "Watson" eventually has all of the data currently available in wikipedia. But with each fact cross-checked for validity against everything else he already knows.
- justincormack 14y agoYou mean like Cyc? Its not an easy project as facts are not as tidy as you might hope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
- batgaijin 14y agoNote to self: never edit a medical article drunk again.
- datapolitical 14y agoYou're fine as long as you stick to medical research articles.
- ZoFreX 14y agoMy doctor actually Googled my symptoms while I was in the office. It's not actually a bad approach, as he put it any article ranking highly for all of the symptoms and no or few other ones is likely to be relevant.
- cygwin98 14y agoWow, reading this makes me wonder if a great deal of family doctors can be replaced by an expert system that can be assisted by a remote doctor in a centralized way. I call it 'Doctor in demand'
- ZoFreX 14y agoNext time you see your GP ask what their typical workload involves. I doubt the remote doctor would even be needed in 90% of cases!
- busyant 14y agoThat's a cheap shot. The medical and science articles in wikipedia that I've read in areas where I have expertise are remarkably good. Why not use a powerful, free and fast resource, as long as you're cognizant of its limitations?
- kruhft 14y agoWatson in your pocket or a UI on your phone to a Watson in the cloud? Given the number of servers they used for the Jeopardy Watson I'm sure it's more like the latter.
- sp332 14y agoFor Jeopardy, they had to beat 2 champions in 3 seconds on a wide range of subjects. For a more specific topic or "good enough" answers, you would not need so much hardware. For example, they kept the whole database in 16TB of RAM!
- jaysonelliot 14y agoWatson’s nerve center is 10 racks of IBM Power750 servers running in Yorktown Heights, New York, that have the same processing power as 6,000 desktop computers. Even though most of the computations occur at the data center, a Watson smartphone application would still consume too much power for it to be practical today. So not actually a pocket-sized Watson, but a smartphone app that will connect to Watson. As long as you've got reliable internet access.
- gradys 14y agoThat was also the conclusion I drew, but it makes me wonder why that would take too much power to be practical on a smartphone as the article suggests. It seems like it would only need to capture the text of the question and push it over the network to IBM's servers.
- zyb09 14y agoI think what they mean is, the datacenters actually running Watson would consume too much power. A mobile app with millions of users would require many many instances of Watson running, so 10 racks of servers per instance doesn't sound feasible.
- alok-g 14y agoWhile I agree with this interpretation, here's an explicit quote from the OP: "Even though most of the computations occur at the data center, a Watson smartphone application would still consume too much power for it to be practical today."
- JanezStupar 14y agoIts called lousy writing. They need to optimize Watson server side for it to become commercially. p.s.: I for one welcome our new Blue Overlord.
- mnutt 14y agoPerhaps they are referring to speech recognition, which would either consume a lot of bandwidth being sent over the wire as audio or consume a lot of power to be processed on-device.
- jonathanyc 14y agoPlease tell me Apple isn't going to sue IBM for putting a voice-activated assistant on smartphones...
- ConstantineXVI 14y agoI'd wager IBM is the absolute last person anyone would want to tick off on patents.
- dude_abides 14y agoIncidentally, Nuance, the company behind the speech recognition tech in Siri, licenses several patents from IBM. I doubt if there exists any technology today that doesn't infringe on any IBM patent.
- jfoutz 14y agoAlso, they outlasted the DOJ in that 13 year antitrust case. If dedication is the key to success, IBM's legal team has it.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoDid anyone else think that if they did this their version would answer with a question? A: Watson, the best hamburger I've ever eaten. Q: Where is St. John's bar and grill? It would be the RPN of voice activated assistants. I got a bit annoyed when the article kept conflating 'power' with 'number of cpu cycles running in parallel to get an answer.' I can tell you that we are no where near having the compute pipeline of 10 racks of Power750 servers in a co-processor in a smartphone.
- bicknergseng 14y agoLove me some St. John's.
- teeja 14y agoIt'll be a while before I'll take medical advice from a machine that "thought" Toronto is in the US.
- minikites 14y agoBecause human doctors never make mistakes? Run the numbers: who makes more mistakes in aggregate: machines like Watson or human doctors? I'll take whichever is less.
- viscanti 14y agoThis would (possibly) be true if all mistakes were weighted equally. As soon as some mistakes have more weight (like maybe the machine killed you on accident because it thought your spleen was in your ear), then looking at aggregate numbers doesn't cut it. You'd need to look at both the frequency of errors, as well as severity of errors. I'll take the guy who messes up 50% of the time, but at worst will give me a paper cut over the hypothetical machine who only makes mistakes 1% of the time, but they're always fatal.
- ilaksh 14y agoHow about 10 - 20 years from now?
- flatline 14y agoThat answer was below the confidence threshold, so it just guessed, because it was final Jeopardy and it had nothing to lose at that point by guessing. For something like medical advice, AI tools like Watson are meant to be used by a domain expert, anyway. Even Starship Enterprise still had doctors...
- JanezStupar 14y agoId like to see your trusted doctor try Watson head on in a Medical Jeopardy.
- MPSimmons 14y agoI've been waiting on this. I've come to the conclusion that half of Tony Stark's JARVIS is essentially Watson.
- Grovara123 14y agoDoes Watson 'learn'?