9 ms·

IBM Watson API

311 points by miket 12y ago

Doublon 12y ago
"Questions" in the documentation without question mark (?) seem somehow wrong to me.
readerrrr 12y ago
Out of curiosity I googled the same request. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22His+1983+hit+\%22Beat+it\%22+featured+Eddie+Van+Halen+on+guitar.%22#safe=off&hl=en&q=His+1983+%22Beat+it%22+featured+Eddie+Van+Halen+on+guitar https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22His+1983+h.... I think this might be useful if Watson was being feed with a medical database. Otherwise I don't see any need for it; is there any? edit: Watson as a legal consultant would be great. There might be a product in that, not as an replacement for a lawyer but more as guide/search tool.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - readerrrr 12y ago
    No. You're making assumptions. Read the entire comment.
- tluyben2 12y ago
  I would think Watson can replace most lawyers (and MDs, and ...) of this world. Most of them don't think and just rehash stuff they learnt, just like Watson does. Sure for the exceptions you need actual people, but that is the same time when you would go from your corner lawyer to a more prominent one and when your doctor would forward you to an expert anyway.
  - ygra 12y ago
    The point is, that (hopefully) your doctor knows where his expertise ends and when to refer you to an expert. I'm not sure Watson could reliably do the same.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Fed with enough medical knowledge, Watson would be the expert.
    - tluyben2 12y ago
      Well, MDs just send you away when stuff doesn't go away or they think it's serious; I think Watson can easily be instructed to do the same. If it belongs in the category 'probably needs expert' he should pass his conclusions about what it is and so on to a human expert. Similarly with the cough he subscribed medicine for and after 1 week it's not gone yet; expert. This is what human MDs do as well and I had MDs actually tell me to 'be a man, suck it up' so not sure if Watson could do worse.
  - jpwagner 12y ago
    Conversation you will never hear in a Dr. office: me: i have pain in my side dr: 25%: something you ate 22%: appendicitis, 18%: kidney stone... Conversation you will never hear in a lawyer's office: me: am i allowed to... lawyer: 42%: Maybe, 38%: Yes, 20%: No
    - yzmtf2008 12y ago
      This is only true when there isn't enough information supplied. You can't expect the doctor to figure out what the problem is just by telling the doctor you have a pain in your side, same goes for the lawyer's scenario.
      - TeMPOraL 12y ago
        Exactly. It's not that the doctors know anything more here, they just don't (can't) quantify their confidence (and later reliably update on new evidence). No offense to doctors/lawyers meant here; all human brains suck at that.
      - jpwagner 12y ago
        Did you consider that that's not the point I'm making? The confidences here provide misinformation. This is more harmful than no information.
        nightski 12y ago
        They are only misinformation if it is misunderstood what they represent.
        luxbock 12y ago
        How is it misinformation? The human doctor would not tell us his diagnosis in terms of percentages, because we as humans have a hard time grasping probabilities intuitively. That doesn't mean that a probabilistic diagnosis would not be more accurate. The doctors job is to provide me with as much information about the objective criteria of my physical condition as possible. However when it comes to making choices about my treatment, say in the case of accepting/rejecting an experimental drug with some potentially nasty side effects, it should be entirely my own value judgement on what to do with said information.
  - TheCondor 12y ago
    Seriously? Watson could replace lawyers or doctors for people that equate Google searches to legal advice or medical advice. Think legalzoom and webmd... Absolutely seems like it could be an entertaining way for a non lawyer or no doctor to explore a law or medical library. The majority on my time spent with lawyers has been discussing my issue until it could be distiled down to a couple concise legal questions; I bought a short sell house and the seller demanded that I put a clause in the contract that said his bank couldn't issue him an i9... I have. No authority over tax laws but I also didn't want any liability or an invalid contract, nor to willingly build a bogus one. There was some real language subtlty to it all and I didn't even know the questions to ask. Same with doctors, pain is relative, strong pains turn lesser pains into mild discomfort and people are insanely good at ignoring and normalizing pains away. Do most patients even know what to ask or describe? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have a lawyer and a doctor on my smartphone all day everyday but it still seems like a ways off. Watson really seems like a tool that cuts your legal fees because your lawyers research time drops 90% or something. (Or rather, he makes 90% more profit from you..)
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      Watson is already better at diagnosing cancer than human doctors. http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/11/ibm-watson-medical-doctor http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/11/ibm-watson-me... Human doctors need sleep. They get tired. They get old. You'll still need innovation in the medical field, but lets not kid ourselves that we need a gourmet chef in every McDonalds.
  - nradov 12y ago
    Watson can't replace most physicians. Physicians have to physically interact with a patient to gather a relevant medical history as well as subjective and objective observations about the patient's symptoms. Robots and machine vision systems are nowhere near being able to fill that role. Watson might be able to partially replace some specialists that primary care physicians use for consultations. When PCPs are unsure about a diagnosis or proper plan of care they will often consult with a specialist for advice via phone or e-mail. So in that case the PCP has already gathered at least some preliminary data and could feed it to a computer. But even for that use case Watson won't be able to provide same level of back-and-forth interaction that's often necessary to achieve the correct result.
    - matznerd 12y ago
      The volume of medical data being created and published is rapidly increasing, and it would take a doctor to read something like 160 hours per week to stay on top of their field. There are only 168 hours in a week, so there is really no way a doctor today can keep up with what is going on . The idea of Watson is to be able to take large amounts of unstructured data (i.e. an entire patient history and current symptoms) and be able to find a solution. I don't think Watson will replace a doctor or physical interaction anytime soon, but a device connected to Watson or similar solution will most definitely be used to augment the doctor's diagnosis and treatment solution.
- sumukh1 12y ago
  I actually built my own version of Watson based on this idea - jeopardy questions are often google-able/searchable on wikipedia. It was pretty easy to build out - but it only gets 80% of the way there. The last 20% is the hardest - and it's why Watson is so impressive (even though even Watson is probably only at 90%)
  - flarg 12y ago
    Did you every see that HN Post about QUANTA [1]? Do you think it would cover the last 20%? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8298887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8298887
- pcocko 12y ago
  Here some examples about Watson implementations https://developer.ibm.com/watson/2014/03/27/industries-can-benefit-cognitive-approach/ https://developer.ibm.com/watson/2014/03/27/industries-can-b... But would be interesting to see a real application working. An online retail for example.
malanj 12y ago
Has anyone at HN used either IBM Watson or Wolfram Alpha to build a real (commercial) app? It feels like there should be a whole wave of apps built on either of these technologies but it doesn't seem to be materialising. What is holding back the killer apps for answer/computation engines?
- jj26 12y ago
  I've heard the turnaround for a Watson implementation is about a year. IBM is just too slow, that's why the flood of apps isn't yet materializing.
- aabajian 12y ago
  Google / Wolfram Alpha / Watson are great at answering broad questions. 1. "Who was the 12th president?" - Zachary Taylor 2. "What color wine is cabernet sauvignon?" - Red 3. "Is a ferret a rodent?" - The ferret is the domesticated member of the Order Carnivora, Family Mustelidae and Genus Mustela. A common misconception is that ferrets are rodents. The real challenge is answering niche questions: 1. What size are the OEM rear wheels of a Honda S2000? 2. How can I fix MySQL error 1064? 3. How do I remove wine from a macbook? These types of questions aren't answerable by a simple mining of Wikipedia or Encyclopedic knowledge. They represent niches within our society (S2000 owners, programmers, people who spilled wine on their macbooks). Google provides excellent links to pages that contain answers to these questions, but it cannot deduce a single answer or common response. This is why sites like Answers.com, Yahoo! Answers, StackExchange, etc. can flourish, but it's also why an NLP question and answer system is very difficult. I've been working on a system to mine existing responses to questions - http://gotoanswer.stanford.edu http://gotoanswer.stanford.edu - I only have a small subset of programming-related questions (~10M), but you can get an idea for what I'm trying to do by searching for "How do I remove wine from a macbook?" You'll see that there are results for removing wine the liquid and WINE the windows non-emulator.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - Rooster61 12y ago
yatoomy 12y ago
Ive been looking into Watson's new application to analytics etc. How would that compare to say Mathimatica or the Wolfram Language/Data Science Platform?
ilaksh 12y ago
So you just ask it any random question and it knows everything? Or only things that come up on Jeopardy? I don't see an API for feeding it information.
- MartynX 12y ago
  I would assume that they are working closer with companies that they trust to feed in information. Having that on an what will eventually be a public API is recipe for disaster.
  - matznerd 12y ago
    Each instance of Watson is unique and has to be trained as such based on it's "corpus" (set of data) and actual feedback on the quality of it's answers by experts. The public API sounds like it will allow access to specific flavors of pre-trained and data-filled Watsons, like the food- recipe one or some basic medical ones.
mooreds 12y ago
I found the link above to be a bit useless as it jumps right into getting answers with evidence. Here's a better overview link: https://developer.ibm.com/watson/docs/developing-watson-apis/using-question-answer-api-access-watson-capabilities/ https://developer.ibm.com/watson/docs/developing-watson-apis...
mooreds 12y ago
If you want access to the API, you have to fill out a form, here: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/form_ecosystem.html?cmp=usbrb&cm=s&csr=watson.site_20140319&cr=deveco&ct=usbrb301&cn=sec3partnerapp http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/form_ecosys... This is buried in the docs as a comment on this page: https://developer.ibm.com/watson/docs/developing-watson-apis/application-development-flow/ https://developer.ibm.com/watson/docs/developing-watson-apis... Edit: No real support for 'playing around' with the API. Bummer. Edit2: Just went through the application process linked above. Be prepared to give info about yourself and your company and an explanation of why you want access to the Watson API, as well as what type of information you'll be working with. I stated 'just want to play around with the API'. We'll see how they react to that.
- pesenti 12y ago
  Watson APIs will be accessible - without the need for an application - as part of BlueMix (https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/ https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/ - the IBM PaaS/Heroku) in a couple of weeks. Stay posted!
  - mark_l_watson 12y ago
    That is great! I just signed up with my existing IBM ID. I am enjoying using IBM Watson right now on a customer project, and being able to experiment and learn on my own will both help the effort to help my customer and perhaps use IBM Watson for personal projects. BTW, I like your dev page, with starter kits for multiple languages and frameworks.
  - Ixiaus 12y ago
    BlueMix is actually pretty exciting to me; I think IBM has finally stepped up as a competitor in the "cloud" ecosystem where Microsoft has really failed.
    - thinkpad20 12y ago
      "Really failed"? According to Forbes in July of this year[0], Microsoft is second only to Amazon in the cloud market, and gaining. I'm not sure how that counts as a failure, except in the sense that Microsoft makes a popular whipping boy. [0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2014/07/28/amazon-is-facing-a-cloud-crisis-as-microsoft-muscles-in/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2014/07/28/amazon-i...
pesenti 12y ago
IBM is about to make these APIs (and many others) much more accessible as part of BlueMix (https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/ https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/ - the IBM PaaS/Heroku). I lead the team in charge of developing the Watson platform. Ask me questions!
- aswath87 12y ago
  When will BlueMix have Watson access?
- atratus 12y ago
  The Q&A is not particularly interesting...are there other api's we can experiment with? Also, is there any precedent for getting clojure up on bluemix?
  - pesenti 12y ago
    Yes many others - think NLP, multi-lingual, social media, speech, vision, etc. We'll start with a small set and keep expanding. I don't know about Clojure, I would ask that question on their forum: https://developer.ibm.com/answers?community=bluemix https://developer.ibm.com/answers?community=bluemix
  - chris_j 12y ago
    (Another) IBMer here. As far as I am aware, Bluemix doesn't have built-in support for Clojure but a few of us have played with it and there are a few ways that you can run Clojure apps: I wrote a blog post about my experiences running a Hello World app using the Heroku buildpack for Clojure which you can find here: http://mytediousblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/running-clojure-webapp-on-ibm-bluemix.html http://mytediousblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/running-clojure-... In addition, since Bluemix natively supports Java apps, you can export a Clojure app as either an uberjar or an uberwar and run it directly on Bluemix that way. So for example, if you create an uberwar of your Clojure webapp then you can push it to Bluemix by doing: cf push your-app-name -p target/my-app-uberwar.war ... and Bluemix will run your app on a WebSphere Liberty Profile app server. I'm happy to help if you have any questions - contact details in my HN profile.
- 12y ago
80ProofPudding 12y ago
Waiting for my coffee to brew, I read that as "Emma Watson API".
Tyrant505 12y ago
Does this also give access to their cooking and recipe data? Edit: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/cognitivecooking/ http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/cognitivecooking/
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
mark_l_watson 12y ago
I am helping a customer integrate Watson into their system so I am very happy to see the news about BlueMix (https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/ https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/) that apparently will allow me to keep experimenting with Watson after my consulting engagement is complete. If you read the documentation, you will see that preparing training data and questions is fairly straightforward.
kyberias 12y ago
Looking at that example, I wonder why that Porcaro quote is listed as evidence. It doesn't relate to Jackson's album at all.
beebs93 12y ago
I sent a e-mail to my co-workers containing "...natural English to ask Watson..." and somehow people read it as "You can ask Emma Watson, who is English, a question and she will respond". And I thought, "...close enough - Watson could answer questions about Emma".

311 points by miket 12y ago

"Questions" in the documentation without question mark (?) seem somehow wrong to me.

Out of curiosity I googled the same request. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22His+1983+hit+\%22Beat+it\%22+featured+Eddie+Van+Halen+on+guitar.%22#safe=off&hl=en&q=His+1983+%22Beat+it%22+featured+Eddie+Van+Halen+on+guitar https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22His+1983+h.... I think this might be useful if Watson was being feed with a medical database. Otherwise I don't see any need for it; is there any? edit: Watson as a legal consultant would be great. There might be a product in that, not as an replacement for a lawyer but more as guide/search tool.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- readerrrr 12y ago
  No. You're making assumptions. Read the entire comment.
tluyben2 12y ago
I would think Watson can replace most lawyers (and MDs, and ...) of this world. Most of them don't think and just rehash stuff they learnt, just like Watson does. Sure for the exceptions you need actual people, but that is the same time when you would go from your corner lawyer to a more prominent one and when your doctor would forward you to an expert anyway.
- ygra 12y ago
  The point is, that (hopefully) your doctor knows where his expertise ends and when to refer you to an expert. I'm not sure Watson could reliably do the same.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Fed with enough medical knowledge, Watson would be the expert.
  - tluyben2 12y ago
    Well, MDs just send you away when stuff doesn't go away or they think it's serious; I think Watson can easily be instructed to do the same. If it belongs in the category 'probably needs expert' he should pass his conclusions about what it is and so on to a human expert. Similarly with the cough he subscribed medicine for and after 1 week it's not gone yet; expert. This is what human MDs do as well and I had MDs actually tell me to 'be a man, suck it up' so not sure if Watson could do worse.
- jpwagner 12y ago
  Conversation you will never hear in a Dr. office: me: i have pain in my side dr: 25%: something you ate 22%: appendicitis, 18%: kidney stone... Conversation you will never hear in a lawyer's office: me: am i allowed to... lawyer: 42%: Maybe, 38%: Yes, 20%: No
  - yzmtf2008 12y ago
    This is only true when there isn't enough information supplied. You can't expect the doctor to figure out what the problem is just by telling the doctor you have a pain in your side, same goes for the lawyer's scenario.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Exactly. It's not that the doctors know anything more here, they just don't (can't) quantify their confidence (and later reliably update on new evidence). No offense to doctors/lawyers meant here; all human brains suck at that.
    - jpwagner 12y ago
      Did you consider that that's not the point I'm making? The confidences here provide misinformation. This is more harmful than no information.
      - nightski 12y ago
        They are only misinformation if it is misunderstood what they represent.
      - luxbock 12y ago
        How is it misinformation? The human doctor would not tell us his diagnosis in terms of percentages, because we as humans have a hard time grasping probabilities intuitively. That doesn't mean that a probabilistic diagnosis would not be more accurate. The doctors job is to provide me with as much information about the objective criteria of my physical condition as possible. However when it comes to making choices about my treatment, say in the case of accepting/rejecting an experimental drug with some potentially nasty side effects, it should be entirely my own value judgement on what to do with said information.
- TheCondor 12y ago
  Seriously? Watson could replace lawyers or doctors for people that equate Google searches to legal advice or medical advice. Think legalzoom and webmd... Absolutely seems like it could be an entertaining way for a non lawyer or no doctor to explore a law or medical library. The majority on my time spent with lawyers has been discussing my issue until it could be distiled down to a couple concise legal questions; I bought a short sell house and the seller demanded that I put a clause in the contract that said his bank couldn't issue him an i9... I have. No authority over tax laws but I also didn't want any liability or an invalid contract, nor to willingly build a bogus one. There was some real language subtlty to it all and I didn't even know the questions to ask. Same with doctors, pain is relative, strong pains turn lesser pains into mild discomfort and people are insanely good at ignoring and normalizing pains away. Do most patients even know what to ask or describe? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have a lawyer and a doctor on my smartphone all day everyday but it still seems like a ways off. Watson really seems like a tool that cuts your legal fees because your lawyers research time drops 90% or something. (Or rather, he makes 90% more profit from you..)
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    Watson is already better at diagnosing cancer than human doctors. http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/11/ibm-watson-medical-doctor http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/11/ibm-watson-me... Human doctors need sleep. They get tired. They get old. You'll still need innovation in the medical field, but lets not kid ourselves that we need a gourmet chef in every McDonalds.
- nradov 12y ago
  Watson can't replace most physicians. Physicians have to physically interact with a patient to gather a relevant medical history as well as subjective and objective observations about the patient's symptoms. Robots and machine vision systems are nowhere near being able to fill that role. Watson might be able to partially replace some specialists that primary care physicians use for consultations. When PCPs are unsure about a diagnosis or proper plan of care they will often consult with a specialist for advice via phone or e-mail. So in that case the PCP has already gathered at least some preliminary data and could feed it to a computer. But even for that use case Watson won't be able to provide same level of back-and-forth interaction that's often necessary to achieve the correct result.
  - matznerd 12y ago
    The volume of medical data being created and published is rapidly increasing, and it would take a doctor to read something like 160 hours per week to stay on top of their field. There are only 168 hours in a week, so there is really no way a doctor today can keep up with what is going on . The idea of Watson is to be able to take large amounts of unstructured data (i.e. an entire patient history and current symptoms) and be able to find a solution. I don't think Watson will replace a doctor or physical interaction anytime soon, but a device connected to Watson or similar solution will most definitely be used to augment the doctor's diagnosis and treatment solution.
sumukh1 12y ago
I actually built my own version of Watson based on this idea - jeopardy questions are often google-able/searchable on wikipedia. It was pretty easy to build out - but it only gets 80% of the way there. The last 20% is the hardest - and it's why Watson is so impressive (even though even Watson is probably only at 90%)
- flarg 12y ago
  Did you every see that HN Post about QUANTA [1]? Do you think it would cover the last 20%? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8298887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8298887
pcocko 12y ago
Here some examples about Watson implementations https://developer.ibm.com/watson/2014/03/27/industries-can-benefit-cognitive-approach/ https://developer.ibm.com/watson/2014/03/27/industries-can-b... But would be interesting to see a real application working. An online retail for example.

malanj 12y ago

Has anyone at HN used either IBM Watson or Wolfram Alpha to build a real (commercial) app? It feels like there should be a whole wave of apps built on either of these technologies but it doesn't seem to be materialising. What is holding back the killer apps for answer/computation engines?

jj26 12y ago
I've heard the turnaround for a Watson implementation is about a year. IBM is just too slow, that's why the flood of apps isn't yet materializing.
aabajian 12y ago
Google / Wolfram Alpha / Watson are great at answering broad questions. 1. "Who was the 12th president?" - Zachary Taylor 2. "What color wine is cabernet sauvignon?" - Red 3. "Is a ferret a rodent?" - The ferret is the domesticated member of the Order Carnivora, Family Mustelidae and Genus Mustela. A common misconception is that ferrets are rodents. The real challenge is answering niche questions: 1. What size are the OEM rear wheels of a Honda S2000? 2. How can I fix MySQL error 1064? 3. How do I remove wine from a macbook? These types of questions aren't answerable by a simple mining of Wikipedia or Encyclopedic knowledge. They represent niches within our society (S2000 owners, programmers, people who spilled wine on their macbooks). Google provides excellent links to pages that contain answers to these questions, but it cannot deduce a single answer or common response. This is why sites like Answers.com, Yahoo! Answers, StackExchange, etc. can flourish, but it's also why an NLP question and answer system is very difficult. I've been working on a system to mine existing responses to questions - http://gotoanswer.stanford.edu http://gotoanswer.stanford.edu - I only have a small subset of programming-related questions (~10M), but you can get an idea for what I'm trying to do by searching for "How do I remove wine from a macbook?" You'll see that there are results for removing wine the liquid and WINE the windows non-emulator.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- Rooster61 12y ago

yatoomy 12y ago

Ive been looking into Watson's new application to analytics etc. How would that compare to say Mathimatica or the Wolfram Language/Data Science Platform?

ilaksh 12y ago

So you just ask it any random question and it knows everything? Or only things that come up on Jeopardy? I don't see an API for feeding it information.

MartynX 12y ago
I would assume that they are working closer with companies that they trust to feed in information. Having that on an what will eventually be a public API is recipe for disaster.
- matznerd 12y ago
  Each instance of Watson is unique and has to be trained as such based on it's "corpus" (set of data) and actual feedback on the quality of it's answers by experts. The public API sounds like it will allow access to specific flavors of pre-trained and data-filled Watsons, like the food- recipe one or some basic medical ones.

mooreds 12y ago

I found the link above to be a bit useless as it jumps right into getting answers with evidence. Here's a better overview link: https://developer.ibm.com/watson/docs/developing-watson-apis/using-question-answer-api-access-watson-capabilities/ https://developer.ibm.com/watson/docs/developing-watson-apis...

mooreds 12y ago

If you want access to the API, you have to fill out a form, here: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/form_ecosystem.html?cmp=usbrb&cm=s&csr=watson.site_20140319&cr=deveco&ct=usbrb301&cn=sec3partnerapp http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/form_ecosys... This is buried in the docs as a comment on this page: https://developer.ibm.com/watson/docs/developing-watson-apis/application-development-flow/ https://developer.ibm.com/watson/docs/developing-watson-apis... Edit: No real support for 'playing around' with the API. Bummer. Edit2: Just went through the application process linked above. Be prepared to give info about yourself and your company and an explanation of why you want access to the Watson API, as well as what type of information you'll be working with. I stated 'just want to play around with the API'. We'll see how they react to that.

pesenti 12y ago
Watson APIs will be accessible - without the need for an application - as part of BlueMix (https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/ https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/ - the IBM PaaS/Heroku) in a couple of weeks. Stay posted!
- mark_l_watson 12y ago
  That is great! I just signed up with my existing IBM ID. I am enjoying using IBM Watson right now on a customer project, and being able to experiment and learn on my own will both help the effort to help my customer and perhaps use IBM Watson for personal projects. BTW, I like your dev page, with starter kits for multiple languages and frameworks.
- Ixiaus 12y ago
  BlueMix is actually pretty exciting to me; I think IBM has finally stepped up as a competitor in the "cloud" ecosystem where Microsoft has really failed.
  - thinkpad20 12y ago
    "Really failed"? According to Forbes in July of this year[0], Microsoft is second only to Amazon in the cloud market, and gaining. I'm not sure how that counts as a failure, except in the sense that Microsoft makes a popular whipping boy. [0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2014/07/28/amazon-is-facing-a-cloud-crisis-as-microsoft-muscles-in/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2014/07/28/amazon-i...

pesenti 12y ago

IBM is about to make these APIs (and many others) much more accessible as part of BlueMix (https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/ https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/ - the IBM PaaS/Heroku). I lead the team in charge of developing the Watson platform. Ask me questions!

aswath87 12y ago
When will BlueMix have Watson access?
atratus 12y ago
The Q&A is not particularly interesting...are there other api's we can experiment with? Also, is there any precedent for getting clojure up on bluemix?
- pesenti 12y ago
  Yes many others - think NLP, multi-lingual, social media, speech, vision, etc. We'll start with a small set and keep expanding. I don't know about Clojure, I would ask that question on their forum: https://developer.ibm.com/answers?community=bluemix https://developer.ibm.com/answers?community=bluemix
- chris_j 12y ago
  (Another) IBMer here. As far as I am aware, Bluemix doesn't have built-in support for Clojure but a few of us have played with it and there are a few ways that you can run Clojure apps: I wrote a blog post about my experiences running a Hello World app using the Heroku buildpack for Clojure which you can find here: http://mytediousblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/running-clojure-webapp-on-ibm-bluemix.html http://mytediousblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/running-clojure-... In addition, since Bluemix natively supports Java apps, you can export a Clojure app as either an uberjar or an uberwar and run it directly on Bluemix that way. So for example, if you create an uberwar of your Clojure webapp then you can push it to Bluemix by doing: cf push your-app-name -p target/my-app-uberwar.war ... and Bluemix will run your app on a WebSphere Liberty Profile app server. I'm happy to help if you have any questions - contact details in my HN profile.
12y ago

80ProofPudding 12y ago

Waiting for my coffee to brew, I read that as "Emma Watson API".

Tyrant505 12y ago

Does this also give access to their cooking and recipe data? Edit: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/cognitivecooking/ http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/cognitivecooking/

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

mark_l_watson 12y ago

I am helping a customer integrate Watson into their system so I am very happy to see the news about BlueMix (https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/ https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/) that apparently will allow me to keep experimenting with Watson after my consulting engagement is complete. If you read the documentation, you will see that preparing training data and questions is fairly straightforward.

kyberias 12y ago

Looking at that example, I wonder why that Porcaro quote is listed as evidence. It doesn't relate to Jackson's album at all.

beebs93 12y ago

I sent a e-mail to my co-workers containing "...natural English to ask Watson..." and somehow people read it as "You can ask Emma Watson, who is English, a question and she will respond". And I thought, "...close enough - Watson could answer questions about Emma".