BackIBM bets on Watson to usher in cognitive era
Watson, having the ability to sift through large data and match compounds, may be applied to anything in future
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Mumbai: Imagine your child asking a toy: “What is the speed of light?", and the toy providing the right answer: “186,000 miles per second".
Dino, from CogniToys, does exactly that. There’s no bank of answers that is fed into the machine and triggered when a child presses a button. Instead, Dino uses International Business Machines Corp.’s (IBM’s) supercomputing engine, Watson, to do the trick.
CogniToys, owned by a US-based company Elemental Path Inc., uses advanced language processing algorithms to personalize and continue the interaction between the toy and child. Parents connect Dino to the Internet with the help of an iOS, or Android app that has a unique identification code. As the child begins to play with the toy, it gradually modifies the content and experience based on how the child is using it, his vocabulary levels and interests. Dino even has a “Parent Panel" to view engagement activity and restrict play for specific periods.
This is just one of the applications of Watson’s cognitive abilities. “We now have 28 Watson APIs (application programming interfaces) and will have about 50 by the end of next year," Vanitha Narayanan, managing director of IBM India Pvt. Ltd, said in an interview last week.
In a bid to reinvent itself as a provider of intelligent cloud computing and data analytics, IBM is sharpening its focus on the cognitive power of Watson, its supercomputing system that even beat Jeopardy players in 2011, to provide small and big companies the intelligence to make smart business decisions by quickly analysing mountains of unstructured data that is generated daily.
Everyone is talking about building a digital company or digital enterprise that can run on the cloud or mobile predominantly. But when you add digital intelligence on top of that, you start to get the foundation for moving into cognitive spheres, according to Narayanan.
Most clients, she pointed out, associate cloud computing with “cheap computing or cheap storage or elasticity, lower capex (capital expenditure)", while mobile “is perceived as doing things with an enabling infrastructure—moving applications on a mobile infrastructure".
“Our view of cloud in the longer term is a platform to drive innovation and transformation. It’s a rich cloud or a smart cloud. Rather it is about leveraging a public, private or hybrid cloud and combining it with a new devops environment to innovate very quickly—which is why we launched Bluemix (an implementation of IBM’s Open Cloud Architecture based on Cloud Foundry—an open source platform as a service) in India," said Narayanan.
IBM launched Bluemix globally with a $1 billion investment in 2014. By the end of the year, Narayanan expects the company to have over 100 services on Bluemix.
All Watson APIs are available on the cloud along with Bluemix APIs, Narayanan noted. “We are discovering that IBM Watson has been fostering tremendous innovation with all these APIs," she said.
Narayanan cited the example of IBM’s Chef Watson that can read up on the chemical composition of hundreds of different ingredients and analysed some 10,000 recipes from American food and entertainment magazine Bon Appétit.
Watson, which has the ability to sift through large data sets and match compounds, may be applied in the future to anything from creating perfumes, to helping scientists create new metal alloys or plastics, to fighting cancer.
“IBM’s moonshot is to transform the healthcare sector, which is why you saw us launch IBM Watson healthcare unit this year," Narayanan added.
In January 2014, the company launched the IBM Watson unit that is dedicated to developing and commercializing cloud-delivered cognitive computing technologies. The company began adding new beta Watson services in February 2015, and scalable deep learning APIs with the acquisition of AlchemyAPI in March. In April, IBM launched Watson Health and the Watson Health Cloud platform.
In April, IBM also acquired two companies—Explory, for its data set based on 50 million people, and Phytel, a provider of health management software. IBM also purchased leading medical imaging firm, Merge Healthcare Inc., for about $1 billion in August. All acquisitions are aimed at adding more capabilities to its growing Watson Health business unit.
Watson also has the ability to sift through hundreds of research papers that are written each year, exploring treatments for cancer and other diseases in the hope of discovering hidden patterns in diseases and their treatment protocols. It can do likewise with legal documents.
But what about India? “We see this as a whole ecosystem—we will keep innovating around Bluemix and Watson. The idea is to create a cloud for business transformation and innovation. This is why we announced a partnership with (India’s software lobby) Nasscom for its 10,000 start-ups a couple of weeks ago. You will see us at a lot more hackathons which combine Bluemix and Watson because we want to see local use cases," said Narayanan.
Cognitive, she pointed out, is at the heart of smarter cities because you have to better harness the humongous amounts of data to get superior outcomes. For instance, IBM does work for Bangalore’s city municipal corporation around smarter water management. “I can take that application and put it on the cloud in this country and offer it to every municipality. The municipalities will not have to build additional water infrastructure," Narayanan explained.
You can also use IBM Watson in the education sector in India, “just as we have done in Australia and the US", she said. For instance, a US-based education technology firm, Carney Labs, provides a platform embedded with Watson language capabilities to help schools learn about a student’s personality characteristics to help them build a career road map.
By 2018, half of all consumers will interact with services based on cognitive computing on a regular basis, according to research firm International Data Corp.’s FutureScape: Worldwide Big Data and Analytics 2015 Predictions, released last December.
Investment in high-value services, however, will affect margins in the short term, said analysts.
IBM is in the middle of its long transition towards higher-value services, while weakness in its commoditized ERP (enterprise resources planning) implementations will continue to offset success in strategic imperatives, that is, cloud, analytics, mobility, social and security solutions, according to a 21 July note by Jennifer Hamel, a Technology Business Research Inc. analyst.
IBM also faces stiff competition in the Internet of Things (IoT) segment, where it announced a $3 billion investment in April to form a new unit in the hope of establishing itself as a leader in this segment.
“As the IoT market heats up in 2015, we expect hardware-centric vendors will follow IBM’s consulting-led approach to capture engagement opportunities," Hamel said in the note.
For instance, Dell Inc. announced the creation of an IoT business unit in June that will complement its digital business services practice launched last November. Cisco, too, launched its IoT System unit in June, which is based around six pillars that aim to cover all aspects of IoT transformation, with support from Cisco Consulting Services.
Narayanan, on her part, acknowledges that Watson’s cognitive capabilities also imply a radical change in traditional recruitment practices.
For instance, IBM will “even need medical professionals because if you’re doing oncology work, which involves taxonomy, even the brightest of IT professionals can’t handle that. No hospital has oncologists to spare or any that can do work part-time", she pointed out.
For now, IBM India is banking on the support of its global expertise of more than 2,000 consulting professionals spanning machine learning, advanced analytics, data science and development, for this task.
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