Artificial Intelligence  

IBM has announced that the artificial intelligence system Watson will be offered as a cloud-based tool to application developers, letting them tap a resource capable of giving everything from shopping tips to medical advice.

After trouncing the human race's best brains in Jeopardy! in 2011 everyone wondered where IBM would take Watson next.

Now the company has announced that it has opened up the Watson artificial intelligence platform to developers, including access to an API (or application programming interface) and tools for incorporating its cognitive computing into existing software.  The system will be cloud-based and is reported to be twice as powerful as the system that was featured on the television program.

According to EWeek, exposing Watson to developers will give IBM an entry into a whole new set of partnerships and help drive growth in the nascent cognitive computing space, which the company helped pioneer. It also offers developers and entrepreneurs with smart ideas a way to quickly and easily get into markets they might otherwise not have had an opportunity to even consider without building up major teams and generating tremendous funding.
Watson is already being used by cancer researchers, scanning through whole archives of medical records and research papers, actually reading and understanding the text, as opposed to simply collecting excerpts based on keywords, it can now do for whoever’s willing to buy access.

“There is so much more that can be accomplished by drawing on the creativity of individuals, organizations, entrepreneurs, startups and established businesses that truly innovate every day on their own,” said Stephen Gold, vice president of Watson Solutions, in an interview with Bloomberg. “Watson can be this ultimate assistant to help individuals get their questions answered and their problems solved.”
The examples of API-based applications provided by IBM are more interesting from a business standpoint than a technological one. Welltok’s CafeWell Concierge app will create personalized “Intelligent Health Itineraries” that help the user manage specific conditions, and provide rewards for good eating, exercise, and other behaviors.

The Fluid Expert Personal Shopper from Fluid Retail will act as an online sales associate, interacting with customers with text and speech. The app can effectively chat with the customer about where he or she is going, what sorts of activities are planned, and then pull up relevant products, reviews and suggestions. As with WellTok’s coach, Fluid’s shopper is learning about the specific person it's serving, and applying that knowledge as it goes.

For these apps, Watson isn’t learning like a machine, gathering and regurgitating data within rigidly defined rules and interfaces. It’s not, for example, requiring that you fill out questionnaires and then make your own way through search results. You’re talking to it—either out loud, or through text—and it’s making logical connections, and coming to conclusions, which it presents in the same sort of conversational language that humans use.

The approach is called cognitive computing, which means the software literally learns. “I don’t program it at all,” says John Gordon, VP of IBM Watson. “I feed it info, I give it practice tests, and I score it. And Watson figures out, on its own, how to learn from its mistakes.”

Gordon compares Watson’s training process to helping his kids with their homework. Instead of digging into the code to upgrade and improve the system’s ability to understand and interact with people, he gives it data, and sometimes discusses it, and Watson gets better. That person-like capacity to learn applies both to its linguistic and interactive algorithms, as well as its book smarts—it can absorb roughly 1 million books worth of content.

Where it was once a room-size assortment of hardware, today’s Watson lives in an online-accessible IBM Power server—the size of about three pizza boxes, says Gordon—and can interact with multiple users at once. Much of the system’s calculations now happen in the cloud, and depending on the applications that are tapping into it, the Watson that helps you shop at TheNorthFace.com, or that tells you how to cope with a chronic condition, will be inherently different from all the other Watsons helping all the other people.

IBM won’t speculate on the kinds of disruptive capabilities it would like to see from Watson-powered developers. It is obvious for many, as it has been since Jeopardy! that this is another sign of the coming Singularity.  Now that cognitive computing isn’t just here, it is the post-Watson-world.



SOURCE  Popular Science

By 33rd Square

Subscribe to 33rd Square

 Computers  

First described in 1837, Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, if it had been built may have launched the computer revolution 100 ago. Now a group, Plan 28, wants to finally build the machine as a symbol of being ahead of your time.

As everyone knows, computer science began in the '30s ... the 1830s.

Charles Babbage designed, but never built the analytical engine almost 200 years ago.  It was conceived, as were the mechanical standards of the time, that it would be built out of brass and iron.

Related articles Miguel Nicolelis Says The Singularity Is Hot Air  McKinsey & Company Report on 12 Disruptive Technologies Released  IBM's Manoj Saxena on What Watson Will Mean for the Future

Although other mechanical machines may predate the Analytical Engine, it is regarded as the first design for a "general purpose computer" that could be reprogrammed to carry out different tasks.

It was the successor to his Difference Engine, a huge brass number-cruncher.

Although elements of the engine have been built over the last 173 years, a complete working model of the steam-powered machine has never been made.

Study of the designs shows that the system would have worked, and would have been comparable to mechanical computers built 100 years later at the end of the WWII. The Harvard Mark IV, built in the early 1940s, has many features borrowed from the Analytical Engine's design.
Plan 28 is an organization that aims to actually build Babbage's Analytical Engine. Babbage left behind extensive documentation of the Analytical Engine, the most complete of which can be seen in his Plan 28 (and 28a), which are preserved in a mahogany case that Babbage had constructed especially for the purpose.

Partial model of the Analytical Engine
Image Source: PlyoJump

According to John Graham-Cumming, founder of Plan 28,

It might seem a folly to want to build a gigantic, relatively puny computer at great expense 170 years after its invention. But the message of a completed Analytical Engine is very clear: it’s possible to be 100 years ahead of your own time. With support, this type of “blue skies” thinking can result in fantastic changes to the lives of everyone. Just think of the impact of the computer and ask yourself how different the Victorian world would have been with Babbage Engines at its disposal. 

What seemed like costly research that was unlikely to have any short-term value turned out to be the seed of one of the greatest revolutions mankind has seen. I hope that future generations of scientists will stand before the completed Analytical Engine, think of Babbage, and be inspired to work on their own 100-year leaps.

"A hundred years ago, before computers were available, [Babbage] had envisaged this machine."
In the TED video below, Graham-Cumming, tells the story of Babbage's mechanical, steam-powered "analytical engine" and how Ada Lovelace, mathematician and daughter of Lord Byron, saw beyond its simple computational abilities to imagine the future of computers.

Graham-Cumming is a British programmer and writer of The Geek Atlas is best known for having originated a successful petition to the British Government asking for an apology for its persecution of Alan Turing.



SOURCE  TED Ed

By 33rd Square

Subscribe to 33rd Square