IBM Taps Next Generation Leaders For Watson Innovation

The Watson Case Competition at USC, the third in a series hosted by IBM, is the latest example of IBM’s work with academia to advance interest among students in Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) curriculums that will lead to high-impact, high-value careers. The competition is in keeping with IBM’s Academic Initiative which delivers course work, case studies and curricula to more than 6,000 universities and 30,000 faculty members worldwide to help students prepare for high-value future job opportunities.

While I was out trying to grok all things SXSW Interactive these past several days, IBM continued with its efforts to put IBM Watson to work for the betterment of mankind by turning to the next generation of brilliant young minds to help figure out where Watson should work next.

Imagine a Watson-powered system that could uncover data-driven insights to help medical professionals identify those who may be suffering silently from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Imagine a Watson that could provide lawyers with faster research capabilities to improve their cases.

Imagine a Watson that could help businesses hire the best talent in the job market.

This is the magnitude of ideas sparked by more than 100 University of Southern California students who gathered recently to compete in the IBM Watson Academic Case Competition.

A debut on the West Coast, the Case Competition put USC students in the spotlight to create business plans for applying Watson to pressing business and societal challenges — and IBM business leaders were present and listening carefully.

IBM: Partnering To Learn

IBM partners with thousands of universities to offer curricula, internships and hands-on experiences to help students learn first hand about new technologies in the fields of Big Data, analytics and cognitive computing.

The company is at the forefront of creating a new workforce of Big Data trained professionals, from IBM’s collaboration with Cleveland Clinic, which provides Watson as a collaborative learning tool for medical students, to its public-private partnership with the New York City Department of Education and the City University of New York to create the Pathways in Technology Early College High School program (P-TECH), which allows students to participate in a six year science and technology program and graduate with an associates degree for free in computer science or engineering.

To kick-off the competition at USC’s campus, IBM provided students with a crash course on Watson’s breakthrough capabilities, including a demonstration of how Watson is helping WellPoint, Inc. and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center improve the speed and quality of treatment for cancer patients.

As the first cognitive computing system of its kind in the marketplace, Watson is able to understand and process the subtleties of human questions, sift through vast amounts of data, and use sophisticated analytics to generate fast, accurate answers for its human users.

Watson also learns from its interactions, constantly improving with each use. This represents a major shift in organizations’ ability to quickly analyze, understand and respond to Big Data, in industries such as healthcare — and this is where student minds were put to the test.

As part of the competition, students were assigned into 24 teams and given 48 hours to define a new purpose for Watson, develop a business plan, and present it to a panel of judges comprising school officials, IBM executives and local business leaders.

The challenge was unique among USC competitions because students worked toward a common goal with peers from other disciplines — similar to how IBM combines the talent of business leaders and research scientists to develop its patented innovations.

To foster interdisciplinary collaboration, each team was required to have at least one business and one engineering member, from USC’s Marshall Business School and Viterbi School of Engineering.

What’s Your Business Plan For Watson?

The student teams faced two rounds of judging based on four areas of criteria: how well the concept and supporting plan articulated and supported the team’s vision; the feasibility of bringing the product or service to market and the supporting elements; the extent the proposed solution leverages Watson’s key capabilities; and the team’s presentation. Three winning ideas were selected by a panel of eight industry and faculty judges, including representatives from Bank of America, Ernst & Young, and IBM.

• 1st Place – Legal Research: Let Watson Do the Discovery for Your Next Legal Case – For corporate legal departments, building a case — or defending one’s own — relies heavily on fast and accurate research. Past legal trials, court documents, articles and digital evidence: all of these materials can make or break a case, and together they comprise a sea of unstructured data that is both time-consuming and costly to pore through. The first place USC team proposed using Watson to process its users’ research needs, based on its ability to think like a human, quickly sift through online legal documents for facts, and not only identify evidence to support a case — but forecast its probability of success. The first place team’s viewpoint: by placing Watson in charge of research, firms can recover time and costs, while delivering better legal outcomes. In turn, firms that leverage Watson’s speed and efficiency can address the growing legal trend towards “flat fee” billing and research outsourcing.
• 2nd Place – Employee Training: Watson Uncovers the Keys to Success for Your Employees – According to the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), 41 percent of employees at companies with inadequate training programs plan to leave within a year, versus 12 percent of employees at companies who provide excellent training and professional development programs. Conversely, the ASTD also states that effective employee training can lead to 218 percent higher income per employee and 45 percent higher shareholder return than market average. The second place USC team proposes that corporate human resource departments use Watson to optimize employee training, by crunching data pertaining to the employers’ HR needs, the employees’ career goals, and the range of training options available that can help both parties succeed. The second place team’s viewpoint: by improving employee satisfaction and retention, a Watson-powered employee training system can also drive higher shareholder value.
• 3rd Place – Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Watson Helps Doctors Find Patients – It is reported that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder affects nearly 7.7 million U.S. adults aged 18 and older. This includes people who have served in combat, experienced domestic violence, have been in car accidents, or other traumatic events. Many with PTSD suffer silently, including the 400,000+ U.S. veterans who have yet to be identified and treated, per the U.S. Veterans Administration. Thankfully, the catalysts behind this illness need no longer remain invisible — due largely to Big Data. For example, there are now unprecedented amounts of data that accompany soldiers who return from war, from medical histories to information on combat experiences. The third place USC team proposes that physicians use Watson to identify people who may develop PTSD, by uncovering insights from data that can help piece together their personal story and shed light on pain he or she may be experiencing. The team’s viewpoint: by helping physicians find and diagnose those suffering from PTSD, Watson can help medical professionals offer patients the treatment they deserve.

Fueling Innovation While Investing In The Next Generation Of Tech Leaders

This competition is the latest example of how IBM is fueling innovation and working with students in higher education to hone valuable business skills that will shape the next generation of industry leaders.

“Partnering with universities such as USC gives IBM a unique opportunity to tap into the minds of our next-generation of leaders, whose training, skills and ideas for changing the world are all forward-thinking and based on a desire to make a meaningful impact,” said Manoj Saxena, IBM General Manager, Watson Solutions, about the new initiative. “These students see what Watson is doing right now and think — how else will cognitive computing impact my life and career in the years to come? To us, that’s exactly the mindset that should be fueling IBM innovations, and the very reason we host Watson Academic Case Competitions.”

Due to the overwhelming response from USC students seeking to participate in the Watson Academic Case Competition, students had to join a waiting list, once the 24-team maximum had been reached. One faculty sponsor, noting that the level of interest was unprecedented for a campus case competition, predicted registration could reach 500 next year.

“For USC students, the opportunity to share their own ideas with IBM on how to commercialize Watson is truly a unique experience,” said Ashish Soni, Executive Director of Digital Innovation and Founding Director of the Viterbi Student Innovation Institute at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. “As educators, we’re quite pleased to see students getting excited about cognitive computing innovation, because we know there’s a business demand for the types of skills they get to showcase in Watson Case Competitions.”

Watson — Building a New Big Data Workforce 

It’s no secret that employers across the U.S. are seeking job candidates who can analyze and build strategy around Big Data, or the 2.5 quintillion bytes of information gleaned from sensors, mobile devices, online transactions and social networks, to name just a few sources. A recent Gartner report estimates that 1.9 million Big Data jobs will be created in the U.S. by 2015.

The Watson Case Competition at USC, the third in a series hosted by IBM, is the latest example of IBM’s work with academia to advance interest among students in Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) curriculums that will lead to high-impact, high-value careers. The competition is in keeping with IBM’s Academic Initiative which delivers course work, case studies and curricula to more than 6,000 universities and 30,000 faculty members worldwide to help students prepare for high-value future job opportunities.

IBM worked closely with academic institutions during the development and introduction of Watson. Eight leading universities around the world participated in the development phase of the system; and more than 10,000 students watched Watson triumph on the Jeopardy! quiz show in February 2011. Most recently, IBM announced it would provide a modified version of an IBM Watson system to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, making it the first university to receive such a system that will enable leading-edge research by faculty and students.

The competition at USC marks the latest collaboration between the university and IBM. Over the last two years, students at the school’s Annenberg Innovation Lab have been using Big Data analytics technologies to conduct social sentiment analyses and determine public engagement on topics such as sports, film, retail and fashion.

Two of the biggest projects looked at Major League Baseball’s World Series and the Academy Awards, projects developed for students to explore and expand their skills as they prepare for new data-intensive careers.  IBM also collaborated with the USC Marshall School of Business for “The Great Mind Challenge,” a global academic initiative focused on providing students with an opportunity to turn their social networking savvy into business ready skills to prepare for the jobs of the future.

Watson Heads Back To School

Well, the introduction of the BlackBerry 10 OS has come and gone, Research In Motion renamed itself as “BlackBerry,” the new company announced two new products, and the market mostly yawned.

Then again, many in the market seemed to find something to love about either the new interface and/or the new devices. David Pogue, the New York Time’s technology columnist (who typically leans towards being a Machead), wrote a surprisingly favorable review . Then again today, he opined again in a post entitled “More Things To Love About The BlackBerry 10.”

With that kind of ink, don’t vote the tribe from Ottawa off of the island just yet!

As I pondered the fate of the BlackBerry milieu, it struck me I hadn’t spilled any ink lately myself about IBM’s Watson, who’s been studying up on several industries since beating the best humans in the world two years ago at “Jeopardy!”

Turns out, Watson’s also been looking to apply to college, most notably, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Yesterday, IBM announced it would be providing a modified version of an IBM Watson system to RPI, making it the first university to receive such a system.

The arrival of Watson will enable RPI students and faculty an opportunity to find new users for Watson and deepen the systems’ cognitive computing capabilities. The firsthand experience of working on the system will also better position RPI students as future leaders in the Big Data, analytics, and cognitive computing realms.

Watson has a unique ability to understand the subtle nuances of human language, sift through vast amounts of data, and provide evidence-based answers to its human users’ questions.

Currently, Watson’s fact-finding prowess is being applied to crucial fields, such as healthcare, where IBM is collaborating with medical providers, hospitals and physicians to help doctors analyze a patient’s history, symptoms and the latest news and medical literature to help physicians make faster, more accurate diagnoses. IBM is also working with financial institutions to help improve and simplify the banking experience.

Rensselaer faculty and students will seek to further sharpen Watson’s reasoning and cognitive abilities, while broadening the volume, types, and sources of data Watson can draw upon to answer questions. Additionally, Rensselaer researchers will look for ways to harness the power of Watson for driving new innovations in finance, information technology, business analytics, and other areas.

With 15 terabytes of hard disk storage, the Watson system at Rensselaer will store roughly the same amount of information as its Jeopardy! predecessor and will allow 20 users to access the system at once — creating an innovation hub for the institutes’ New York campus. Along with faculty researchers and graduate students, undergraduate students at Rensselaer will have opportunities to work directly with the Watson system.This experience will help prepare Rensselaer students for future high-impact, high-value careers in analytics, cognitive computing, and related fields.

Underscoring the value of the partnership between IBM and Rensselaer, Gartner, Inc. estimates that 1.9 million Big Data jobs will be created in the U.S. by 2015.

This workforce — which is in high demand today — will require professionals who understand how to develop and harness data-crunching technologies such as Watson, and put them to use for solving the most pressing of business and societal needs.

As part of a Shared University Research (SUR) Award granted by IBM Research, IBM will provide Rensselaer with Watson hardware, software and training.The ability to use Watson to answer complex questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and confidence has enormous potential to help improve decision making across a variety of industries from health care, to retail, telecommunications and financial services.

IBM and Rensselaer: A History of Collaboration 

Originally developed at the company’s Yorktown Heights, N.Y. research facility, IBM’s Watson has deep connections to the Rensselaer community. Several key members of IBM’s Watson project team are graduates of Rensselaer, the oldest technological university in the United States.

Leading up to Watson’s victory on Jeopardy!, Rensselaer was one of eight universities that worked with IBM in 2011 on the development of open architecture that enabled researchers to collaborate on the underlying QA capabilities that help to power Watson.

Watson is the latest collaboration between IBM and Rensselaer, which have worked together for decades to advance the frontiers of high-performance computing, nanoelectronics, advanced materials, artificial intelligence, and other areas. IBM is a key partner of the Rensselaer supercomputing center, the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations, where the Watson hardware will be located.

Flanked by the avatar of IBM’s Watson computer, IBM Research Scientist Dr. Chris Welty (left) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute student Naveen Sundar discuss potential new ways the famous computer could be used, Wednesday, January 30, 2013 in Troy, NY. IBM donated a version of its Watson system to Rensselaer, making it the first university in the world to receive such a system. Rensselaer students and faculty will explore new uses for Watson and ways to deepen its cognitive computing capabilities. (Philip Kamrass/Feature Photo Service for IBM)

Live @ IBM InterConnect 2012: A Q&A With Manoj Saxena About IBM’s Watson Being Put To Work

IBM General Manager of Watson Solutions Manoj Saxena is responsible for the commercialization efforts of IBM’s Watson technology globally.

This morning on the IBM InterConnect stage, IBM general manager for the IBM Watson Solutions organization, Manoj Saxena, explained to the gathered audience in Singapore how IBM has taken Watson out of its “Jeopardy!” TV show playground and put Watson to work!

I last discussed Watson with Manoj this past April at the IBM Impact event, when Watson had just matriculated into the workforce, getting jobs in both the healthcare and financial services industries.

During our interview yesterday here at IBM InterConnect, Manoj and I conducted a mid-year performance review for Watson, and the evaluation was overwhelmingly positive — Watson will continue to stay gainfully employed, but as with any cutting edge technology, there are always areas for improvement.

We discussed all of this, and how Manoj’s team has made Watson smaller and smarter, during our interview here in Singapore. Manoj also explained how Watson has really become a demonstrable example of “one of the most dramatic shifts we’re going to see in our life times,” the shift from transactional to cognitive computing.

You can view the interview here.

Watson To Take On Harvard And MIT

Watson went to Boston earlier today to take on students from Harvard and MIT in a friendly game of "Jeopardy!"

At last week’s Information On Demand event in Las Vegas, we heard a lot about how the Watson technology is starting to permeate the marketplace.

There was much discussion around the use of Watson by Seton Hospitals using the new IBM Content and Predictive Analytics for Healthcare solution, and also about the continued expansion of Watson into other industries.

Today, we learned that IBM is headed to Harvard with Watson.  Not to go back to school, but to present a Watson symposium with the Harvard Business School and the MIT Sloan School of Management.

This event is bringing together some of the brightest academic minds to collaborate on the use of advanced analytics, like those powering Watson, to transform the way the world does business.

As part of the symposium, teams of students from Harvard and MIT will put their skills to the test in a demonstration of IBM Watson’s question answer (QA) capabilities in an exhibition game of the TV quiz show “Jeopardy!”

The commercialization of Watson technology means that today’s students will require new skill sets when they enter the job market. As future leaders in a wide range of industries and entrepreneurial ventures, students will need to combine business skills and knowledge with advanced analytical techniques to compete successfully in the world economy.

For example, when applied to banking and finance industry, Watson-like technologies can uncover hidden patterns in data that can rapidly identify market trends, and provide deep, integrated risk analysis. This provides financial services professionals a more accurate picture of their market positions, helping them better assess risk and hedge their financial exposures.

“Great technology companies like IBM are converting the seemingly impossible into reality these days, to the point that it’s hard to keep up with all the digital innovations and their business implications,”said Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist, MIT.

“So we thought it would be a good idea to devote a day to discussing them, and also seeing them in action. We’re going to spend the morning talking computer science and economics with the world’s leading experts in these fields, then cheer our students on against Watson in the afternoon. I predict at least a second place finish for the MIT team.”

Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan School of Management are the first two business schools where IBM will co-host a Watson symposium.

A team of researchers from MIT, led by Boris Katz, principal research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, contributed code to the QuestionAnswer capabilities in Watson.

Harvard Business School’s Professor Shih recently wrote an in-depth case study of Watson that is will be used by MBA students in the School’s required first-year course Technology and Operations Management.

Follow the event and share your thoughts at #IBMWatson and the live blog at www.asmarterplanet.com, or via Facebook at www.facebook.com/ibmwatson

Putting Watson To Work In Healthcare

If you’ve been wondering whether our IBM intelligent Q&A technology Watson (no relation) was going to ever go out and get a real job, you need wait no longer.

Just as the Watson v. Jeopardy contest is set to start being rebroadcast here in North America this very day, IBM and Wellpoint announced an agreement today to create the first commercial applications of the IBM Watson technology.

WellPoint is the nation’s largest health benefits company in terms of medical membership, with 34 million members in its affiliated health plans, and a total of more than 70 million individuals served through its subsidiaries.

Under the agreement, Wellpoint will develop and launch Watson-based solutions to help improve patient care through the delivery of up-to-date, evidence-based health care for millions of Americans.

IBM will develop the foundational Watson healthcare technology on which WellPoint’s solution will run.

What Is Watson?

Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, is a computing system built by a team of IBM scientists who set out to accomplish a grand challenge –- build a computing system that rivals a human’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and confidence.

Earlier this year, Watson competed and won against two of the most celebrated players ever to appear on Jeopardy!. This historic match is being rebroadcast over three days, starting today.

Watson’s ability to analyze the meaning and context of human language, and quickly process vast amounts of information to suggest options targeted to a patient’s circumstances, can assist decision makers, such as physicians and nurses, in identifying the most likely diagnosis and treatment options for their patients.

In recent years, few areas have advanced as rapidly as health care. For physicians, incorporating hundreds of thousands of articles into practice and applying them to patient care is a significant challenge.

Watson can sift through an equivalent of about 1 million books or roughly 200 million pages of data, and analyze this information and provide precise responses in less than three seconds.

Watson: Helping Doctors With Their Diagnostics

Using this extraordinary capability WellPoint is expected to enable Watson to allow physicians to easily coordinate medical data programmed into Watson with specified patient factors, to help identify the most likely diagnosis and treatment options in complex cases. Watson is expected to serve as a powerful tool in the physician’s decision making process.

Medical conditions such as cancer, diabetes, chronic heart or kidney disease are incredibly intricate. New solutions incorporating Watson are being developed to have the ability to look at massive amounts of medical literature, population health data, and even a patient’s health record, in compliance with applicable privacy and security laws, to answer profoundly complex questions.

For example, we envision that new applications will allow physicians to use Watson to consult patient medical histories, recent test results, recommended treatment protocols and the latest research findings loaded into Watson to discuss the best and most effective courses of treatment with their patients.

“There are breathtaking advances in medical science and clinical knowledge, however; this clinical information is not always used in the care of patients. Imagine having the ability to take in all the information around a patient’s medical care — symptoms, findings, patient interviews and diagnostic studies. Then, imagine using Watson analytic capabilities to consider all of the prior cases, the state-of-the-art clinical knowledge in the medical literature and clinical best practices to help a physician advance a diagnosis and guide a course of treatment,” said Sam Nussbaum, M.D., WellPoint’s Chief Medical Officer.

“We believe this will be an invaluable resource for our partnering physicians and will dramatically enhance the quality and effectiveness of medical care they deliver to our members.”

Watson may help physicians identify treatment options that balance the interactions of various drugs and narrow among a large group of treatment choices, enabling physicians to quickly select the more effective treatment plans for their patients.

It is also expected to streamline communication between a patient’s physician and their health plan, helping to improve efficiency in clinical review of complex cases. It could even be used to direct patients to the physician in their area with the best success in treating a particular illness.

Depending on the progress of the development efforts, WellPoint anticipates employing Watson technology in early 2012, working with select physician groups in clinical pilots.

You can visit here to learn more about the IBM Watson technology.

Watson Redux

If you missed your chance to watch the competition aired nationally in North America this past February between IBM and America’s favorite quiz show Jeopardy!, fear not: IBM announced today that Jeopardy! will broadcast an encore presentation of the first-ever man vs. machine Jeopardy! competition between IBM’s “Watson” computing system and the show’s two greatest contestants – Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

Millions of North American viewers will be able to again witness TV history as Watson successfully competes against two human champions in two matches played over three consecutive days, September 12, 13, and 14, 2011.

(Spoiler Alert: developerWorks’ Scott Laningham and I interviewed the principal investigator and project lead of the Watson effort, Dr. David Ferrucci, during this year’s SXSW Interactive conference in March of this year. Do NOT watch the video Q&A below if you haven’t yet seen the broadcast/re-broadcast if you don’t want to spoil the ending! In the interview, Ferrucci explains in some detail the AI methods behind Watson’s madness!)

“With the Jeopardy! challenge, we accomplished what was thought to be impossible – building a computer system that operates in the near limitless, ambiguous and highly contextual realm of human language and knowledge,” said Dr. David Ferrucci, IBM Fellow and scientist leading the IBM Research team that created Watson. “Watching the match again reminds us of the great power and potential behind Watson to be able to make sense of the massive amounts of data around us and to solve problems in new ways.”

Six months after the original competition, Watson’s Deep Question Answering (QA) technology has already driven progress in new fields such as the healthcare industry. IBM is working with Nuance Communications, Inc. to explore and develop applications to help critical decision makers, such as physicians and nurses, process large volumes of health information in order to deliver quicker and more accurate patient diagnoses. Working with universities and clients, IBM is identifying many potential uses for Watson’s underlying QA technology.

The technology underlying Watson analyzes the structure and wording of the question or challenge being investigated, and formulates an answer that it has the highest level of ‘confidence’ is correct.  Watson answers ‘natural language’ questions, which can contain puns, slang, jargon and acronyms that must all be evaluated as part of Watson’s confidence in returning an answer.

The Watson v. Jeopardy! man v. machine contest, featuring Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, will be re-broadcast in North America in mid-September.

“We recognized the Jeopardy! IBM Challenge was not only a historic moment for television, but also for scientific discovery and innovation,” said Harry Friedman, executive producer of Jeopardy! “We wanted to provide the opportunity for more viewers to once again enjoy this ground-breaking exhibition match.”

IBM and the other contestants gave $1.25 million to charity, with $1 million coming from IBM.

What is Watson?

Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, is a breakthrough human achievement in the scientific field of Question and Answering, also known as “QA.” The Watson software is powered by an IBM POWER7 server optimized to handle the massive number of tasks that Watson must perform at rapid speeds to analyze complex language and answer questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and confidence.

Beyond providing correct responses, Watson had to analyze Jeopardy! clues that involved subtle meaning, irony, riddles, and other complexities in which humans excel and computers traditionally do not. The system incorporates a number of proprietary technologies for the specialized demands of processing an enormous number of concurrent tasks and data while analyzing information in real time.

You can learn more about the Watson research initiative here.

Deep Q&A: An Interview With IBM’s Dr. David Ferrucci On Watson Beyond Jeopardy!

During the recent SXSW Interactive fest here in Austin, developerWorks’ Scott Laningham and I had the opportunity to sit down and do an interview with the principal investigator behind the Watson Deep QA technology, Dr. David Ferrucci.

You may recognize Ferrucci from some of his recent TV appearances (or the IBM smarter planet TV spots addressing the power and opportunity the Watson technology presents).

Me, I was just glad to have the opportunity, along with Scott, to ask some specific questions that had been on my mind about Watson. And also to point out to Dr. Ferrucci that I had the last name Watson before our supercomputer did!

It was a fun and fascinating 13 minutes, and, for my money, one of the highlight interviews Scott and I have conducted in recent times.

Continued kudos to Ferrucci and his entire IBM team for such a great success with Watson.  Clearly, the Jeopardy! victory is just a launching point for the exciting new places where this new technology is likely to take us from here.

Calling Dr. Watson

What’s Next for Watson?

So now that the matches have all aired, and Watson came out the victor, what does it all mean?

If you missed the hullaballoo, this week, IBM’s Watson computer system competed against Jeopardy!’s most successful contestants, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, and ended up running away with victory.

But as amazing as the win was, what hasn’t been celebrated nearly enough in this blogger’s opinion is the practical applications of this technology to solve real problems in the world moving forward across a wide range of industries.

Watson was built by a dedicated team of brilliant IBM Research scientists over the past four years, and represents a breakthrough innovation: a machine that rivals a human’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language – quickly, accurately, confidently.

We saw this demonstrated in full force during the Jeopardy! matches this week.

But today begins the next phase of Watson’s evolution.

Calling Doctor Watson

Today, IBM is announcing that doctors from Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Maryland School of Medicine will work to take the same Jeopardy! playing capabilities of Watson and apply them to medicine in an effort to address some of the healthcare industry’s biggest challenges.

IBM also announced a research agreement with Nuance Communications, Inc., to explore, develop, and apply the Watson computing system to healthcare.

Consider these statistics: Primary care physicians spend an average of only 10.7-18.7 minutes face-to-face with each patient per visit. And approximately 81% average 5 hours or less per month – just over an hour per week – reading medical journals.

This results in an estimated 15% of diagnoses being inaccurate or incomplete.

In today’s healthcare environment, where doctors are often working with limited information and little time, the results can be fragmented care and errors that raise costs and threaten quality.

What doctors need is an assistant who can quickly read and understand massive amounts of information and then provide useful suggestions.

Watson’s ability to deal with natural language across a wide collection of diverse information and make it more digestible for humans holds an enormous potential to transform healthcare effectiveness, efficiency and patient outcomes.

Answer: What Is Watson?

Many have probably wondered through the course of the Jeopardy! matches what, exactly is Watson?

Think of Watson as an analytical computing system that specializes in understanding the meaning of natural human language and provides specific answers to questions across a broad domain of knowledge at lightning speeds.

Those domains could span virtually every industry: as noted already in this post, healthcare, but also media/entertainment, financial services, the public sector, transportation, and more.

Watson’s breakthrough comes in its understanding of natural language, not simply language specifically designed and encoded for computers.  But, rather, language we humans use to naturally capture and communicate knowledge.

Watson evaluates the equivalent of roughly 200 million pages of content (about 1 million books worth) written in natural human language to find correct responses to the Jeopardy! clues.

The system was named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, and is powered by 10 racks of IBM POWER 750 servers and runs on the LINUX operating system. Watson contains 15 terabytes of RAM and 2,880 processor cores, and can operate at 80 teraflops – 80 trillion operations per second.

Yes, you read that correctly.  80 trillion.  And yes, I, too, wish I could have that kind of horsepower on my laptop.

Getting A Second Opinion With Watson

As the leading company that helps businesses make sense of data, IBM created Watson to advance our ability to find meaning and knowledge in vast amounts of data.

Watson’s ability to understand the meaning and context of human language, and rapidly process information to find precise answers to questions, holds enormous potential to transform how computers help people accomplish tasks in business and their personal lives.

The fact is, no matter how doctors may try to keep up with the medical literature, it doubles in size every few years and the task of incorporating hundreds of thousands of articles a day into practice and applying them to patient care is difficult and impractical.

Diagnosis, treatment and management of diseases are phenomenally complicated.  For any given chronic disease, there are all sorts of nuances.  One size doesn’t fit all.

Patients with problems like cancer, diabetes, chronic heart or kidney disease are incredibly complex. But much of that is computable. Watson will be able to look at all that and answer profoundly complex questions by analyzing massive amounts of health data and healthcare knowledge.

Doctors understandably tend to diagnose based on their own specialties or experience. A computer system like Watson can also suggest questions that raise alternatives. For instance, doctors may focus on physical issues and forget to investigate whether symptoms could be caused by depression.

It can narrow among a large group of choices and ultimately help doctors pick the right decision — a very necessary advance in the effective and efficient storage, retrieval, analysis and use of biomedical information to improve health.

IBM calls this Deep DDX – deep differential diagnosis.

Now, lest you have fears that R2D2 will start making the rounds, you’re never going to replace a doctor or a nurse.  But, like a good surgical’s assistant, Watson can help inform and advise physicians by creating many hypotheses about a condition then narrowing them down to the one it feels most confident about based on symptoms of the patient, combined with all the information it has received from medical journals, text books, and the like.

Deep QA At Columbia And Maryland

The new research and technology initiative with Nuance will combine IBM’s Deep Question Answering (QA), Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning capabilities with Nuance’s speech recognition and Clinical Language Understanding (CLU) solutions for the diagnosis and treatment of patients that provide hospitals, physicians, and payers access to critical and timely information.

At Columbia and Maryland School of Medicine, physicians will help identify critical issues in the practice of medicine where the Watson technology may be able to contribute, and to help identify the best way that a technology like Watson could interact with medical practitioners to provide maximum assistance.

Watson’s ability to analyze the meaning and context of human language, and quickly process information to find precise answers can assist decision makers, such as physicians and nurses, unlock important knowledge and facts buried within huge volumes of information, and offer answers they may not have considered to help validate their own ideas or hypotheses.

“Combining our analytics expertise with the experience and technology of Nuance, we can transform the way that healthcare professionals accomplish everyday tasks by enabling them to work smarter and more efficiently,”  said Dr. John E. Kelly III, senior vice president and director of IBM Research. “This initiative demonstrates how we plan to apply Watson’s capabilities into new areas, such as healthcare with Nuance.”

For example, a doctor considering a patient’s diagnosis could use Watson’s analytics technology, in conjunction with Nuance’s voice and clinical language understanding solutions, to rapidly consider all the related texts, reference materials, prior cases, and latest knowledge in journals and medical literature to gain evidence from many more potential sources than previously possible.

You don’t want your doctor to guess.  You want them to have confidence in their answers.

Built into Watson is the idea of confidence in answering. It’s the doctor’s responsibility to make the diagnoses…Watson would only be there to narrow down the options.

As for Watson’s bedside manners…well, on that one we’ll just have to wait and see.

Watson On Watson

I’m no relation to IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, Sr.  I joke I’d be on a yacht somewhere if I were.

But I definitely consider myself part of the proud IBM tradition of using technology to solve challenging business problems.

So when our computer (actually, a whole bunch of computers put together along with some transformation Deep Q&A technology developed by IBM Researchers) finally went on air to play the human “Jeopardy!” champions, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, I was standing by with baited breath.

DISCLOSURE ALERT: STOP READING NOW IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED IN THE FIRST EPISODE AND ROUND BETWEEN THE HUMANS AND WATSON

Before the match got underway, Alex Trebek gave an excellent tour of Watson behind the scenes at our Yorktown Research Lab, where these matches were played.

He also set up the match with some color, explaining this was the next “grand challenge in computing” and that we were about to witness what could be an historic competition.

He also joked that Watson would have appreciated the crowd’s applause, but can neither hear nor see, and would receive all questions in a text message at the same time he read them aloud to the human contestants.

Trebek explained Watson would be represented by an avatar, then took us backstage to meet Watson.  Watson was set up in two units, he explained, and the first thing you noticed was a lot of “noise,” emanating from two very large refrigerator units to help Watson keep his cool.  Literally.

Watson consists of over 2800 POWER750 chips, sitting in some five separate racks on two different units.  Linking them all together, you create a deep analytics engine that houses over 15 trillion bytes.

But, Trebek explained in his continuing set up, Watson would have to “stand on his own” and rely on the knowledge that was stored in his memory, and that he couldn’t be connected to the Internet to look anything else up during the match.

“Some of the world’s most brilliant minds have created this most impressive system.”

That was self-evident from the debut of the first match.  In a matter of a few minutes, Watson was overpowering Jennings and Rutter, some $5000 to Jenning’s $200 and I think Rutter’s $1,200 or so.

Watson was, in short, smoking the humans, nailing a very tough Double Jeopardy question for $1,000 on the second question.

But, in the second half of the first round, the humans came back in a big way, this time smoking Watson.

It is ON.

However, you won’t be able to fully appreciate what you’re seeing until you learn more about the Deep Q&A technology that was powering Watson.

For that, check out the IBM Watson Web site, and you can also see some of the related materials here in our press kit.

As for me, I cannot WAIT until the match to pick back up tomorrow (we IBMers also have NO clue who’s going to win).

I want to send my IBM Research colleagues my best wishes — whether Watson wins or not, you have already demonstrated that we’re well into the next frontier of computing, and I’m just glad you’re on our side!  LOL

Signed, Todd “Turbo” Watson

The Human (For Now)

P.S. Also human, lead investigator on the Watson/Jeaopardy! initiative, Dr. David Ferucci provides an answer to the question “Why Jeopardy!” in the video below.

Man or Machine?

We’re only a few short days away from the Watson/Jeopardy matches that will be aired here in the United States starting next Monday.

I’ll point you again to the IBM Watson website, if you’re interested in learning more about how this technology was developed and the approach that IBM’s magician researchers took to make this thing come to life.

The more I hear and learn about it, the more I’m amazed.

Honestly, I don’t know if Watson’s going to win or not.  Even though the matches have already been taped, this is the best kept secret since the revelation in the movie “The Crying Game.”

But what I do know, based on what I’ve learned thus far, the implications of this technology are huge.  I’ve heard senior executives on conference calls inside IBM telling us about the tapings, at which several of our customers were in attendance.

And, after the matches, most all of those customers said “I want a Watson.”

Yeah, you and me both.

I can imagine about 100 different scenarios I could use a Watson for on our Web efforts every day.  Or in identifying influencers in the marketplace.  Or in analyzing search data.  Or a garden variety of other scenarios.

The opportunities for this technology are substantial, and though Watson may not pass “The Turing Test” anytime soon, there will be a garden variety of other scenarios and problem-solving it will be equipped to handle, problems that information technology heretofore was unable to address.

Speaking of the Turing test, check out this deep dive on artificial intelligence in The Atlantic entitled “Mind v. Machine.”

For those of you in the U.S. who wish to learn more about Watson, tape or watch “Nova” tonight on PBS, as it will provide a behind-the-scenes examination of the Deep Q&A technology and the overall systems POWERing Watson.

If you’re not in the U.S. and can’t see “Nova,” check out the IBM/Watson website to do a little research yourself before the airing of next week’s matches.

Meanwhile, if you’re interested in seeing yet another in a long line of examples of how IBM is helping institutions around the globe become smarter through predictive analytics, check out this most recent case study with Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City, California.

Earlier today, IBM announced that Sequoia Hospital has reduced its mortality rate in cardiac surgeries more than 50 percent through the use of IBM predictive analytics software by reducing risk and offering personalized patient care.

By analyzing a cardiac database of more than 10,000 patients, including demographics, types of surgeries, risk factors and outcomes, IBM predictive analytics informs doctors and recommends crucial pre- and postoperative procedures that reduce complications and extend the length and quality of patients’ lives.

The use of IBM predictive analytics software supports the latest advancement in evidence-based medicine that integrates and analyzes existing information from various sources, including healthcare databases, medical precedents and real-world medical cases.

Combining this information with an individual patient’s condition, medical history and ailments allows Sequoia Hospital doctors to better counsel patients on the best strategy for care at a given point in time.

Who knows, maybe Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter may need some predictive analytics of their own hearts after these matches with Watson.

As for my own perspective, based on what I’ve seen and learned thus far, this time around, this man is betting on the machine.