IBM Watson, Uncover the Power of Cognitive Solutions

Key takeaways

Your value will be not what you know; it will be what you share - Ginny-Rometty International Business Machines, or IBM, was founded in 1911.
IBM also pioneered the hard drive, pioneering spinning platters to store data and retrieving it using a magnetic arm.
We will all benefit from AI in the right hands- says Rob Thomas- The General Manager of IBM Data and AI.

Your value will be not what you know; it will be what you share - Ginny-Rometty

Chairwoman, President, and CEO of IBM; She is the first female head of the company. #

International Business Machines, or IBM, was founded in 1911. They were previously known as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording (C-T-R) Company.

Charles Ranlett Flint did not invent the C-T-R Company. Rather than that, it was developed through the consolidation of three companies founded in the late 1800s: the Computing Scale Company, the Tabulating Machine Company, and the Time Recording Company. The newly amalgamated corporation was headquartered in New York City and employed approximately 1,300 people.

During its early years, the C-T-R Company concentrated on accounting and calculating equipment, business time recorders, and mechanical punch card systems. It first focused on everyday office items rather than evolving into the invention-driven corporation that it eventually became.

In 1924, Thomas Watson became president and renamed the corporation International Business Machines, or IBM. Watson established IBM’s success over his first several years by focusing on business and marketing tactics, developing products tailored to individual customers’ needs, and extensively investing in the company’s sales staff.

History of IBM-Watson #

IBM had been on the lookout for a new challenge since Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in chess in 1997. In 2004, while having dinner with coworkers, IBM Research manager Charles Nickel realized that the restaurant had gone silent. He quickly uncovered the source of this nighttime lull: Ken Jennings, who was in the midst of his 74-game winning streak on Jeopardy! Almost the entire restaurant had gathered around the screens in the middle of the dinner to watch Jeopardy!

Nickel was intrigued by the quiz show as a potential challenge for IBM, and in 2005, IBM Research chief Paul Horn backed Nickel, urging someone in his department to take on the challenge of playing Jeopardy! with an IBM system. Though he first struggled to find research workers prepared to take on a considerably more sophisticated challenge than the wordless chess game, David Ferrucci eventually accepted his offer. Watson’s precursor, a system called Piquant, was typically only able to reply appropriately to approximately 35% of clues and frequently took several minutes to respond. To compete successfully on Jeopardy!, Watson would have to react in a matter of seconds, yet the game show’s puzzles were believed challenging to solve at the time.

Watson was given 500 clues from the previous Jeopardy! Programs in initial tests were conducted in 2006 by David Ferrucci, senior manager of IBM’s Semantic Analysis and Integration department. While the finest real-world competitors buzzed in half the time and adequately replied to up to 95% of clues, Watson’s initial pass could only get roughly 15% correct. IBM gave the team three to five years and a staff of 15 individuals to solve the difficulties in 2007. In 2007, John E. Kelly III succeeded Paul Horn as IBM Research’s head. Kelly was dubbed “the father of Watson” by InformationWeek and credited with motivating the system to compete against humans on Jeopardy! By 2008, Watson had advanced to the point where it could compete against Jeopardy! Champions. By February 2010, Watson was regularly defeating human Jeopardy! opponents.

The IBM-Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content, occupying four terabytes of disc space, including the complete text of the 2011 version of Wikipedia, but was not connected to the Internet throughout the game. On the television screen, Watson’s three most likely responses were displayed for each clue. Watson typically outperformed human opponents on the signaling device in the game but struggled in a few categories, most notably those with brief clues, including only a few words.

Although Watson is primarily an IBM effort, it was developed in collaboration with faculty and graduate students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, University of Texas at Austin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Trento, as well as students from New York Medical College. Ed Toutant was one of the IBM programmers who worked on Watson; he had previously been on Jeopardy! in 1989.

IBM and the Computer #

Despite an impressive track record in business, IBM is most known for its technical accomplishments.

In 1943, the business invented the Vacuum Tube Multiplier, the world’s first all-electronic computer machine. This resulted in the 1944 Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, or “Mark I,” built jointly by IBM and Harvard. This was the first piece of equipment that we would refer to as a computer in the modern-day. It took up a small room, measuring 50 feet long and eight feet tall, and automatically conducted electromechanical computations. The United States Navy relied on the Mark I to determine gun trajectories on its ships.

The company, however, did not promote this line of business until the 1950s, when Thomas Watson’s son, Thomas Watson Jr., took over. During this period, IBM’s computer business shifted away from mechanical switches on the Mark I and toward vacuum tubes on the Vacuum Tube Multiplier, as vacuum tubes were easier to maintain and repair.

IBM pioneered many fundamental technologies that enabled computers to become ubiquitous in the commercial world during the 1950s and 1960s. It invented the functioning vacuum tube computer, which served as the foundation for all computers until the microchip was invented. IBM also pioneered the hard drive, pioneering spinning platters to store data and retrieving it using a magnetic arm. Additionally, it invented FORTRAN, the forerunner of the majority of modern computer programming languages.

IBM’s domination of the computer market was nearly complete throughout this era, with the corporation manufacturing between 60% and 70% of all business computers globally.

Notable Accomplishments: #

IBM Research is credited with pioneering scientific breakthroughs in computer science, physics, and various other technical areas. Here is a summary of our accomplishments, divided by category, highlighting the technologies and scientific advances that have influenced the way billions of people work, play, study, travel, and live.

IBM’s Watson Artificial Intelligence #

IBM has been a pioneer in deploying artificial intelligence to compete and win against elite humans in games of intellect and strategy since the 1950s, when Arthur Lee Samuel developed a checkers player capable of learning from experience. IBM defined how people thought about speech recognition for the next two decades. After another twenty years, IBM Research made history when Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, the first chess-playing machine to beat a reigning world champion. IBM researchers continue to tackle new artificial intelligence challenges in machine learning, neurology, genomics, and robotics.

In the healthcare sector #

IBM’s founders desired to give back to the world and investigate how computers may benefit our community’s health. IBM Research is committed to medical informatics due to that early dedication and recognition of the enormous possibility to serve the world by utilizing computers to aid in the study of how human bodies work and can be treated. IBM Research has a world-class physics department that assists in constructing components for computers, and some of that research informs us about the artificial things we can do to help humans.

In the Software Engineering #

IBM learned numerous lessons critical to software engineering while constructing OS/360, the most prominent program ever built. This occurred when software development procedures were modeled after those used in developing and producing machinery. Design patterns represented actual work on planning for change, while AOSD demonstrated how to structure code in a more morphable manner. Our extensive expertise in program analysis resulted in developing tools that are critical to today’s techniques.

In Visualization #

Visualization is the process of graphically expressing and engaging with data to acquire insight into it. Computer graphics has traditionally given a potent method for producing, altering, and interacting with these representations. At IBM, graphics and visualization research focuses on the challenge of transforming data into compelling, revealing, and interactive visuals that are tailored to the needs of individual users.

Our research focuses on visual analytic, the development of languages and models for interacting with visualizations, the design of novel information visualizations for more innovative visual analytic. The story of new representations of 3D geometry, collaborative and social visualization strategies, and the creation of software systems that support various display formats ranging from smartphones to immersive mufti-display visualization environments.

In Physical Sciences #

IBM Research has fostered the careers of numerous physicists who have made fundamental contributions to various professions and fields of study. The dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), field-effect transistor scaling rules, semiconductor superlattice structures, specialized lasers, and thin-film magnetic recording heads, as well as advancements in optical communications and electron microscopy, were all discovered and developed here.

Five IBM physicists have won the Nobel Prize in Physics: Leo Saki in 1973 for his work on semiconductors; Herd Binning and Heinrich Roarer in 1986 for their work on the scanning tunneling microscope; and George Bednorz and Alex Mueller in 1987 for their work on superconductivity.

The future of IBM Watson #

There is a dilemma in the realm of artificial intelligence: While AI represents the most significant economic opportunity of our generation (it is predicted to add $16 trillion to GDP by 2030), enterprise adoption was less than 4% in 2018. According to a recent Gartner survey, the 4% in 2018 increased to 14% in 2019. However, this is a pitiful sum. This is due to many factors, including a lack of abilities, a lack of tools, and a lack of confidence

For enterprises seeking to engage in this phase of technological innovation and wealth creation, the most critical characteristic is a beginner’s mindset; a willingness to experiment, and an acceptance of failure. Organizations should aim to do 100 AI trials per year, with the understanding that more than half will fail. Numerous corporate cultures are unsuitable for this. A more common method is to unite around a single large AI project, devoting significant people, time, and money. That is not a strategy I recommend. Artificial intelligence is about broad experimentation, not a single large project deployment. This is not enterprise resource planning.

Fortune is on the side of the courageous. I feel that the trial and error that we have all experienced – and will continue to share – is worthwhile in light of the beneficial outcomes. Not just for economic gain but also to benefit businesses, consumers, and, ultimately, the world in which we live. There will be increased experimentation, a more significant number of failures, and a greater number of achievements. And, without a doubt, numerous changes in the way we live and work. It is incumbent upon all of us to guarantee that those changes are beneficial.

I believe that every human being on Earth will interact with Watson in some way – whether it’s through accelerating customer service, augmenting their work, enhancing their retail experiences, providing medical insights to caregivers, assisting them in avoiding food scarcity, or even in ways not yet imagined. Our aspirations have not waned. IBM will continue to be a leader in advancing AI for all.

Conclusion #

Watson Anywhere is more than a fantastic way to conduct AI. It is founded on true innovation, with the Cloud Pak for Data at its heart – a microservices-based data and analytic platform built on Red Hat OpenShift. On this platform, enterprises may deploy Watson tools and apes to virtually any cloud – including IBM Cloud, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or their private cloud.

IBM’s Watson platform will continue to have a beneficial impact on the globe, expanding adoption and enabling individuals and businesses to share in the $16 trillion wealth creation. Additionally, we know that we will do so in the manner you have come to expect from IBM: thoughtful, trustworthy, and measured. We will all benefit from AI in the right hands- says Rob Thomas- The General Manager of IBM Data and AI.

Related reading