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Can Watson save IBM?

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Re: Can Watson save IBM?

#11

Post by pesenti »

swingbridge wrote: post #5

I've asked many IBM employees to explain to me what Watson actually does (like for real, not the marketing BS that's on TV) that would make me want to buy it. Nobody could explain it. Literally some where just like "yeah, I think they're still trying to figure out how they can make a product out of it." The Jeopardy thing was cool but since then it's turned into this mystery black box that will supposedly solve all y…

You can check and use many things that Watson does by using trying and using our cloud services: http://ibm.com/watsondevelopercloud. I know there is a lot of PR around Watson. But there are also real efforts and some state-of-the-art technology in speech, dialog, text analytics, vision, machine translation, etc. I am happy to answer any question you may have.

Re: Can Watson save IBM?

#13

Post by pesenti »

I know that there is a lot of PR around Watson but it is not just PR. There is a genuine effort to put AI-related technologies in the hands of as many developers as possible. If you want to check for yourself what we are doing, please go to: http://ibm.com/watsondevelopercloud.

We are trying to expose state-of-the-art technology in speech, dialog, text analytics, vision, machine translation, etc as a coherent platform. I am happy to answer (without any PR BS) any question you may have.

Re: Can Watson save IBM?

#14

Post by baldfat »

iheartmemcache wrote: post #6
baldfat wrote: post #2

The issue for me is does IBM need to be saved? Their business practices have continued to be patent laden and closed. If they went down the road in a more open nature I feel that they wouldn't be in the place they are.

The last 15 years of IBM has basically been open. 1) They're in the top 5 re: Linux contributors. (Guess who else is in there? Microsoft.) 2) They dropped their JVM (J9) for OpenJDK - again upstreaming their patches to the community. 3) Eclipse was founded by them in 2001 (later released into the public domain). 4) They released (at least part of) their ML system "SystemML" into the public domain as well, during the…

IBM is the number one patent company for each of the following years. 1999 - 2015 I can't see much beyond this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_United_States_pate...

Re: Can Watson save IBM?

#15

Post by awqrre »

iheartmemcache wrote: post #6
baldfat wrote: post #2

The issue for me is does IBM need to be saved? Their business practices have continued to be patent laden and closed. If they went down the road in a more open nature I feel that they wouldn't be in the place they are.

The last 15 years of IBM has basically been open. 1) They're in the top 5 re: Linux contributors. (Guess who else is in there? Microsoft.) 2) They dropped their JVM (J9) for OpenJDK - again upstreaming their patches to the community. 3) Eclipse was founded by them in 2001 (later released into the public domain). 4) They released (at least part of) their ML system "SystemML" into the public domain as well, during the…

> 1) They're in the top 5 re: Linux contributors. (Guess who else is in there? Microsoft.)

quantity and quality of contributions doesn't mean that they are the most useful contributions though

Re: Can Watson save IBM?

#17

Post by pathsjs »

pesenti wrote: post #13

I know that there is a lot of PR around Watson but it is not just PR. There is a genuine effort to put AI-related technologies in the hands of as many developers as possible. If you want to check for yourself what we are doing, please go to: http://ibm.com/watsondevelopercloud . We are trying to expose state-of-the-art technology in speech, dialog, text analytics, vision, machine translation, etc as a coherent platfo…

Ok, here is a question. I went to the site and tried the document conversion service. I gave it three very clean PDF files containing CS articles. In all cases, what I got in response was "The input document failed to be converted because An invalid XML character (Unicode: 0x0) was found in the element content of the document."

Tika is able to parse them without a glitch, and has been doing so for a few years at least.

So I tried with some sample HTML taken from the main italian news sites. In this cases, it parsed it, but returned some garbage HTML tags and no content. BoilerPipe or similar libraries are able to extract a clean body of the news in all cases.

How is that state of the art technology?

Re: Can Watson save IBM?

#18

Post by baldfat »

awqrre wrote: post #15
iheartmemcache wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last 15 years of IBM has basically been open. 1) They're in the top 5 re: Linux contributors. (Guess who else is in there? Microsoft.) 2) They dropped their JVM (J9) for OpenJDK - again upstreaming their patches to the community. 3) Eclipse was founded by them in 2001 (later released into the public domain). 4) They released (at least part of) their ML system "SystemML" into the public domain as well, during the…

> 1) They're in the top 5 re: Linux contributors. (Guess who else is in there? Microsoft.) quantity and quality of contributions doesn't mean that they are the most useful contributions though

Open Source has won in Enterprise and every company has examples. Microsoft has continued down that road especially the last few years. IBM has made some moves but the vast majority of its strategy is with closed source projects like Watson.

Re: Can Watson save IBM?

#19

Post by alanwatts »

swingbridge wrote: post #5

I've asked many IBM employees to explain to me what Watson actually does (like for real, not the marketing BS that's on TV) that would make me want to buy it. Nobody could explain it. Literally some where just like "yeah, I think they're still trying to figure out how they can make a product out of it." The Jeopardy thing was cool but since then it's turned into this mystery black box that will supposedly solve all y…

It seems like it may be a "solution without a problem" so to speak.

Re: Can Watson save IBM?

#20

Post by scholia »

iheartmemcache wrote: post #6
baldfat wrote: post #2

The issue for me is does IBM need to be saved? Their business practices have continued to be patent laden and closed. If they went down the road in a more open nature I feel that they wouldn't be in the place they are.

The last 15 years of IBM has basically been open. 1) They're in the top 5 re: Linux contributors. (Guess who else is in there? Microsoft.) 2) They dropped their JVM (J9) for OpenJDK - again upstreaming their patches to the community. 3) Eclipse was founded by them in 2001 (later released into the public domain). 4) They released (at least part of) their ML system "SystemML" into the public domain as well, during the…

Pretty trivial stuff in the context of an $81.7bn corporation. IBM makes the vast majority of its turnover and profits from closed, proprietary systems, most of which are in decline (it used to be a $107bn corporation).

> They're really not hurting the consumer at all.

The public pays indirectly to support the extremely expensive IBM systems that, partly for historical reasons, still run almost all Fortune 500 companies. You may say that "They make a ton of money by bilking banks/the feds/states", but ultimately it's consumers and taxpayers who foot the bills.

PS You forgot OpenPower ;-)

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