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Can Watson save IBM?

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Re: Can Watson save IBM?

#21

Post by iheartmemcache »

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

I really don't want to turn this into a Microsoft praise fest but similar to IBM, they've been a net-zero since about Ballmer era, and a net-positive since Satya took over. All of that Microsoft Research papers which silently go unnoticed in Silicon Valley (or published under the MSR, INRIA // MSR, Cambridge name and people don't do the math) but here's a few things MS has been responsible for

a: Asynchrony -- the async / await paradigm - if you use it in JavaScript it came from C#, which came from a MSR paper (or maybe a Microsoft Languages whitepaper.) A lot of the semantics took a very long time by very smart people to work out the execution logistics, and we get to reap the benefits.

b: Haskell -- paying SPJ's salary so he can work on Haskell full-time as a MSR Cambridge employee and implement a whole bevy of things like STM[1], the popularization of pure functions (immutable.js users, as well as CLJS)

c: Clojure -- if you use Clojure's STM, borrowed from work funded by Microsoft. For me, it's used every day in Datomic.

d: Verifiability -- a mind-blowingly large amount of formal verification stuff - ranging from the first formally verified OS + integrated language, to things like F*

e: Z3 -- no need to explain this if you're in any sort of reverse-engineering I'm sure your life has been made significantly easier since MS released this into the public domain

f: CoreCLR + the JS engine + their crossplatform 100% free IDE + opening up VS Community (which is about as as VS Professional)

g: Probably most importantly -- Well, just go here. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/rise/default.aspx. Basically 1 out of 4 things in there is already, or will be imminently, used by 'mainstream' languages after it moves out of the "only publishing grad students who eagerly wait for POPL every year" zone.

[1] I know STM comes from that '88 paper. I've read it. SPJ did too and brought it into the mainstream, so I give him credit.

IBM and Microsoft (and, presumably GoogleX but they havent been publishing) are one of the few corporations I'm aware of that dedicate more than a few resources to research-for-the-sake-of-research (n.b. MS has been doing this silently since 1991, and IIRC employ more than 100 staff just to produce work to the field of computer science further.)

Re: Can Watson save IBM?

#22

Post by freddealmeida »

Watson is no longer the system that won Jeopardy. It is a collection of technologies that have nothing to do with machine intelligence and some that do. What is clear is that by no means has IBM won the game against FB, Google or Baidu. In many cases they can't do it. They have invested too much into a specific technology framework.

But what I believe is that IBM will survive. Their ability to sell will win over technology.

Re: Can Watson save IBM?

#23

Post by iheartmemcache »

scholia wrote: post #20
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…

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 compan…

I considered that -- we're effectively subsidizing research. I feel way better about that, then giving defense contractors 300/hr to drag&drop some Telerik components into Visual Studio. I figure that's the lesser of two evils IMO. Some companies don't even pay taxes -take Apple[1] who posted 30 billion in profit (for those of you who haven't paid retained earnings taxes, that's ~10 billion that should have gone to the federal government, and if you live in California, your state wouldn't be broke anymore (or significantly less broke)). More than $100 billion dollars homed in a nominal 'headquarters' to rob hard working Americans. (Granted I'd be transfer pricing too if my corporation could afford to retain Skadden, haha.) On the upside, I think they pay the salary for a few LLVM guys.

We digress. Support other startups, if you have a startup - use Tarsnap. ;)

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/may/29/apple-tax-... (The Guardian does have a bit of a liberal slant, FYI. Think of them as the UK's NYT.)

Re: Can Watson save IBM?

#24

Post by [deleted] »

pathsjs wrote: post #17
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 leas…

[deleted]

Re: Can Watson save IBM?

#25

Post by pesenti »

pathsjs wrote: post #17
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 leas…

Thanks for giving it a try. I agree that particular test does not sound like state-of-the-art. But don't judge the whole package just based on one test of one API. It'd be great to have access to these files (you can email them to me at my YC ID @gmail.com). Best would even be to post your experience on our forum: https://developer.ibm.com/answers/smartspace/watson/. We are usually pretty responsive.

Re: Can Watson save IBM?

#26

Post by pathsjs »

pesenti wrote: post #25
pathsjs wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 leas…

Thanks for giving it a try. I agree that particular test does not sound like state-of-the-art. But don't judge the whole package just based on one test of one API. It'd be great to have access to these files (you can email them to me at my YC ID @gmail.com). Best would even be to post your experience on our forum: https://developer.ibm.com/answers/smartspace/watson/ . We are usually pretty responsive.

Sorry I was harsh. I tried the translation service and it work better.

Anyway, I don't remember exactly all the articles I tried, but two of them were

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/pubs/mst.pdf https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~condon/papers/chungcondon96.pdf

while one news that failed to parse was

http://www.repubblica.it/economia/2016/02/09/news/borse_9_fe...

I tried other articles and news, but I do not recall each of them exactly

Re: Can Watson save IBM?

#27

Post by pesenti »

pathsjs wrote: post #26
pesenti wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for giving it a try. I agree that particular test does not sound like state-of-the-art. But don't judge the whole package just based on one test of one API. It'd be great to have access to these files (you can email them to me at my YC ID @gmail.com). Best would even be to post your experience on our forum: https://developer.ibm.com/answers/smartspace/watson/ . We are usually pretty responsive.

Sorry I was harsh. I tried the translation service and it work better. Anyway, I don't remember exactly all the articles I tried, but two of them were https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/pubs/mst.pdf https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~condon/papers/chungcondon96.pdf while one news that failed to parse was http://www.repubblica.it/economia/2016/02/09/news/borse_9_fe... I tried other articles and news, but I do not recall each…

We will check them and get back to you. Thanks!

Re: Can Watson save IBM?

#29

Post by scholia »

iheartmemcache wrote: post #23
scholia wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compan…

I considered that -- we're effectively subsidizing research. I feel way better about that, then giving defense contractors 300/hr to drag&drop some Telerik components into Visual Studio. I figure that's the lesser of two evils IMO. Some companies don't even pay taxes -take Apple[1] who posted 30 billion in profit (for those of you who haven't paid retained earnings taxes, that's ~10 billion that should have gone to t…

The spending on pure research is trivial compared with IBM's profits. In its last financial year: "Total capital return to shareholders of $9.5 billion; dividends of $4.9 billion and gross share repurchases of $4.6 billion" http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/48846.wss

IBM also spends a lot of money buying dozens of companies to bolster its results. These include These include Cognos ($5bn), Softlayer ($2bn), Netezza ($1.7bn), Kenexa ($1.4bn) and Trusteer ($1bn). http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-vs-microsoft-and-the-battle...

Re: Can Watson save IBM?

#30

Post by cperciva »

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…

use Tarsnap instead of S3

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this... I mean, Tarsnap is built on top of Amazon S3, so using Tarsnap will still mean that your data is ultimately stored in S3. The difference is that tarsnap would deduplicate, compress, encrypt, and sign your data first.

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