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IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

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Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#61
Wow awesome... AI diagnosing diseases have been going around for at least... 30 years? 40 years? Simple decision trees, some data, maybe a bit of neural network, and hop, you've got it. Still, nobody gives a shit about it. You know why? Because the problem is not to make the right diagnosis - it takes only a few seconds to a doctor. It's to set the patient in the right mindset, and to have access to the right treatment.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#62
post #20

It is funny that so many are quick to dismiss this because it is IBM, so "it must be just PR" (saw a few comments here). If Google did this or Elon Musk, everyone would be singing praises and musing about a better, brighter future. Which is funny because it is Google / Facebook / Microsoft which collect and hold everyone's personal details and data. For better or for worse, IBM never seemed to have gotten into that b…

True, but I think it is sad that IBM uses the Watson name for everything related to AI, because this way they implicitly pretend to have found a unified approach to AI. I don't believe this is true. The AI doing the diagnosing is not the same AI as the one that played Jeopardy. But please correct me if I'm wrong.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, just like monkeys picking stocks with darts can outperform the best traders on Wall street.

That's not even remotely true. The Quantum Fund by Soros and others, returned upwards of 30% per year for over three decades. Steve Cohen averaged near 30% annual returns for two decades. Buffett's investing track record is similarly off the charts. And lastly, a monkey couldn't do what John Paulson (or Burry and Eisman) did with the 'greatest trade ever,' producing a radical outcome from an extremely intricate conce…

Using Steven Cohen as an example only hurts your argument. His success has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with insider trading.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#65
post #62
post #20

It is funny that so many are quick to dismiss this because it is IBM, so "it must be just PR" (saw a few comments here). If Google did this or Elon Musk, everyone would be singing praises and musing about a better, brighter future. Which is funny because it is Google / Facebook / Microsoft which collect and hold everyone's personal details and data. For better or for worse, IBM never seemed to have gotten into that b…

True, but I think it is sad that IBM uses the Watson name for everything related to AI, because this way they implicitly pretend to have found a unified approach to AI. I don't believe this is true. The AI doing the diagnosing is not the same AI as the one that played Jeopardy. But please correct me if I'm wrong.

The underlying algorithms may mostly be shared hence grouping them together as Watson just like Google uses Brain but I think it's more of a branding thing. It looks like they want to eventually make these systems work and run together to form a kind of"true AI"

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>nothing about any kind of controls or whether or not this was a one-off performance or if it would work at scale. I thought the 20 million oncology studies Watson cross referenced was the control and I arrived at the opposite conclusion as you about the usefulness at scale. For example, I immediately thought that under the Affordable Care Act, the number of patient Electronic Health Records the Government collects e…

The "control" for the actual (machine) learning may be the test set derived from the available data, but the control of a medical study must be real life (new data) and not old data used for the machine learning algorithm.

You don't need 100% new data to get an idea of performance. It's meaningful (indeed, common) to select some arbitrary percentage of the real-world data as a "training set" then measure the performance of the algorithm on the rest. It's not proof against overfitting, of course, but it helps.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#67
post #20

It is funny that so many are quick to dismiss this because it is IBM, so "it must be just PR" (saw a few comments here). If Google did this or Elon Musk, everyone would be singing praises and musing about a better, brighter future. Which is funny because it is Google / Facebook / Microsoft which collect and hold everyone's personal details and data. For better or for worse, IBM never seemed to have gotten into that b…

> IBM never seemed to have gotten into that business (yet?) of recording and selling every American's data for ads.

Maybe not Americans, but they did pretty well from doing it for Europerans from 1936-1945. [1] and rather than ads, the Hollerith cards IBM supplied by the million tabulated the census data from 1930s Europe into Jew / Not Jew rather nicely.

When the death camps were liberated there was a special unit assigned to makes sure the leased Hollerith machines were returned to the USA safely.

Thomas J. Watson was one of four Americans to receive the Order of the German Eagle [2]

[1] http://ibmandtheholocaust.com/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_German_Eagle

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#68
post #32
post #20

It is funny that so many are quick to dismiss this because it is IBM, so "it must be just PR" (saw a few comments here). If Google did this or Elon Musk, everyone would be singing praises and musing about a better, brighter future. Which is funny because it is Google / Facebook / Microsoft which collect and hold everyone's personal details and data. For better or for worse, IBM never seemed to have gotten into that b…

> "I think healthcare is more important than self driving Teslas..." Well self driving cars in theory should save a lot of lives too.

Not only save, as a disabled person who cannot drive a car, self-driving cars would instantly improve my life experience.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#69
post #20

It is funny that so many are quick to dismiss this because it is IBM, so "it must be just PR" (saw a few comments here). If Google did this or Elon Musk, everyone would be singing praises and musing about a better, brighter future. Which is funny because it is Google / Facebook / Microsoft which collect and hold everyone's personal details and data. For better or for worse, IBM never seemed to have gotten into that b…

> IBM never seemed to have gotten into that business (yet?) of recording and selling every American's data for ads. Maybe not Americans, but they did pretty well from doing it for Europerans from 1936-1945. [1] and rather than ads, the Hollerith cards IBM supplied by the million tabulated the census data from 1930s Europe into Jew / Not Jew rather nicely. When the death camps were liberated there was a special unit a…

In the United States, IBM was the data processor for the Japanese internment camps in the US.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#70
I have a slightly unrelated question, but there may be medically trained individuals in this thread.

I'm a medical student, and it seems like most people in the field are rather cavalier when it comes to talking about the job outlook for physicians in most any specialty. Do you all think that some healthcare jobs will not be as vital in the next decade thanks to improvements in computing and AI?

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