381–390 of 452 posts
The most ingenious trick that the IBM marketing department pulled was to get non-technical (and probably even technical people, judging by this thread) to think that Watson is some kind of singular thing. Like that it’s a single big neural network with different APIs on it, or something. I honestly think that’s what most people think Watson refers to. Watson is like Google Cloud Platform. It’s just a name for a platf…
The author's particular gripe is that the Watson advertisements showing someone sitting down and talking to "Watson." They bother me as well (and did so when I was working at IBM in the Watson group) because they portray a capability that nothing in IBM can provide. Nobody can provide it (again to the author's point) because dialog systems (those which interact with a user through conversational speech) don't exist o…
It all goes back to how the Watson that played jeopardy - what the vast majority think of when they hear the word "Watson" - was a really cool research experiment and amazing advertising. A lot of the people that pay for "Watson" probably think they're paying for something really similar to the Watson that beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy! and cracked jokes on TV. They're paying for something that might use some of the…
https://www.space.com/35042-ibm-watson-computer-nasa-researc...
why did you share this. this is insipid.
The most ingenious trick that the IBM marketing department pulled was to get non-technical (and probably even technical people, judging by this thread) to think that Watson is some kind of singular thing. Like that it’s a single big neural network with different APIs on it, or something. I honestly think that’s what most people think Watson refers to. Watson is like Google Cloud Platform. It’s just a name for a platf…
I'm not even convinced Watson is a platform. My impression is that it's just a consulting division of the company that deploys teams to build solutions that are in some way related to AI, with each solution or implementation potentially being completely unique from the ground up. Perhaps someone from IBM can correct me though.
IBM's customers probably understand that Watson (the jeopardy-playing bot) isn't really relevant, and that what they're buying isn't a pre-written software package so much as software consulting services. But there's still a serious problem, which is that a customer of Watson would reasonably believe that they're getting the team of engineers that solved Jeopardy. In reality there is no overlap whatsoever in personne…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what Knewton is all about. knewton.com
Knewton is very cool, thanks for the link. I'm assuming they break things down into traditional objective units within a standard curriculum and material that is relevant. That's great but it is a very manual process. Remember Yahoo curated keyword recommendations from the 90s? This Knewton approach is more like that. What I'd like to see is more like a Google Search in this analogy...something more flexible and comp…
That knowledge graph combined with a concrete goal (mastery level) and time to get there (deadline) can then be used to recommend to a specific learner what material to study or activities to do next.
It's theoretically possible to do this even more organically, but you need clearly tagged educational "stuff" (written content, lectures, activities, etc.) and, perhaps more importantly, clear ways to measure outcomes as a result of interacting with that "stuff" (typically quizzes which themselves have been clearly calibrated).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a previous job I looked into the viability of pen computing, specifically which companies had succeeded commercially with a pen-based interface. A lot of folks are too young to know this, but there was a time when it was accepted wisdom that much of personal computing would eventually converge to a pen-based interface, with the primary enabling technology being handwriting recognition. What I found is that compute…
> The other was companies who had tricked people into learning a new kind of handwriting [...] It's interesting parallels with spoken word interfaces. I don't know what the answer is. Well, here's a possibility: we'll meet in the middle. Companies will train humans into learning a new kind of speech which is more easily machine-recognisable. These dialects will be very similar to English but more constrained in synta…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a previous job I looked into the viability of pen computing, specifically which companies had succeeded commercially with a pen-based interface. A lot of folks are too young to know this, but there was a time when it was accepted wisdom that much of personal computing would eventually converge to a pen-based interface, with the primary enabling technology being handwriting recognition. What I found is that compute…
> The other was companies who had tricked people into learning a new kind of handwriting [...] It's interesting parallels with spoken word interfaces. I don't know what the answer is. Well, here's a possibility: we'll meet in the middle. Companies will train humans into learning a new kind of speech which is more easily machine-recognisable. These dialects will be very similar to English but more constrained in synta…
The commands and syntax he uses to interact with the system might be a decent approximation of the custom English syntax you suggest.