Watson isn't what investors and the general public thinks it is. It's now more or less some classifier/machine learning as a service plus a dev integration team you can hire to pull it into your codebase (which by the way, is lots of $$$) It is not difficult for anyone on HN to spend a weekend, read a machine learning book, and replicate most of Watson's functionality. It's IBM marketing at it's finest.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Watson isn't what investors and the general public thinks it is. It's now more or less some classifier/machine learning as a service plus a dev integration team you can hire to pull it into your codebase (which by the way, is lots of $$$) It is not difficult for anyone on HN to spend a weekend, read a machine learning book, and replicate most of Watson's functionality. It's IBM marketing at it's finest.
you are full of it. Are you sure you can replicate beating world class players on jeopardy in a weekend?
Please don't cross into personal attack regardless of how wrong you think another comment is. That only makes this place worse.
Not only that, but if the software at the Urgent Care is that old, it may be raising false flags on things that are no longer considered clinically relevant and just present a hassle for the provider to click through.
The age of the software would not reflect the quality of the data. I'm positive that these alerts are updated with new drugs and contradiction logic continuosly.
You are right in that the age wouldn't necessarily correlate with quality, but I can speak from first hand knowledge about the inertia that different EMRs bring. A lot of these drug interactions are mild precautions or the evidence changes with time. Ideally what is supposed to happen is a multidisciplinary committee reviews the latest evidence and continuously updates the interactions. What often happens though is that there isn't enough 'oomph' to override a previously established notification so inertia wins. It's often not until a major EMR upgrade where things get more closely looked at and some of the less important flags/notifications get weeded out out. Definitely true that new major interactions get added all the time and usually in a timely fashion. As you can also imagine there is a medico-legal aspect of removing a previous flag, so often it's easier to just leave it and make the provider do an extra unneeded click.
So is there a better oncologist’s assistant AI out there? Or is the sweet spot somewhere between picking music you’ll like, suggesting when you should leave for an appointment to manage traffic and playing chess or go? I understand the dislike of the marketing, but something like Watson in medicine is a moonshot attempt. Can CNNs and whatever other stuff Watson has available to it simply not handle cancer? Or is it b…
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the technology. However, doing ML well isn’t really about the ML as much as it’s about getting everything leading up to the ML right. That’s the difference between value-add applications of ML and an expensive mess. IBM didn’t understand that and hence the mess they’re in now with Watson.
While parent post is full-of-it on the general question of replicating Watson's full bag-of-techniques against client problems in a weekend, I believe the Watson Jeopardy victory was far less impressive than it seemed. It's a very-constrained domain, and the challenge Watson won has never been opened to scrappy teams other than IBM. I wrote up my doubts way back in 2011: https://memesteading.com/2011/02/16/ibm-watson…
> And, with 6 months to a year, as dominant as "Watson" was against the Jeopardy champs. Was Watson dominant because it had a buzzer advantage, or because it could answer the questions better? I recall the other two guys furiously trying to hit the button on different occasions and sighing when Watson beat them out yet again. Thing is we don't know that Watson was better at answering the questions, only that it was b…
My experience with Watson is a manager asking if I had any project ideas for it because the company had “Watson time” that no one could think of a way to use. I tried to picture the chain of events necessary for the exchange to have taken place that wasn’t comical. I failed. After being forced into ClearCase use at another company, I couldn’t help but imagine how much damage IBM sales has done to the software industr…
I’ve been in similar positions, but you can’t blame IBM — the situation that you found yourself in has everything to do with decision making at your employer. You could tell the same story or worse about Oracle, HP, etc. The difference is that IBM’s strategy of tying hardware to solutions has kept it viable far longer than its competitors. I’d argue that Microsoft is worse — at least IBM treats your boss’ boss to ste…
> but you can’t blame IBM — the situation that you found yourself in has everything to do with decision making at your employer
I partially agree. I would say that both IBM and companies that get suckered by them are dysfunctional.
So given that IBM’s only big commercial bet is (was?) Watson and it is clearly not going to drive significant revenue.. what do IBM do next? They ballsed up cloud, they let the rather impressive DB2 wither, and their software suite is... meh.
They can always fall back on consulting; there will always be corps willing to pay them in order to learn how to do things the "IBM way"