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IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

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Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#311

Post by sgt101 »

pnloyd wrote: post #203
ChuckMcM wrote: post #15

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…

To be fair, you can kinda talk to Google assistant in a "question response" type capacity and it does pretty well.

Search and command interfaces are doable (within reasonable expectations) dialogs just aren't without eye popping engineering challenges (like 100k branches hand engineered onto trees + lots of deep learning.)

Also we (science) know shockingly little about real dialogs and their challenges as far as I can find out - but I am not a linguist and am angling here fore some killer references !

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#312

Post by chisleu »

jbob2000 wrote: post #90
chisleu wrote: post #72

I worked on data systems that fed weather data into Watson. IBM's technology, and IBM's marketing are very different beasts. The marketing is somewhat trivial, but the reality of ML and the Watson data systems is incredible. They are pumping a huge amount of data into it and they have data scientists doing incredible things with the data already. It is the largest growing segment of the company (and maybe the only gr…

The problem is that all of this AI and ML is being used to target Ads better. You don't need AI and ML to do this, it is a solution looking for a problem. Your example about routine elevator maintenance does't need AI at all. Whoever logs the elevator maintenance can just press a button to send a notification message. Hell, it can be wired up such that when you submit a notification notice, it automatically sends an…

The idea of the elevator maintenance from the IBM commercial is that it can use ML to detect that there will be downtime that could be solved by preemptively calling for some maintenance. I guess "routine" was a bad word choice.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#313

Post by sgt101 »

ryandrake wrote: post #68
ChuckMcM wrote: post #15

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…

This is Marketing 101 though. It's easier to sell someone a dream or some emotional state than it is to sell an actual product/thing that you have. I'd give people a little more credit. Adults know what advertisements are and that they're all phony.

A lot of non-technical decision makers don't think this is phony and are making life very difficult for engineers in their companies we will all remember this though. For the future.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#314

Post by slg »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #299
PaulHoule wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's bad about it is that it leads to a "market for lemons" for anyone working in the A.I. field in either engineering or sales. People see so much bullshit that they come to the conclusion that it is all bullshit.

The "market for lemons" theory proved that used car dealerships can't exist. And yet they do. People understand that ads are just a hint and a tease, not a precise value proposition.

That isn't the conclusion of the market for lemons. It predicted that the price of used cars would be substantially depressed due to unknown quality, especially when the seller had little reputation. Considering the huge depreciation a new car experiences as soon as it is driven off the lot and that prices are lower when buying from individual sellers rather than used car dealerships, there is plenty of evidence that the theory was correct.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#315

Post by opportune »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #15

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 same algorithms and software, but they're not actually getting something that seems as sentient and "clever" as what was on TV.

To me, the whole "Watson" division does seem like false advertising.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#316

Post by nartz »

mcguire wrote: post #112
nartz wrote: post #7

The way IBM talks about it is completely bs. However, this round of AI is definitely better than the last one. Specifically, whats different this time around is that previously, expert based systems and many machine learning techniques require that you specifically hand code things like: 1. Parsing and providing the input dataset into 'features' 2. Hand coding the logic and rules for many different cases (Expert syst…

One of the neat parts of expert systems was that you could get surprising and bizarre interactions between rules, leading to entertainingly nonsensical answers. One of the neat parts of neural networks is that you have no idea what rules it's using, but it still manages to produce answers that are sometimes not entertainingly nonsensical.

Ha - the thing to think about here is, pretend that you were asked a question of say, why you labeled a horse picture as a horse.

You might say something like "well, it has hoofs, and a mane, and a long snout, and 4 legs, etc". However, that sort of answer from a computer would probably be labeled as too generic since that could be any number of animals.

The issue is, that to you a horse is some complicated 'average' of all the examples of horses you've seen in your lifetime, that go through a complicated mechanism for you to classify it. Specifically, probabilities of different features that your eyes have extracted from seeing them.

Similarly, understanding why a neural network is doing something is very possible, however, it fails to mean much when the answer it could give is a list of, say, hundreds of vectors and weightings that contributed to its prediction.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#317

Post by nartz »

jacquesm wrote: post #158
mcguire wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the neat parts of expert systems was that you could get surprising and bizarre interactions between rules, leading to entertainingly nonsensical answers. One of the neat parts of neural networks is that you have no idea what rules it's using, but it still manages to produce answers that are sometimes not entertainingly nonsensical.

The bigger problem is that they produce that are most of the time making perfect sense and then every now and then they spectacularly fail on input that is indistinguishable from inputs that gave correct answers.

Well, as referenced in my above comment - you could spend the time to figure out how the prediction was made. Specifically, decoding the training process and what data points were used to influence the prediction - but it would be complicated and take a lot of your time. It might give you more clues why something like random noise was classified as a hot dog.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#318

Post by sgt101 »

zerotolerance wrote: post #41

Dear engineers, merit is useless when you're trying to sell something. Authority is king, and people remember emotion and hyperbole. Marketing and sales is almost always about representing authority regardless of merit. The only thing that matters after a Watson sale is if Watson can help solve the problems the customers have.

Well, there's also the opportunity cost of capex leaked away from areas that it could be productively focused on, also the opex of running the new implementation. And the missed opportunity from building skills in implementing opensource alts - like Tensorflow, for example.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#319

Post by plushpuffin »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #235
kbenson wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately many, many people think that talking to your computer in actually already possible, they just haven't experienced it yet. Given how often another person can't correctly infer meaning when people talk, I doubt it will ever be how people imagine it. Initially, I imagine it will be a lot of people trying to talk normally and a lot of AI responses asking how your poorly worded worded request should be car…

I think you have a good point. Something that was fascinating for me was that one of the things the search engine did after being acquired by IBM was looking at search queries for common questions people would ask a search engine. Taking 5 years of search engine query strings (no PII[1]) and turning them into a 'question' that someone might ask. What was interesting is that it was clear that search engines have train…

There was an article in The Atlantic recently that remarked upon this.

The Atlantic: Alexa Is a Revelation for the Blind. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/05/what-al...

Then I stop myself. Isn’t it possible that he expects Alexa to recognize a prompt that’s close enough? A person certainly would. Perhaps Dad isn’t being obstreperous. Maybe he doesn’t know how to interact with a machine pretending to be human—especially after he missed the evolution of personal computing because of his disability.

...

Another problem: While voice-activated devices do understand natural language pretty well, the way most of us speak has been shaped by the syntax of digital searches. Dad’s speech hasn’t. He talks in an old-fashioned manner—one now dotted with the staccato march of time. “Alexa, tell us the origin and, uh, well, the significance, I suppose, of Christmas,” for example.

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

#320

Post by paulclinger »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #15

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…

> Not sure how we fix that.

Easy: just say that all Watson systems have the hardware needed for cognitive computing and full dialog support.

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