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

However - MCMC for scalable bayesian reasoning. - Answer Sets for reasoning in FOL. - Big data sets for training lots of classifiers. Including deep networks. A big breakthrough has been crowdsourcing the labelling.

Eventually they scrapped the project because it not only took a ton of employee time to talk with IBM's team to get it set up and working, it also cost a significant chunk of money and wasn't as good as what the people who already worked at the company thought they could do themselves.

With all due respect to the people that work at IBM, I just can't imagine IBM's sales and consulting cultures to work well with deploying AI. I don't know firsthand, but from what I've heard and what I would guess anyway, a lot of the people selling Watson and actually on the front lines working with it probably aren't that knowledgeable about AI/ML/whatever. I just don't see how you could determine a project's feasibility or effectiveness without having a sharp conceptual knowledge of the actual AI algorithms and what potentially what kind of data is needed to make them shine.

Suppose a university admissions department offers paper surveys to prospective students at the end of on-campus tours. In an effort to improve admitted student yield (the percentage of students that actually attend the university after being accepted), the university wants to be able to scan these surveys' text digitally and then perform sentiment analysis to determine how excited the student is about attending the university, or more directly, how likely the student is to matriculate. The university doesn't have any people capable of doing this, so they get into contact with Watson.

How much will the salespeople at Watson pry into the questions of the survey, demographics and culture of the school, or the sample size? Will they ask about statistics such as acceptance rate, yield, and which students are most likely to matriculate (based on quantifiable metrics)? Even the type or color of paper and text field sizes on the surveys on could affect the feasibility of the project regarding OCR, or bias the responses toward short answers. I would argue that a lot of knowledge about the project would be necessary before a sales quote or even the feasibility of the project itself could be considered, but would a salesperson know to ask these question? Would they even be incentivized to ask? Would the consultants know that certain questions could make OCR hard or sentiment analysis a wash? Would a statistician be consulted to see if the same or better results could be obtained from simple analysis of GPA, ZIP, and test scores?

I'm sure everybody at Watson is pretty technically competent - and to be sure, I'm sure for most consulting and sales that IBM does, I wouldn't have to make the following qualification. But to be brutally honest, I think the type of people who are familiar enough with AI to be the person you want working at Watson in consulting and sales probably are using those skills as developers and data scientists. And even then, again with all due respect to IBM employees (and I know IBM puts out a lot of great research), those people might not also be at IBM either.

That sounds like a mistake caused by the translator having a (relatively) poor knowledge of English. A bilingual English/Korean speaker wouldn't make that mistake. I mean, I don't know your linguistic background, but you clearly know enough English and Korean to know that that's a bad translation, and you presumably wouldn't have made the same mistake if you'd been translating the book.

>Some even defends the practice by saying they are faithful to the European syntax of the original text!

I think there's always a tension between making the translation faithful to the original text and making it idiomatic. That's partly a matter of taste, especially in literature.