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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)

#371

Post by mark_l_watson »

brundolf wrote: post #176

I'd like to make a plug for my company ( http://www.cyc.com ) whose "AI" is not machine-learning based, does actual cognition and generalized symbolic reasoning, and lived through the AI winter of the 80s. We've gotten some contracts as a direct result of companies being disenchanted with Watson's capabilities.

I would like to ask you a question: over the years I experimented quite a bit with OpenCyc that you stopped distributing last year. Is ResearchCyc reasonable to experiment with on a small server of powerful laptop? Is an OWL version available?

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

#372

Post by [deleted] »

amptorn wrote: post #294
snowwrestler wrote: post #278

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…

[deleted]

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

#373

Post by opencl »

emodendroket wrote: post #359
DonaldFisk wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is software that allows you to draw the characters on a touch screen, but it's still slower than typing and most people either type the words phonetically (e.g. in Pinyin) or use something like Cangjie which is based on the shape of character components. Shape-based methods are harder to learn but can result in faster input. For Japanese there are keyboard-based romaji and kana based input methods. The correct…

Almost nobody uses kana input in Japanese. There are specialized systems for newspaper editors, stenographers, etc., that are just as fast as English-language equivalents, but learning them is too difficult for most people to bother.

Huh? The standard Japanese keyboard layout is Hiragana-based, and every touchscreen Japanese keyboard I've used defaults to 9key kana input. Do people really normally use the romanji IME instead?

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

#374

Post by abhgh »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #370
abhgh wrote: post #249

Oh wow, Roger Schank [1]! Haven't heard that name in a while - he was quite famous in the early days of AI. I wonder if he has figured out a good way to marry ML to his theory of Conceptual Dependency (CD) [2] - because that would could be ground-breaking for hard NLP problems. Interestingly I started reading the article without paying much attention to who the author is. A few lines in I began to wonder if this is g…

In the 1980s I spent too much time trying to use Conceptual Dependency in a few small R&D projects. Looked promising, but I had little success with it.

I think one of the challenges with using CD in the real world is the "unclean" input that need to be mapped to the various primitives and structures of CD, or stuff in the same vein that came after. Without a way to do that automatically, in a scalable fashion and with minimal human assistance, its utility is limited. Which is why I feel that if we had a way to leverage the current breed of ML techniques to automatically (or even semi-automatically) define this mapping, it would be a big step forward.

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

#375

Post by AndrewKemendo »

foldr wrote: post #289
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're completely on the right track. People usually judge AI systems based on superhuman performance criteria with almost no human baseline. For example, both Google Translate and Facebook's translation system could reasonably be considered superhuman in performance because the singular systems can translate into dozens of languages immediately more accurately and better than any single human could. Unfortunatel…

>Unfortunately people compare these to a collection of the best translators in the world. I don't think that's really true. They're comparing them to the performance of a person who is a native speaker of both of the languages in question. That seems like a pretty reasonable comparison point, since it's basically the ceiling for performance on a translation task (leaving aside literary aspects of translation). If you…

>They're comparing them to the performance of a person who is a native speaker of both of the languages in question.

Which is synonymous with the best translators in the world. Those people are relatively few and far between honestly - I've traveled a lot and I'd argue that native bi-lingual people are quite rare.

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

#376

Post by _bxg1 »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #371
brundolf wrote: post #176

I'd like to make a plug for my company ( http://www.cyc.com ) whose "AI" is not machine-learning based, does actual cognition and generalized symbolic reasoning, and lived through the AI winter of the 80s. We've gotten some contracts as a direct result of companies being disenchanted with Watson's capabilities.

I would like to ask you a question: over the years I experimented quite a bit with OpenCyc that you stopped distributing last year. Is ResearchCyc reasonable to experiment with on a small server of powerful laptop? Is an OWL version available?

OWL is not available, but ResearchCyc will definitely run on a laptop

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

#377

Post by emodendroket »

opencl wrote: post #373
emodendroket wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost nobody uses kana input in Japanese. There are specialized systems for newspaper editors, stenographers, etc., that are just as fast as English-language equivalents, but learning them is too difficult for most people to bother.

Huh? The standard Japanese keyboard layout is Hiragana-based, and every touchscreen Japanese keyboard I've used defaults to 9key kana input. Do people really normally use the romanji IME instead?

Yes. Despite the fact that kana are printed on the keys, pretty much no Japanese person who is not very elderly uses kana input. They use the romaji (no N) input instead, and that's the default setting for keyboards on Japanese PCs.

You are right that the ten-key method is more common on cell phones (and older feature phones had kana assigned to number keys), although romaji input is also available.

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

#379

Post by AndrewKemendo »

simen wrote: post #335
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're completely on the right track. People usually judge AI systems based on superhuman performance criteria with almost no human baseline. For example, both Google Translate and Facebook's translation system could reasonably be considered superhuman in performance because the singular systems can translate into dozens of languages immediately more accurately and better than any single human could. Unfortunatel…

Being able to do many things at a level below what trained humans can isn't what any reasonable person would call superhuman performance. If machine translation could perform at the level of human translators at even one pair of languages (like English-Mandarin), that would be impressive. That would be the standard people apply. But they very cleary can't.

It's a problem with who you're comparing against.

Generally people think superhuman = better than the best humans. I understand this and it's an obvious choice, but it assumes that humans are measured on a objective scale of quality for a task, which is rarely the case. Being on the front line of deploying ML systems, I think it's the wrong way to measure it.

I think Superhuman should be considered relative to the competence level of average person who has the average amount of training on the task. This is because from the "business decision" level, if I am evaluating between hiring a human with a few months or a year of training and a tensorflow docker container that is reliably good/bad, then I am going to pick the container every time.

That's what is relevant today - and the container will get better.

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

#380

Post by rspeer »

akvadrako wrote: post #351
akvadrako wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is way too long to justify whatever point you are making. First of all, how long ago do you mean? Are you 100 years old and people in the 1940's thought computers would be operated by pens? But also, when my college had a demo microsoft tablet in their store in 2003, I could sign my name as I usually do (typical poor male handwriting) and it recognized every letter. That seems pretty good to me. I also h…

This is my most down-voted comment ever and I have no idea why.

In addition to what novia said about your first sentence, your comment is so weirdly off-base. You have very strong opinions about pen computing, but where in reality are they coming from?

No, we are not talking about the 1940s, why would anyone be talking about the 1940s? How does that make any sense at all?

We aren't talking about a Microsoft demo that worked well for you once, either. We are talking about the fact that, since the 2000s when it was tried repeatedly, people do not like to hand-write on computers. It is a strange thing not to be aware of when you're speaking so emphatically on the topic.

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