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IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

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Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#611

Post by yellowapple »

mNovak wrote: post #535
dllthomas wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they even had a stupid Watson chef thing at SXSW one year I loved Chef Watson, am sad that it's gone, and would pay a small amount for renewed access. It wasn't "smart", and its recommendations needed to be tempered with human understanding, but I wound up with some great recipes that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. I think the best was goat milk mac & cheese with radishes and red miso. The funniest was when…

I remember reading some very amusing Chef Watson cocktail recipes. Lots of savory concepts like putting chicken or meat into a drink.

I mean, that's all the rage for Bloody Mary recipes these days, so maybe Chef Watson was onto something.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#612

Post by pridkett »

mNovak wrote: post #535
dllthomas wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they even had a stupid Watson chef thing at SXSW one year I loved Chef Watson, am sad that it's gone, and would pay a small amount for renewed access. It wasn't "smart", and its recommendations needed to be tempered with human understanding, but I wound up with some great recipes that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. I think the best was goat milk mac & cheese with radishes and red miso. The funniest was when…

I remember reading some very amusing Chef Watson cocktail recipes. Lots of savory concepts like putting chicken or meat into a drink.

I worked on Chef Watson and was part of the team at SXSW. One of the most amusing parts was how much it loved bacon. This was because bacon could be sweet, savory, salty, and fatty - it all depended on how you cooked it. A big part of the way that Chef Watson created recipes was by connecting flavors together. There was a while when it didn’t record why it had included an ingredient - so bacon would be brought originally because it can be sweet, but then it would immediately bridge to the fatty flavor. Fun times indeed.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#613

Post by yellowapple »

nradov wrote: post #385
derefr wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Super important” — more like “super nice-to-have.” Hospitals don’t have any single person on staff who stays attached to particular in-patients. Who knows you? Your chart. Yes, of course, hospital care would be better in many ways if we did have somebody who statefully understood particular patients’ needs. But what I’m saying is, the GPs in hospitals could be replaced with stateless diagnostic AI without making hos…

That's simply false. You obviously have no idea how hospital care is actually delivered. To start with, every admitted patient has an assigned attending physician who is responsible for coordinating the care team. Some things can be documented in the patient chart but there are always gaps. Clinical decision support systems for partially automating diagnosis could potentially be helpful in some limited circumstances…

> To start with, every admitted patient has an assigned attending physician who is responsible for coordinating the care team.

That's rarely (if ever) a 1:1 ratio. That attending physician is almost certainly juggling multiple patients. Same with the rest of the care team. There's a reason why the first thing one does when approaching a patient bed is to look at the chart.

> Some things can be documented in the patient chart but there are always gaps.

Then those gaps need closed, stat. Once those gaps are closed...

> Clinical decision support systems for partially automating diagnosis could potentially be helpful in some limited circumstances but the ones built so far mostly don't work very well.

...then this will improve considerably. Garbage in, garbage out.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#614

Post by matheusmoreira »

listenallyall wrote: post #608
matheusmoreira wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more material available, not just scientific journal articles. The medical specialty associations periodically release detailed guidelines covering new criteria, methods, treatments. For example: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA.... There are courses available if you wish to be taught. There are events where people present new developments. There are paid sites like UpToDate. Even t…

Did you check the Disclosures section of your article? Are there any drug companies NOT included there? Like it or not, private companies fund the vast majority of medical research in the U.S., and any doctor who wants to stay up to date cannot (and should not) ignore it all. The authors have no conflict of interest to declare, but declare lecture honoraria or consulting fees as follows: T.U., Bayer, Boehringer Ingel…

I did see that. I don't see that as a reason to doubt the recommendations of this particular article.

I thought we were talking about direct marketing by pharmaceutical company representatives by the way. It is of course impossible to separate modern medicine from the pharmaceutical industry since many therapies depend directly on them. It's still the doctor's job to figure out which medicines are actually good and what's merely some salesman's product.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#615

Post by NikolaeVarius »

MR4D wrote: post #599

I see tons of comments on how IBM sucks. Fair enough - they do. However, consider that IBM is selling off its AI crown jewel to “* refocus its business on cloud computing and AI services*.” So an IBM that does something like that knows it has a problem and is killing off the parts it doesn't need, so it can simplify and improve focus. To me, this is a good indication that the new IBM will be quite different from the…

I dont think I've met a single person who has used IBM cloud that has anything at all not despicable to say about IBM cloud.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#616

Post by acjohnson55 »

jonas21 wrote: post #498
morpheuskafka wrote: post #436

As someone doing a CS degree now, I seem to be the only one who doesn't want to have anything on my resume to do with "AI", blockchain, ML, NFT, chatbots, etc... all I see is overhyped product after product, one-size-fits all solutions that frustrate customers and create problems for humans to clean up, hugely valued companies that have very little real improvement over conventional technology, etc. An "AI chatbot" i…

Since you're still a student, I feel like maybe I can offer some advice: First, I think you're getting the wrong lesson from this. The key takeaway is stay to away from IBM. Almost everyone in the field has known that Watson is a bunch of marketing hype since day one. It's no surprise that Watson Health didn't work out. That doesn't mean that everything is overhyped, and it's important to develop a good sense for wha…

I agree with morpheuskafka, and I'm almost a couple decades out of college. The industry values buzzwords over actual product. It's embarrassing, if you take the time to think about it. It reminds me of a cargo cult. Maybe if we just throw some blockchain big data AI up, the market will reward us with its riches. The most transformative companies value product over any specific technology. They try to solve the customer's "jobs to be done" by any means necessary, often using tech that is not particularly sexy.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#617

Post by space_fountain »

alar44 wrote: post #459
dpflan wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deep Blue preceded this. They had specialty equipment for crunching chess moves. Really excellent hype machine. I liked the documentary about it: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0379296/

I don't see the problem here, that was literally the point. To build a chess computer.

I think maybe the common problem is that there’s a hidden and false assumption that being good in one domain will transfer elsewhere, it doesn’t and didn’t

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#618

Post by nradov »

yellowapple wrote: post #613
nradov wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's simply false. You obviously have no idea how hospital care is actually delivered. To start with, every admitted patient has an assigned attending physician who is responsible for coordinating the care team. Some things can be documented in the patient chart but there are always gaps. Clinical decision support systems for partially automating diagnosis could potentially be helpful in some limited circumstances…

> To start with, every admitted patient has an assigned attending physician who is responsible for coordinating the care team. That's rarely (if ever) a 1:1 ratio. That attending physician is almost certainly juggling multiple patients. Same with the rest of the care team. There's a reason why the first thing one does when approaching a patient bed is to look at the chart. > Some things can be documented in the patie…

That's largely pointless. The critical data elements do get charted. But time spent closing data entry gaps on patient charts is time not spent actually caring for patients. There are simply not enough clinicians to do all that, or funding to pay them. Furthermore there are many aspects of patient conditions that can't really be coded in a useful way. A skilled, experienced clinician can intuit a great deal from subtle signs like skin color, breathe sounds, tone of voice, small movements, etc. Healthcare relies on tacit knowledge far more than arrogant, ignorant software developers understand.

And in most routine cases the diagnosis is the easy part. The hard stuff is actually working with patients and doing the hands-on procedures, which won't be significantly automated in our lifetimes.

Pattern recognition algorithms do have some promise for computer assisted interpretation of things like medical images and ECG waveforms where the input data is already in digital form. We can't rely exclusively on algorithms for patient care, but if the physician reaches a conclusion different from the human physician, then it's probably worth taking a deeper look and getting a second opinion.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#619

Post by killjoywashere »

Good riddance. The number of smart people who expected me to comment intelligently on Watson’s plumbing in the before-times was disturbing. Trying to be very polite when saying “I have no idea what Watson does, and I’m not sure you or the person you talked to does either” is ... not my strong suit.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#620

Post by bushbaba »

stathibus wrote: post #345
tekstar wrote: post #260

I worked for a large e-commerce company. I wanted to investigate putting all our support data into Watson and see what sort of recommendations it could provide, maybe a sort of auto-suggestion to help our customers. Three really funny points stand out from the experience: 1) To apply for Watson access you needed to show C-level approval, so our CEO put his name and phone number on the application (trying Watson was s…

IBM is famous for charging people for the privilege of talking to them, even if you're trying to sell them something. This strategy makes sense if you consider that even in it's heyday Watson was 95% data science consulting firm and 5% actual valuable technology. I really think Watson is one of the biggest tech marketing bamboozles of the 21st century. Through Jeopardy they really had a segment of the business world…

Watson is one the greatest marketing achievements of the 21st century.

It’s literally consulting with open source software. But they packaged it up in an attractive format that got them buzz. Imagine what that marketing team could do for a product that was able to half work!!!

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