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IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

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Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#81

Post by 1e-9 »

Randypea wrote: post #46

I was recently diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer, which my PCP had been misdiagnosed for 10 years as IBS. This is more the norm than the exception for people with this type of cancer, Steve Jobs included. It's a perfect example of where AI can likely diagnosis what my PCP could not. AI tools need to find cancer problems to solve which are more suited to their capabilities. e.g. does anybody know of a company worki…

Unfortunately, there are still many cancers detected far too late for effective treatment. It sounds like you were indeed fortunate to have a less aggressive form. AI for cancer screening generally falls under the category of "Computer-Aided Detection" or CAD. The commercial and academic CAD efforts tend to be organized by the primary anatomical site of cancer and the detection method (e.g. X-Ray, CT-Scan, PET, ultrasound, blood test) . Was your primary the pancreas or intestine? Are you wanting to contribute to an imaging detection method or something else? I might be able to help you identify someone working in the area depending on your goals.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#83

Post by SiempreViernes »

seibelj wrote: post #60
freehunter wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People kept investing with Bernie Madoff for decades too, because his investments kept giving returns. People will keep shoveling money into Bitcoin as long as its value keeps swinging wildly. That's hardly a measure of success.

How much will Bitcoin have to be worth, and for how long, to make it successful in your eyes? Or is the entire idea of a digital asset with intrinsic value impossible to you?

Slot machines pull in a lot of money too, I guess you would label them a success?

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#84

Post by seibelj »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #83
seibelj wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much will Bitcoin have to be worth, and for how long, to make it successful in your eyes? Or is the entire idea of a digital asset with intrinsic value impossible to you?

Slot machines pull in a lot of money too, I guess you would label them a success?

USDC (https://www.circle.com/en/usdc) is a dollar-backed cryptocurrency operating on Ethereum. Over $260 million has been converted into USDC, and it is used all over the globe to move small or very large amounts of money securely within seconds (https://etherscan.io/token/0xa0b86991c6218b36c1d19d4a2e9eb0c...). This is a novel application of blockchain technology that is beyond a slot machine.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#85

Post by djakjxnanjak »

ethbro wrote: post #78
SCAQTony wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watson should rebrand then. You can't have a colossal failure such as the one reported by Stat News: “multiple examples of unsafe and incorrect treatment recommendations.” — [Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center] and expect to move on from it as if they were growing pains.

I call this the Netflix ML effect. If your answer is mission critical, probabilistic ML isn't advanced, explainable, or reliable enough for your problem. If your answer is of the great-to-be-right, meh-to-be-wrong sort (e.g. ranking movie recommendations), then you can and should go nuts with ML. And if someone really wants to do an ML project on the former, do everything you can to transform it into the latter.

If you can tune the specifics-sensitivity curve, you should be able to handle both cases. You have to be willing to refuse to provide an answer when you have low confidence.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#86

Post by megy »

scrooched_moose wrote: post #54
Waterluvian wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion you don't even need to be an expert. - if you're a generally competent, learned person - and the new product feels like a giant leap from anything that exists already - it's likely not all it claims to be.

I've always had a 20% threshold If anyone is promising a 20% or greater improvement over the current leaders, I immediately file it away as a scam until I see extraordinary proof. Other than some very immature industries, even 20% leaps don't happen without earth shattering once-in-a-generation breakthroughs. Some call me a pessimist, and occasionally I'm unfairly dismissive of new technologies. But for every one I g…

> If anyone is promising a 20% or greater improvement over the current leaders, I immediately file it away as a scam until I see extraordinary proof.

Ha, this is just silly. Ok, so what percent were IBM promising? How do you ever reduce anything complicated into a percent change.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#88

Post by ackbar03 »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #79
1e-9 wrote: post #21

To me, the main mistake was the series of commercials giving the strong impression that IBM already had this incredible Artificial General Intelligence that was indistinguishable from a highly intelligent human and was solving a myriad of difficult practical problems better than any expert. I suspect that most who were well-versed in AI felt the ads were disingenuous from the start. I know I did. I think the marketin…

The commercials are the public-facing tip of a much larger iceburg of enterprise-scale sales and marketing. Big institutions gave Watson a shot because they created a machine that maximized FOMO with intriguing demos, reduced risk with the "nobody gets fired for buying IBM effect", and perhaps most importantly pitches projects that were large enough to move the needle and make the career of a high level administrator…

Is it possible that the marketing people just didn't really understand the technology and let their imagination carry them away

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#89

Post by barbecue_sauce »

zeropnc wrote: post #59
rocgf wrote: post #58

At one point, there was an API available via the IBM Cloud that you could use in order to ask Watson questions. I've rarely been that underwhelmed. After using that, I realized that Watson was mostly a gimmick.

It’s called Bluemix - it’s hilarously underwhelming

The greatest thing about BlueMix was its promotional budget. Saw The Force Awakens on IBM's dime, and got about $50 worth of movie theater gift cards. All I had to do was sit through a 20 minute presentation about BlueMix case study integrations.

Re: IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

#90

Post by nickpsecurity »

telchar wrote: post #32
tosser1234 wrote: post #23

I worked on this project and there were a lot of issues. Two of the biggest were: * Whatever the quality of the technology (which I personally never saw as that compelling) was wrapped up in terribly written research code, making it practically impossible to setup and use. * The Jeopardy demo was made possible by the existence of a marked-up source of general knowledge (Wikipedia), a ready-made bank of questions and…

That's not really true. The UMLS has a large graph of marked up medical domain knowledge that can be used. It's not as specific as one might want for developing an AI autodoc, but it's quite a bit better than what is available in most fields. It's actually quite similar to what one can derive from Wikipedia.

Quora has a nice set of answers about why machine learning isn't used so much in medical:

https://www.quora.com/Why-isn%E2%80%99t-machine-learning-mor...

Skip to Jae Won Joe's answer to see a case study with a patient showing the interactive process. Then, especially look at ending questions about missing or deceptive data. Seems like their good diagnoses comes from a combination of domain data and expertly reading people in front of them. Machines suck at the part I emphasized. The data sets might not reflect a lot of stuff like that, too. Who knows.

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