ibm watson & your organization -...

IBM Watson & Your Organization

1.

Unless you’ve been living in cave – although even caves are wired these days (just ask Batman) – you’ve probably heard about Watson, IBM’s latest Research Grand Challenge, designed to further the science of natural language processing through advances in question and answer (QA) technology.

In February 2011, Watson competed against two human Jeopardy! champions and beat them. Quite an achievement for something IBM describes as a “workload optimized system based on IBM DeepQA architecture running on a cluster of IBM® POWER7® processor-based servers that hold roughly the equivalent of one million books.” In other words, it’s a big fancy computer – but what a computer it is.

Make no mistake about it. IBM didn’t develop Watson to play games. The advances in Watson’s QA technology are poised to help support professionals in a variety of critical and timely decision-making areas like health care, business intelligence, enterprise knowledge management and customer support.

In fact, Watson’s ability to understand the meaning and context of human language, then rapidly process the information to find precise answers to complex questions, holds enormous potential to transform how computers can help people accomplish tasks in business and industry. In this ebook, we’ll take a brief look at four of the areas in which

Watson’s DeepQA technology holds the most promise, beginning with the quest to better understand customers.

1: Better understanding customers

As IBM’s Craig Rhinehart describes it: “[Watson’s] DeepQA technology provides humans with a powerful tool for their information gathering and decision support.”

Take customer relationship management, for instance. Imagine a tool built on DeepQA that has a deep understanding of natural language to the point where it’s able to process users’ questions and quickly deliver and justify precise, succinct, high-confidence answers. That’s the sort of potential descendants of Watson will offer organizations.

Stanley S. Litow, president of the IBM International Foundation, sees other exciting ways DeepQA may help better understand “customers,” in areas like non-profit and education. Here’s how he explains some of that potential affecting students:

“We’re now developing new standards in science, math, history, and English. But if you’re still stuck with the same multiple-choice testing, even if you have higher standards, it won’t raise people up, it will dumb things down so people base their teaching and learning on those multiple-choice tests. The technology behind Watson blows that up. It says you could have long-answer questions, you could have the ability to grade lengthy paragraphs of information. If the testing system incorporates that, it will allow teachers to test to higher standards and children to learn at higher levels. And it will save lots of money in what is currently a very ineffective and inefficient testing and assessment system.”

SECTION 1: What can Watson do for you?

2.

2: Making better decisions in real-time

In Part 1, we took a look at how the DeepQA technology behind Watson – IBM’s latest language-deciphering supercomputer – can help better understand people, whether they’re customers, donors or students.

But what about going beyond understanding? What about making, quite literally, life or death decisions?

“Built into Jeopardy!,” says IBM’s Katharine Frase, “is this notion of confidence. And in the real world there are lots of problems just like that. You don’t want your doctor to guess. You want him to have confidence in his answer before he decides to give you a treatment.”

Some of the leading minds believe Watson’s DeepQA technology and the robustness of its hardware – 90 Power 750 servers with 2,880 POWER7 cores, 500GB per second on-chip bandwidth and 35 terabytes of memory and clustered disk storage – could significantly impact the way doctors diagnose and treat patients.

How?

Imagine medical records, texts, journals and research documents all stored in a Watson-type machine, one that doesn’t simply call it up the way search technology would, but rather understands the stored

information and instantly delivers answers to healthcare providers. That’s where network computing blogger David Hill sees DeepQA technology headed:

“A ‘Dr. Watson’ for the health care field is likely to be the first commercial instance of the technology. The purpose would be to complement a physician by helping examine all the evidence (such as from medical journals and medical images) for a patient to form a broader, deeper perspective. For example, Dr. Watson could examine evidence outside of a specialist’s area of knowledge that may apply to the patient. IBM believes that a Dr. Watson could save lives and that seems very likely the case.”

In other words, Watson’s DeepQA technology ought to be able to gather and assess many disparate data sources – more than any one human could – then prompt human users like doctors for help with missing pieces of information and finally, in the case of medicine, arrive at the correct diagnosis. Or Watson could provide summaries of the likely diagnoses and allow the doctor to assess them and select the most likely one.

But it’s not just healthcare where DeepQA holds promise of course. Think Finance. Enormous amounts of data are generated every day in the financial industry and as the globe becomes even more interconnected, the amount of data grows exponentially. You only need to turn on the news to see that what happens in China or Egypt or Indonesia can have a direct impact on the markets here at home.

“Business people make decisions every day,” says IBM Marketing and Communication’s Jon Iwata, “whether it’s about investments or pricing decisions or trying to understand what customers and consumers want. How many of them depend on asking the right questions and then of course selecting the right answer with the highest level of confidence and giving it really really quickly?”

A lot, of course. Watson’s deep analytics capability could help businesses extract knowledge from these mountains of data and make more informed, quicker financial decisions. “Watson represents a way to look at all this data and extract and [find] the key insight that’s useful,” says Iwata. “[In other words,] the needle in the haystack.”

In the next section we’ll look at how Watson can help with collaborative decision-making, for instance helping to transform the customer service industry into a faster, more accurate experience.

3.

3: Transforming customer service

As we saw in Parts 1 and 2, health care and finance hold a lot ofpromise when it comes to Watson, but Dr. Paul Bloom from IBMResearch believes the first level of Watson application in the marketplace will not be around either. Rather it’ll be around an industry that’s judged on the same two criteria as Watson – speed and accuracy. That industry is call centres, and Dr. Bloom believes Watson is poised to change the business models of how those centres are set up.

“It’s really going to change the way businesses interact with their customers,” Bloom says. “Call centres are very large costs for industries where they get literally millions and millions of phone calls [and] sometimes you’ll get very frustrated because you have to wait minutes and sometimes hours to get an answer.”

The promise is that the DeepQA analytics technology and POWER7 processing capabilities behind Watson would enable the improvement of service quality and provide answers quickly. Unlike a well-trained but decidedly human customer service representative, a Watson-type rep would be pre-programmed with all the organization’s relevant policies, any of which could be accessed 100% accurately and, most importantly for customers like us, quickly. One way to look at the customer service potential of Watson, says network computing blogger David Hill is as the quantum evolution of search engines.

“[Imagine] making Watson available via a cell phone. [It] would allow people to ask a natural language question and get back a very precise answer verbally (rather than having to try to review information on a small screen in text).” Dr. Eduard Hovy at the University of Southern California agrees. “I would like nothing more than to have my little PDA … that I can speak to and [if] my computer stops working I can say ‘what’s happening now with my computer?’ and that it goes through the web to the right little collection of knowledge, runs this [DeepQA] technology and brings me back the answer – just the answer. I don’t want 7,000 pages out Google.”

Will technology like Watson completely eliminate the human element to customer service? Probably not. But nor will it be unsuccessful because customers can’t relate to it, as some critics suggest.

“I can’t relate with the self-serve kiosk at the airport,” says the Customer Contact Council’s Matt Hoffman, “but I prefer using the kiosk to waiting for a relatable airline employee to check me in.”

4.

4: Enabling visibility and understanding risk

“The recent financial crisis,” says financial services executive Jay Dweck, “highlights the problem of systemic risk. One thing that causes this systemic risk is interdependency and these failures that start to go like dominoes. You could use something like Watson to understand what creates those interdependencies.”

Whether an extension of banking or insurance or any business really, Watson’s understanding of language, its capability to learn and its sheer processing power – 2,800 Power Unix processors running in parallel – could put a significant dent in enterprise visibility – or the ability to see an organization’s processes and operations in action – not to mention understanding, managing and simplifying the types of risks every organization continually faces.

According to banking.com, “if a financial institution could harness Watson’s computing power, it could determine the proper actions as they happen. Watson has the ability to analyze multiple scenarios, many broader, more impossible and complex than those able to be executed on the average statistical model.”

Shankar Ramamurthy puts it another way.

“What if you had 50 or 100 of the best economists available to you when you look at a scenario … and what if each expert had the ability to access not just structured data but also unstructured

data – voice streams, video, etc. – and what if you could add more experts as you learn and could bring them all together and respond to events as they happen on a real time basis?”

Banks, says Ramamurthy, would be able to put that power and insight to good use analyzing risk and a whole host of other business challenges.

In healthcare, finance, customer service, is Watson poised to solve all our pressing problems? Of course not. But in this age of big data and as with the advent of the internet before it, Watson’s DeepQA technology and processing power are offering up new ways to find clearer answers.

“When you have data and also the tools to make sense of the data, you can begin to make things better,” says IBM Marketing and Communication’s Jon Iwata. “Business people would say we can make things more productive, more efficient, more optimized. Others would say we can address some real societal issues.”

5.

IBM DeepQA

DeepQA is a massively parallel probabilistic evidence-based architecture. For the Jeopardy! Challenge, more than 100 different techniques are used to analyze natural language, identify sources, find and generate hypotheses, find and score evidence, and merge and rank hypotheses. Far more important than any particular technique is the way all these techniques are combined in DeepQA such that overlapping approaches can bring their strengths to bear and contribute to improvements in accuracy, confidence, or speed.

DeepQA is an architecture with an accompanying methodology, but it is not specific to the Jeopardy! Challenge. IBM has begun adapting it to different business applications and additional exploratory challenge problems including medicine, enterprise search and gaming.

The overarching principles in DeepQA are:

1. Massive parallelism: Exploit massive parallelism in the consideration of multiple interpretations and hypotheses. 2. Many experts: Facilitate the integration, application and contextual evaluation of a wide range of loosely coupled probabilistic question and content analytics.

3. Pervasive confidence estimation: No single component commits to an answer; all components produce features and associated confidences, scoring different question and content interpretations. An underlying confidence processing substrate learns how to stack and combine the scores.

4. Integrate shallow and deep knowledge: Balance the use of strict semantics and shallow semantics, leveraging many loosely formed ontologies.

Harnessing POWER7

Watson harnesses the massive parallel processing performance of its POWER7 processors to execute its thousands of DeepQA tasks simultaneously on individual processor cores.

Each of Watson’s 90 clustered IBM Power 750 servers features 32 POWER7 cores running at 3.55 GHz. Running the Linux® operating system, the servers are housed in 10 racks along with associated I/O nodes and communications hubs. The system has a combined total of 16 Terabytes of memory and can operate at over 80 Teraflops (trillions of operations per second).

With its innovative, eight-core processor design, POWER7 is ideally suited for massively parallel processing of Watson’s analytics

algorithms. POWER7 also features 500 gigabytes of on-chip communications bandwidth, contributing to exceptional efficiency of both memory and processor utilization. And since each server packs 32 high performance POWER7 cores with up to 512 GB of memory, the Power 750 makes an ideal platform for Watson’s processor and memory-hungry Java processes.

Designing Watson on commercially available Power 750 servers was a deliberate choice to ensure more rapid adoption of optimized systems in industries such as healthcare and financial services. That goal was a fundamental difference between Watson and Deep Blue, which was a highly customized supercomputer. Deep Blue was based on an earlier generation of Power processor technology, featuring a 30 node RS/6000 SP system, with each node containing a single 120 MHz POWER2 processor. But in addition to the regular POWER2 processors, Deep Blue’s performance was enhanced with 480 special purpose chess processor chips.

The same Power 750 server used by Watson is already deployed today by thousands of organizations in optimized systems that provide for both complex analytics and transaction processing.

SECTION 2: Digging into the technology

6.

A system designed for answers

After four years of intense research and development by a team of IBM researchers, Watson has demonstrated its ability to compete on Jeopardy! against champion players, performing at human-expert levels in terms of precision, confidence and speed. The project has advanced the fields of unstructured data analytics, natural language processing, and the design of workload optimized systems. Beyond Jeopardy!, the technology behind Watson can be adapted to solve business and societal problems—for example, diagnosing disease, handling online technical support questions, and parsing vast tracts of legal documents—and to drive progress across industries. Watson’s ability to understand the meaning and context of human language, and rapidly process information to find precise answers to complex questions, holds enormous potential to transform how computers can help people accomplish tasks in business and their personal lives.

InfoSphere Warehouse DB2, Informix, NetezzaAggregating and storing data and content

InfoSphere StreamsMassively parallel analysis

Business AnalyticsBI, Predictive analytics and more

ECM SolutionsIBM eDiscovery analyzer, IBM classification module,IBM OmniFind enterprise search

IBM Global Business ServicesResearch, expertise and analytical assets

Related Innovations

IBM Content AnalyticsNatural language processing

and content analysis leveraging UIMA

Used by Watson

InfoSphere BigInsights“Big Data” analysis (Hadoop)

IBM Power SystemsThousands of parallel processes

Workload Optimized SystemsIntegrated, Optimized by Workload

7.

Better Insight. Better Business

As a $1-billion solutions provider, Softchoice serves the needs of thousands of organizations in more than 40 local markets. Certified for the entire spectrum of IBM technologies, expertise designing and implementing even the most advanced IBM solutions. Simply put, we believe the key to better business is better IT.

Our Performance Management Proof of Concept and IBM Systems Consolidation Evaluation can help you to understand the potential of Watson to unlock the intelligence of your organization.

SECTION 3: How to get Watson working for you.

>>Read our Fully Funded Customized Proof of Concept whitepaper

>>Read our IBM Systems Consolidation Evaluation

Connect with us today. 1.800.268.7638 | www.softchoice.com

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Softchoice’sIBM SystemsConsolidation EvaluationTools for Success


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