Watson's avatar, inspired by the IBM "smarter planet" logo
Watson is a question-answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's first CEO, industrialist Thomas J. Watson.
The computer system was initially developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy! and, in 2011, the Watson computer system competed on Jeopardy! against legendary champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings winning the first place prize of $1 million.
In February 2013, IBM announced that Watson software system's first commercial application would be for utilization management decisions in lung cancer treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York City, in conjunction with health insurance company WellPoint. IBM Watson's former business chief, Manoj Saxena, says that 90% of nurses in the field who use Watson now follow its guidance.
Description
The high-level architecture of IBM's DeepQA used in Watson
Watson was created as a question answering (QA) computing system that IBM built to apply advanced natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, automated reasoning, and machine learning technologies to the field of open domain question answering.
The key difference between QA technology and document search is that document search takes a keyword query and returns a list of documents, ranked in order of relevance to the query (often based on popularity and page ranking), while QA technology takes a question expressed in natural language, seeks to understand it in much greater detail, and returns a precise answer to the question.
When created, IBM stated that, "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."
In recent years, the Watson capabilities have been extended and
the way in which Watson works has been changed to take advantage of new
deployment models (Watson on IBM Cloud) and evolved machine learning
capabilities and optimised hardware available to developers and
researchers. It is no longer purely a question answering
(QA) computing system designed from Q&A pairs but can now 'see',
'hear', 'read', 'talk', 'taste', 'interpret', 'learn' and 'recommend'.
Software
Watson uses IBM's DeepQA software and the Apache UIMA
(Unstructured Information Management Architecture) framework
implementation. The system was written in various languages, including Java, C++, and Prolog, and runs on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 operating system using the Apache Hadoop framework to provide distributed computing.
Hardware
The system is workload-optimized, integrating massively parallel POWER7 processors and built on IBM's DeepQA technology, which it uses to generate hypotheses, gather massive evidence, and analyze data.
Watson employs a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers, each of which
uses a 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight-core processor, with four threads per core.
In total, the system has 2,880 POWER7 processor threads and 16 terabytes of RAM.
According to John Rennie, Watson can process 500 gigabytes, the equivalent of a million books, per second. IBM's master inventor and senior consultant, Tony Pearson, estimated Watson's hardware cost at about three million dollars.
Its Linpack performance stands at 80 TeraFLOPs, which is about half as fast as the cut-off line for the Top 500 Supercomputers list. According to Rennie, all content was stored in Watson's RAM for the Jeopardy game because data stored on hard drives would be too slow to be competitive with human Jeopardy champions.
Data
The sources of information for Watson include encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, newswire articles and literary works. Watson also used databases, taxonomies and ontologies. Specifically, DBPedia, WordNet and Yago were used.
The IBM team provided Watson with millions of documents, including
dictionaries, encyclopedias and other reference material that it could
use to build its knowledge.
Operation
| “ | The computer's techniques for unravelling Jeopardy! clues sounded just like mine. That machine zeroes in on keywords in a clue then combs its memory (in Watson's case, a 15-terabyte databank of human knowledge) for clusters of associations with those words. It rigorously checks the top hits against all the contextual information it can muster: the category name; the kind of answer being sought; the time, place, and gender hinted at in the clue; and so on. And when it feels "sure" enough, it decides to buzz. This is all an instant, intuitive process for a human Jeopardy! player, but I felt convinced that under the hood my brain was doing more or less the same thing. | ” |
| — Ken Jennings | ||
Watson parses questions into different keywords and sentence fragments in order to find statistically related phrases. Watson's main innovation was not in the creation of a new algorithm for this operation but rather its ability to quickly execute hundreds of proven language analysis algorithms simultaneously. The more algorithms that find the same answer independently the more likely Watson is to be correct.
Once Watson has a small number of potential solutions, it is able to
check against its database to ascertain whether the solution makes sense
or not.
Comparison with human players
Ken Jennings, Watson, and Brad Rutter in their Jeopardy! exhibition match.
Watson's basic working principle is to parse keywords in a clue while
searching for related terms as responses. This gives Watson some
advantages and disadvantages compared with human Jeopardy! players. Watson has deficiencies in understanding the contexts of the clues. As a result, human players usually generate responses faster than Watson, especially to short clues. Watson's programming prevents it from using the popular tactic of buzzing before it is sure of its response. Watson has consistently better reaction time
on the buzzer once it has generated a response, and is immune to human
players' psychological tactics, such as jumping between categories on
every clue.
In a sequence of 20 mock games of Jeopardy, human
participants were able to use the average six to seven seconds that
Watson needed to hear the clue and decide whether to signal for
responding.
During that time, Watson also has to evaluate the response and
determine whether it is sufficiently confident in the result to signal. Part of the system used to win the Jeopardy!
contest was the electronic circuitry that receives the "ready" signal
and then examined whether Watson's confidence level was great enough to
activate the buzzer. Given the speed of this circuitry compared to the
speed of human reaction times, Watson's reaction time was faster than
the human contestants except when the human anticipated (instead of
reacted to) the ready signal. After signaling, Watson speaks with an electronic voice and gives the responses in Jeopardy!'s question format. Watson's voice was synthesized from recordings that actor Jeff Woodman made for an IBM text-to-speech program in 2004.
The Jeopardy! staff used different means to notify Watson and the human players when to buzz, which was critical in many rounds. The humans were notified by a light, which took them tenths of a second to perceive. Watson was notified by an electronic signal and could activate the buzzer within about eight milliseconds. The humans tried to compensate for the perception delay by anticipating the light, but the variation in the anticipation time was generally too great to fall within Watson's response time. Watson did not attempt to anticipate the notification signal.
History
Development
Since Deep Blue's victory over Garry Kasparov
in chess in 1997, IBM had been on the hunt for a new challenge. In
2004, IBM Research manager Charles Lickel, over dinner with coworkers,
noticed that the restaurant they were in had fallen silent. He soon
discovered the cause of this evening hiatus: Ken Jennings, who was then in the middle of his successful 74-game run on Jeopardy!.
Nearly the entire restaurant had piled toward the televisions,
mid-meal, to watch the phenomenon. Intrigued by the quiz show as a
possible challenge for IBM, Lickel passed the idea on, and in 2005, IBM
Research executive Paul Horn backed Lickel up, pushing for someone in his department to take up the challenge of playing Jeopardy!
with an IBM system. Though he initially had trouble finding any
research staff willing to take on what looked to be a much more complex
challenge than the wordless game of chess, eventually David Ferrucci
took him up on the offer.
In competitions managed by the United States government, Watson's
predecessor, a system named Piquant, was usually able to respond
correctly to only about 35% of clues and often required several minutes
to respond. To compete successfully on Jeopardy!,
Watson would need to respond in no more than a few seconds, and at that
time, the problems posed by the game show were deemed to be impossible
to solve.
In initial tests run during 2006 by David Ferrucci, the senior
manager of IBM's Semantic Analysis and Integration department, Watson
was given 500 clues from past Jeopardy! programs. While the best
real-life competitors buzzed in half the time and responded correctly to
as many as 95% of clues, Watson's first pass could get only about 15%
correct. During 2007, the IBM team was given three to five years and a
staff of 15 people to solve the problems. By 2008, the developers had advanced Watson such that it could compete with Jeopardy! champions. By February 2010, Watson could beat human Jeopardy! contestants on a regular basis.
During the game, Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage including the full text of the 2011 edition of Wikipedia, but was not connected to the Internet.
For each clue, Watson's three most probable responses were displayed on
the television screen. Watson consistently outperformed its human
opponents on the game's signaling device, but had trouble in a few
categories, notably those having short clues containing only a few
words.
Although the system is primarily an IBM effort, Watson's development involved faculty and graduate students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, the University of Texas at Austin, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Trento, as well as students from New York Medical College.
Jeopardy!
Preparation
Watson demo at an IBM booth at a trade show
In 2008, IBM representatives communicated with Jeopardy! executive producer Harry Friedman about the possibility of having Watson compete against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two of the most successful contestants on the show, and the program's producers agreed. Watson's differences with human players had generated conflicts between IBM and Jeopardy! staff during the planning of the competition.
IBM repeatedly expressed concerns that the show's writers would exploit
Watson's cognitive deficiencies when writing the clues, thereby turning
the game into a Turing test. To alleviate that claim, a third party randomly picked the clues from previously written shows that were never broadcast. Jeopardy!
staff also showed concerns over Watson's reaction time on the buzzer.
Originally Watson signalled electronically, but show staff requested
that it press a button physically, as the human contestants would.
Even with a robotic "finger" pressing the buzzer, Watson remained
faster than its human competitors. Ken Jennings noted, "If you're trying
to win on the show, the buzzer is all", and that Watson "can knock out a
microsecond-precise buzz every single time with little or no variation.
Human reflexes can't compete with computer circuits in this regard." Stephen Baker, a journalist who recorded Watson's development in his book Final Jeopardy, reported that the conflict between IBM and Jeopardy! became so serious in May 2010 that the competition was almost canceled.
As part of the preparation, IBM constructed a mock set in a conference
room at one of its technology sites to model the one used on Jeopardy!. Human players, including former Jeopardy! contestants, also participated in mock games against Watson with Todd Alan Crain of The Onion playing host. About 100 test matches were conducted with Watson winning 65% of the games.
To provide a physical presence in the televised games, Watson was represented by an "avatar"
of a globe, inspired by the IBM "smarter planet" symbol. Jennings
described the computer's avatar as a "glowing blue ball criss-crossed by
'threads' of thought—42 threads, to be precise", and stated that the number of thought threads in the avatar was an in-joke referencing the significance of the number 42 in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Joshua Davis,
the artist who designed the avatar for the project, explained to
Stephen Baker that there are 36 triggerable states that Watson was able
to use throughout the game to show its confidence in responding to a
clue correctly; he had hoped to be able to find forty-two, to add
another level to the Hitchhiker's Guide reference, but he was unable to pinpoint enough game states.
A practice match was recorded on January 13, 2011, and the
official matches were recorded on January 14, 2011. All participants
maintained secrecy about the outcome until the match was broadcast in
February.
Practice match
In
a practice match before the press on January 13, 2011, Watson won a
15-question round against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter with a score of
$4,400 to Jennings's $3,400 and Rutter's $1,200, though Jennings and
Watson were tied before the final $1,000 question. None of the three
players responded incorrectly to a clue.
First match
The
first round was broadcast February 14, 2011, and the second round, on
February 15, 2011. The right to choose the first category had been
determined by a draw won by Rutter.
Watson, represented by a computer monitor display and artificial voice,
responded correctly to the second clue and then selected the fourth
clue of the first category, a deliberate strategy to find the Daily
Double as quickly as possible.
Watson's guess at the Daily Double location was correct. At the end of
the first round, Watson was tied with Rutter at $5,000; Jennings had
$2,000.
Watson's performance was characterized by some quirks. In one
instance, Watson repeated a reworded version of an incorrect response
offered by Jennings. (Jennings said "What are the '20s?" in reference to
the 1920s. Then Watson said "What is 1920s?") Because Watson could not
recognize other contestants' responses, it did not know that Jennings
had already given the same response. In another instance, Watson was
initially given credit for a response of "What is a leg?" after Jennings
incorrectly responded "What is: he only had one hand?" to a clue about George Eyser
(the correct response was, "What is: he's missing a leg?"). Because
Watson, unlike a human, could not have been responding to Jennings's
mistake, it was decided that this response was incorrect. The broadcast
version of the episode was edited to omit Trebek's original acceptance
of Watson's response. Watson also demonstrated complex wagering strategies on the Daily Doubles, with one bet at $6,435 and another at $1,246.
Gerald Tesauro, one of the IBM researchers who worked on Watson,
explained that Watson's wagers were based on its confidence level for
the category and a complex regression model called the Game State Evaluator.
Watson took a commanding lead in Double Jeopardy!, correctly
responding to both Daily Doubles. Watson responded to the second Daily
Double correctly with a 32% confidence score.
Although it wagered only $947 on the clue, Watson was the only
contestant to miss the Final Jeopardy! response in the category U.S.
CITIES ("Its largest airport was named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle"). Rutter and Jennings gave the correct response of Chicago, but Watson's response was "What is Toronto?????"
Ferrucci offered reasons why Watson would appear to have guessed a
Canadian city: categories only weakly suggest the type of response
desired, the phrase "U.S. city" did not appear in the question, there
are cities named Toronto in the U.S., and Toronto in Ontario has an American League baseball team. Dr. Chris Welty,
who also worked on Watson, suggested that it may not have been able to
correctly parse the second part of the clue, "its second largest, for a
World War II battle" (which was not a standalone clause despite it
following a semicolon, and required context to understand that it was referring to a second-largest airport). Eric Nyberg,
a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a member of the
development team, stated that the error occurred because Watson does not
possess the comparative knowledge to discard that potential response as
not viable.
Although not displayed to the audience as with non-Final Jeopardy!
questions, Watson's second choice was Chicago. Both Toronto and Chicago
were well below Watson's confidence threshold, at 14% and 11%
respectively. (This lack of confidence was the reason for the multiple
question marks in Watson's response.)
The game ended with Jennings with $4,800, Rutter with $10,400, and Watson with $35,734.
Second match
During
the introduction, Trebek (a Canadian native) joked that he had learned
Toronto was a U.S. city, and Watson's error in the first match prompted
an IBM engineer to wear a Toronto Blue Jays jacket to the recording of the second match.
In the first round, Jennings was finally able to choose a Daily Double clue, while Watson responded to one Daily Double clue incorrectly for the first time in the Double Jeopardy! Round.
After the first round, Watson placed second for the first time in the
competition after Rutter and Jennings were briefly successful in
increasing their dollar values before Watson could respond.
Nonetheless, the final result ended with a victory for Watson with a
score of $77,147, besting Jennings who scored $24,000 and Rutter who
scored $21,600.
Final outcome
The
prizes for the competition were $1 million for first place (Watson),
$300,000 for second place (Jennings), and $200,000 for third place
(Rutter). As promised, IBM donated 100% of Watson's winnings to charity,
with 50% of those winnings going to World Vision and 50% going to World Community Grid. Similarly, Jennings and Rutter donated 50% of their winnings to their respective charities.
In acknowledgment of IBM and Watson's achievements, Jennings made an
additional remark in his Final Jeopardy! response: "I for one welcome
our new computer overlords", echoing a similar memetic reference to the episode "Deep Space Homer" on The Simpsons, in which TV news presenter Kent Brockman speaks of welcoming "our new insect overlords". Jennings later wrote an article for Slate, in which he stated:
IBM has bragged to the media that Watson's question-answering skills are good for more than annoying Alex Trebek. The company sees a future in which fields like medical diagnosis, business analytics, and tech support are automated by question-answering software like Watson. Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the 20th century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of 'thinking' machines. 'Quiz show contestant' may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I'm sure it won't be the last.
Philosophy
Philosopher John Searle argues that Watson—despite impressive capabilities—cannot actually think. Drawing on his Chinese room thought experiment,
Searle claims that Watson, like other computational machines, is
capable only of manipulating symbols, but has no ability to understand
the meaning of those symbols; however, Searle's experiment has its detractors.
Match against members of the United States Congress
On February 28, 2011, Watson played an untelevised exhibition match of Jeopardy! against members of the United States House of Representatives. In the first round, Rush D. Holt, Jr. (D-NJ, a former Jeopardy! contestant), who was challenging the computer with Bill Cassidy
(R-LA, later Senator from Louisiana), led with Watson in second place.
However, combining the scores between all matches, the final score was
$40,300 for Watson and $30,000 for the congressional players combined.
IBM's Christopher Padilla said of the match, "The technology
behind Watson represents a major advancement in computing. In the
data-intensive environment of government, this type of technology can
help organizations make better decisions and improve how government
helps its citizens."
Current and future applications
According
to IBM, "The goal is to have computers start to interact in natural
human terms across a range of applications and processes, understanding
the questions that humans ask and providing answers that humans can
understand and justify." It has been suggested by Robert C. Weber, IBM's general counsel, that Watson may be used for legal research.
The company also intends to use Watson in other information-intensive
fields, such as telecommunications, financial services and government.
Watson is based on commercially available IBM Power 750 servers
that have been marketed since February 2010. IBM also intends to market
the DeepQA software to large corporations, with a price in the millions
of dollars, reflecting the $1 million needed to acquire a server that
meets the minimum system requirement to operate Watson. IBM expects the
price to decrease substantially within a decade as the technology
improves.
Commentator Rick Merritt said that "there's another really
important reason why it is strategic for IBM to be seen very broadly by
the American public as a company that can tackle tough computer
problems. A big slice of [IBM's profit] comes from selling to the U.S.
government some of the biggest, most expensive systems in the world."
In 2013, it was reported that three companies were working with
IBM to create apps embedded with Watson technology. Fluid is developing
an app for retailers, one called "The North Face", which is designed to
provide advice to online shoppers. Welltok is developing an app designed
to give people advice on ways to engage in activities to improve their
health. MD Buyline is developing an app for the purpose of advising
medical institutions on equipment procurement decisions.
In November 2013, IBM announced it would make Watson's API
available to software application providers, enabling them to build
apps and services that are embedded in Watson's capabilities. To build
out its base of partners who create applications on the Watson platform,
IBM consults with a network of venture capital firms, which advise IBM
on which of their portfolio companies may be a logical fit for what IBM
calls the Watson Ecosystem. Thus far, roughly 800 organizations and
individuals have signed up with IBM, with interest in creating
applications that could use the Watson platform.
On January 30, 2013, it was announced that Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
would receive a successor version of Watson, which would be housed at
the Institute's technology park and be available to researchers and
students. By summer 2013, Rensselaer had become the first university to receive a Watson computer.
On February 6, 2014, it was reported that IBM plans to invest
$100 million in a 10-year initiative to use Watson and other IBM
technologies to help countries in Africa address development problems,
beginning with healthcare and education.
On June 3, 2014, three new Watson Ecosystem partners were chosen
from more than 400 business concepts submitted by teams spanning 18
industries from 43 countries. "These bright and enterprising
organizations have discovered innovative ways to apply Watson that can
deliver demonstrable business benefits", said Steve Gold, vice
president, IBM Watson Group. The winners were Majestyk Apps with their
adaptive educational platform, FANG (Friendly Anthropomorphic Networked
Genome); Red Ant with their retail sales trainer; and GenieMD with their medical recommendation service.
On July 9, 2014, Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories
announced plans to integrate Watson to improve their customer
experience platform, citing the sheer volume of customer data to analyze
is staggering.
Watson has been integrated with databases including Bon Appétit magazine to perform a recipe generating platform.
Watson is being used by Decibel, a music discovery startup, in
its app MusicGeek which uses the supercomputer to provide music
recommendations to its users. The use of the artificial intelligence of
Watson has also been found in the hospitality industry. GoMoment uses
Watson for its Rev1 app, which gives hotel staff a way to quickly
respond to questions from guests.
Arria NLG has built an app that helps energy companies stay within
regulatory guidelines, making it easier for managers to make sense of
thousands of pages of legal and technical jargon.
OmniEarth, Inc. uses Watson computer vision services to analyze
satellite and aerial imagery, along with other municipal data, to infer
water usage on a property-by-property basis, helping water districts in
drought-stricken California improve water conservation efforts.
In September 2016, Condé Nast has started using IBM's Watson to
help build and strategize social influencer campaigns for brands. Using
software built by IBM and Influential, Condé Nast's clients will be able
to know which influencer's demographics, personality traits and more
best align with a marketer and the audience it is targeting.
In February 2017, Rare Carat, a New York City-based startup and e-commerce platform for buying diamonds and diamond rings, introduced an IBM Watson-powered artificial intelligence chatbot
called "Rocky" to assist novice diamond buyers through the daunting
process of purchasing a diamond. As part of the IBM Global Entrepreneur
Program, Rare Carat received the assistance of IBM in the development of
the Rocky Chat Bot.
In May 2017, IBM partnered with the Pebble Beach Company to use Watson as a concierge.
Watson's artificial intelligence was added to an app developed by
Pebble Beach and was used to guide visitors around the resort. The
mobile app was designed by IBM iX and hosted on the IBM Cloud. It uses
Watson's Conversation applications programming interface.
In November 2017, in Mexico City, the Experience Voices of
Another Time was opened at the National Museum of Anthropology using IBM
Watson as an alternative to visiting a museum.
Healthcare
In
healthcare, Watson's natural language, hypothesis generation, and
evidence-based learning capabilities are being investigated to see how
Watson may contribute to clinical decision support systems and the increase in Artificial intelligence in healthcare for use by medical professionals.
To aid physicians in the treatment of their patients, once a physician
has posed a query to the system describing symptoms and other related
factors, Watson first parses the input to identify the most important
pieces of information; then mines patient data to find facts relevant to
the patient's medical and hereditary history; then examines available
data sources to form and test hypotheses; and finally provides a list of individualized, confidence-scored recommendations.
The sources of data that Watson uses for analysis can include treatment
guidelines, electronic medical record data, notes from healthcare
providers, research materials, clinical studies, journal articles and
patient information.
Despite being developed and marketed as a "diagnosis and treatment
advisor", Watson has never been actually involved in the medical
diagnosis process, only in assisting with identifying treatment options
for patients who have already been diagnosed.
In February 2011, it was announced that IBM would be partnering with Nuance Communications
for a research project to develop a commercial product during the next
18 to 24 months, designed to exploit Watson's clinical decision support
capabilities. Physicians at Columbia University
would help to identify critical issues in the practice of medicine
where the system's technology may be able to contribute, and physicians
at the University of Maryland
would work to identify the best way that a technology like Watson could
interact with medical practitioners to provide the maximum assistance.
In September 2011, IBM and WellPoint announced a partnership to utilize Watson's data crunching capability to help suggest treatment options to physicians. Then, in February 2013, IBM and WellPoint gave Watson its first commercial application, for utilization management decisions in lung cancer treatment at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center.
IBM announced a partnership with Cleveland Clinic in October 2012. The company has sent Watson to the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University,
where it will increase its health expertise and assist medical
professionals in treating patients. The medical facility will utilize
Watson's ability to store and process large quantities of information to
help speed up and increase the accuracy of the treatment process.
"Cleveland Clinic's collaboration with IBM is exciting because it offers
us the opportunity to teach Watson to 'think' in ways that have the
potential to make it a powerful tool in medicine", said C. Martin
Harris, MD, chief information officer of Cleveland Clinic.
In 2013, IBM and MD Anderson Cancer Center began a pilot program to further the center's "mission to eradicate cancer". However, after spending $62 million, the project did not meet its goals and it has been stopped.
On February 8, 2013, IBM announced that oncologists at the Maine
Center for Cancer Medicine and Westmed Medical Group in New York have
started to test the Watson supercomputer system in an effort to
recommend treatment for lung cancer.
On July 29, 2016, IBM and Manipal Hospitals (a
leading hospital chain in India), announced launch of IBM Watson for
Oncology, for cancer patients. This product provides information and
insights to physicians and cancer patients to help them identify
personalized, evidence-based cancer care options. Manipal Hospitals is
the second hospital
in the world to adopt this technology and first in the world to offer
it to patients online as an expert second opinion through their website.
On January 7, 2017, IBM and Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance entered
into a contract for IBM to deliver analysis to compensation payouts via
its IBM Watson Explorer AI, this resulted in the loss of 34 jobs and the
company said it would speed up compensation payout analysis via
analysing claims and medical record and increase productivity by 30%.
The company also said it would save ¥140m in running costs.
It is said that IBM Watson will be carrying the knowledge-base of
1000 cancer specialists which will bring a revolution in the field of
healthcare. IBM is regarded as a disruptive innovation. However the
stream of oncology is still in its nascent stage.
Several startups in the healthcare space have been effectively
using seven business model archetypes to take solutions based on IBM
Watson to the marketplace. These archetypes depends on the value
generate for the target user (e.g. patient focus vs. healthcare provider
and payer focus) and value capturing mechanisms (e.g. providing
information or connecting stakeholders).
IBM Watson Group
On January 9, 2014 IBM announced it was creating a business unit around Watson, led by senior vice president Michael Rhodin. IBM Watson Group will have headquarters in New York's Silicon Alley and will employ 2,000 people. IBM has invested $1 billion to get the division going. Watson Group will develop three new cloud-delivered
services: Watson Discovery Advisor, Watson Engagement Advisor, and
Watson Explorer. Watson Discovery Advisor will focus on research and development projects in pharmaceutical industry, publishing, and biotechnology, Watson Engagement Advisor will focus on self-service applications using insights on the basis of natural language
questions posed by business users, and Watson Explorer will focus on
helping enterprise users uncover and share data-driven insights based on
federated search more easily.
The company is also launching a $100 million venture fund to spur
application development for "cognitive" applications. According to IBM,
the cloud-delivered enterprise-ready Watson has seen its speed increase
24 times over—a 2,300 percent improvement in performance and its
physical size shrank by 90 percent—from the size of a master bedroom to
three stacked pizza boxes. IBM CEO Virginia Rometty said she wants Watson to generate $10 billion in annual revenue within ten years.
On 20 September 2017, Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT School of
Engineering announced Antonio Torralba as the MIT director of the
MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. In March 2018, IBM's CEO Ginni Rometty proposed "Watson's Law," the "use of and application of business, smart cities, consumer applications and life in general."
Chatterbot
Watson is being used via IBM partner program as a Chatterbot to provide the conversation for children's toys.
Building codes
In 2015, the engineering firm ENGEO
created an online service via the IBM partner program named
GoFetchCode. GoFetchCode applies Watson's natural language processing
and question-answering capabilities to the International Code Council's model building codes.
Teaching assistant
IBM
Watson is being used for several projects relating to education, and
has entered partnerships with Pearson Education, Blackboard, Sesame
Workshop and Apple.
In its partnership with Pearson, Watson is being made available
inside electronic text books to provide natural language, one-on-one
tutoring to students on the reading material.
As an individual using the free Watson APIs available to the public, Ashok Goel, a professor at Georgia Tech, used Watson to create a virtual teaching assistant to assist students in his class.
Initially, Goel did not reveal the nature of "Jill", which was created
with the help of a few students and IBM. Jill answered questions where
it had a 97% certainty of an accurate answer, with the remainder being
answered by human assistants.
The research group of Sabri Pllana developed an assistant for learning parallel programming using the IBM Watson.
A survey with a number of novice parallel programmers at the Linnaeus
University indicated that such assistant will be welcome by students
that learn parallel programming.
Weather forecasting
In August 2016, IBM announced it would be using Watson for weather forecasting. Specifically, the company announced they would use Watson to analyze data from over 200,000 Weather Underground personal weather stations, and data from other sources, as a part of project Deep Thunder.
Fashion
IBM
Watson together with Marchesa designed a dress that changed the colour
of the fabric depending on the mood of the audience. The dress lit up in
different colours based on the sentiment of Tweets about the dress.
Tweets were passed through a Watson tone analyzer and then sent back to a
small computer inside the waist of the dress. As social media is an
integral part of their business, the Marchesa team loved how Watson
could incorporate that information into the glamour of the gown.
Tax preparation
On February 5–6, 2017, tax preparation company H&R Block began nationwide use of a Watson-based program.
