IBM Taking AI To The Masses

At the GigaOm Structure Data conference in New York City, IBM and AlchemyAPI spoke about their experiences in providing cognitive computing technology to help solve broad societal, medical and other problems, and also to help democratise the use of cognitive technology. AlchemyAPI says its goal is to democratise breakthroughs in “deep learning” to power unstructured data applications.

IBM opened up its Watson cognitive computing platform to developers last November, launching an effort to enable anybody with programming skills and an idea to take the technology and use it as a foundation for building apps that can both understand natural language and learn new things to expand its knowledge base. Watson represents a breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence, and IBM’s opening up the platform indicates just how far AI has come.

Artificial intelligence APIs

Elliot Turner, chief executive of AlchemyAPI, and Stephen Gold, vice president of worldwide marketing and sales operations for IBM’s Watson Group, spoke on the issue of spreading the use of artificial intelligence with APIs.

“We’re in this new trend – the API economy where you take something complicated and expose it as an API,” Turner said. “Cognition is yet another one of those things. “So we’re seeing companies leverage unstructured data – things like photographs, videos, chat logs, documents – to make better, more informed business decisions to automate processes. They’re leveraging humanlike capabilities inside automated workflows. I think these technologies can ultimately augment what’s possible in business and humanity, but not necessarily replace that.”

“Even though we think about a humanistic aspect of computing, when we look at it, we’re very tied to this notion of logic and rules and reason and structure,” Gold said. “And the vast form of data that’s proliferating today that’s available to us is all unstructured. It’s the texts, the blogs, the tweets, the articles, the photographs.

We’re just now starting to experience the idea of a system that is readily approachable that you can navigate through natural language. And better yet, these cognitive systems are systems that learn. So they get progressively smarter.

Gold noted that, in medicine today, less than half the discipline is evidence-based. “This holds the promise to take us to a point that our physician will have an assistant that can actually provide, unequivocally, insights that were locked away in some study or trial or periodical.

Cognitive systems

Turner acknowledged that data and learning is a lot more nuanced in cognitive systems. “The whole idea of a ground truth, which used to be a big thing in computing, is really starting to go away,” he said. “Our systems leverage a technique known as unsupervised learning – where, by exposure to data over time, you can build up a conceptual mapping of the world. In terms of keeping a system from going off the rails, one of the things that we saw in exposing our system to the Internet is that dogs are people. So the point about context being key is really important. You can have multiple ground truths, depending on the situation.”

AlchemyAPI counts among its customers several large media companies, advertisers and others that leverage AlchemyAPI to improve engagement across their properties, to improve efficiencies and to identify story opportunities.

Meanwhile, retail is a use case for IBM’s cognitive technology. “E-commerce has changed our lives in terms of being able to select and purchase products online,” Gold said. “And if all I want is price and availability it’s terrific. but if I’m uncertain about that purchase and I really need the assistance of an expert salesperson, what do I do? I get in the car and I drive to the brick and mortar location. or maybe I get online and chat or ask a friend.”

Yet, in the case of Fluid, one of IBM’s Watson partners, they have built an application that provides an expert sales assistant in an ecommerce capacity that takes ecommerce to a level that’s more consistent with the brick and mortar experience, Gold said. And in another example IBM has partnered with Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre to optimise treatment for cancer patients using Watson.

Both Gold and Turner said they see vision as a next big thing for cognitive technology – to have systems that can “see” and recognise things. Turner said AlchemyAPI has been testing its computer vision API with partners for the last few months and has seen interesting apps, everything from the identification of plants, to specific types of animals to expanding the ability to experience art galleries, he said.

Data visualisation

Gold said IBM recently demonstrated Watson’s ability to read and understand an x-ray, which unlocks the possibility for new discoveries. IBM also is working on how to visualise the data for Watson, he said. “I think visualisation is going to be a big part of cognition.”

Moreover, “I think we’re going to see these technologies take further hold in our everyday lives,” Turner said. “One of the interesting things about cognition is as soon as these technologies come online and we integrate them into our daily workflows we really stop thinking abbot them in that special way.

Meanwhile, platforms like Alchemy API and Watson continue to make these capabilities available to a broad audience. “The creativity that’s out there in the world in terms of taking these technologies when they’re easily consumable and available and integrating them into applications is really exciting,” Turner said.

Figuring out a viable pricing model for cognitive computing technology is not entirely settled. “You will see ‘freemium,’ free, transaction-, subscription-based models of varying price points,” Gold said. “I think we’ll see new forms of models emerge in the consumption of cognitive. And I think there will be people who will step up and say I will pay for that because of the value it brings.”

Turner concurred. “Value based pricing is key,” he said. “Freemium is a great way to expose everyone to these technologies. We’ve had a freemium model since 2009 and seen more than 40,000 developers across the world start incorporating cognition into their applications to build smarter apps and services.”

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Originally published on eWeek.