That beast of artificial intelligence that responds to the name of IBM Watson is undoubtedly one of the most interesting technological projects launched by the American multinational in recent decades.
Of being little more than a curiosity capable of overcoming any human being in a television contest, he has proven to have enormous potential to revolutionize research fields such as biochemist or doctor, has helped companies make better decisions based on data based onAnd you are getting us to "talk" to the machines naturally.
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KEYS Suscríbete a la nueva newsletter de MCPROTransformación Digital en España ¡Participa y envíanos tu caso de éxito!Tendencias de inversión TIC en 2021 ¡Descárgate el informe!But what is your story?How has Ibm Watson probably the commercial division of IBM that grows?What does it contribute to the AI field and what do we expect from this development in the future?
A television debut
To find the origins of Watson, you have to go back to 1996, when IBM presents Deep Blue, the first AI capable of the role, of "intellectually" overcoming the capacities of a human being and demonstrating its competition a year later by defeating the defeatworld champion Chess Gary Kasparov with a result of 3.5 by 2.5, while in his confrontation the previous year he had resulted in a clear victory of the Russian champion for four games to two.
Fifteen years later (2011) and as without a doubt many know, IBM engineer, David Ferrucci, proposes the "even more difficult" and puts himself in charge of a research team whose objective is to develop a platform sufficientlyintelligent to overcome Jeopardy world champion! A popular television contest in the United States, based on the classic question and answers dynamics.
But why Jeopardy!precisely and not another?Not only because it was a tremendously popular contest, but for having a devilish structure, different from the traditional questions and answers program.Instead of based on "academic" questions of the type "What is the capital of Angola?" Jeopardy!presents responses to the contestants, who must know what they represent.In other words, given the information «I cross several countries in South America and my length exceeds 7.000 km »The correct answer would be" I am the Amazon River "but also, the program uses all kinds of words, linguistic turns and unexpected combinations that make it almost impossible to find information" indexed ".
The natural consequence of the above and that explains that before the new IBM no other computer dared to face this challenge is that "the machine" that wanted to win the game was not enough to "seek information" on a base ofdata but somehow, had to really understand what they were asking, capture irony and even have a sense of humor.
The result, an IBM Watson, whose name refers and tributes Thomas J.Watson, founder and first CEO of the company.
Overcoming the challenge
To be able to overcome two of its most legendary champions (Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings) the Watson team builds a platform in which to apply the latest advances of the moment in fields such as the processing of natural language, information recovery, knowledge representation, knowledge, knowledge,Automated reasoning and Machine Learning with the aim of giving answers to open and public domain questions.
Already in his first version, IBM explained that Watson was able to “use one hundred different techniques to analyze natural language, identify sources or find, merge, generate and classify hypotheses.»What earned him win.
After demonstrating its capacity on the pitch, in 2013 IBM developed together with the MEMORIAL HOSPITAL CENTER Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, its first commercial project: a practical application that greatly improved decision making when managing clinical treatment(and pharmacological) of patients affected by lung cancer.
Since then Watson's abilities have not stopped growing and over time has incorporated new technologies such as Cloud's power to go further and has ceased to be a computer system of questions and answers to a very different one capable of «see"," Hear "," Read "," Gust "," Interpret "," Learn "or" Recommend ".
Elementary, dear Watson
Of course the IBM Watson that David Ferrucci's team presents in 2011 is not exactly the same with which companies and researchers from the entire planet work today.
At the moment, keep this computing giant in operation has meant the start -up of a cluster formed by 750 IBM Power 750 servers, each of which uses an eight Power7 core processor at 3.5 GHz.To this we must add no less than 16 TB of RAM.This involves a gross calculation power of 80 petaflops, which in terms of supercomdators (for many aspects does not enter this category) would enter directly into ranking of the first five.
How does all gross power move?If we examine your software layers we discover that IBM Watson is based on the Deepqa artificial intelligence platform developed by IBM and based on programming languages such as Java, C ++ and Prolog.
To hold it, use Apache Uima architecture (Ustructured Information Management Architecture), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 as an operating system and Apache Hadoop Framework for distributed computing tasks.
With all these ingredients, IBM boys get Watson to process 500 GB (the equivalent of one million books) per second.In fact, as sources of information entry, the platform is nourished by all types of encyclopedias, dictionaries, scientific papers, taxonomies, ontologies ... counting on projects such as Dbpedia (a project to extract structured information from Wikipedia), Wordnet or Yago.
Watson enters the big business door
The collaboration with the MEMORIAL Sloan Kettering Cancer Center was the first of many of those that came below.The intention to develop Watson's commercial capabilities was reflected in 2014, with the implementation of the "IBM Watson Group" a new business division headed by Michael Rodin and to which they would begin to serve more than 2.000 people.
Since its implementation, IBM has invested more than 1.000 million dollars in the division, which has focused its efforts on the development of three large branches of growth: Watson Discovery Advisor, Watson Engagement Advisor, and Watson Explorer.
The first, Watson Discovery Advisor works on research projects Relationship with the pharmaceutical and biotechnological industry.Watson Engagement Advisor is the area from which Self-Service applications are developed (chatbots, virtual attendees, etc..) For the interpretation of natural language, respond to the needs of company users.Finally, Watson Explorer helps users to discover, structure and share information from huge volumes of data.
And what projects have been involved lately?Without going any further, in the last US Open of Tennis, Watson was the platform on which the intelligent assistant "Ask the Us Open" was built, which thanks to their conversational abilities informed the fans who went to the tournament about everything thatThey had to know to improve their experience: advice "before going", points of interest in the stadium, integration of maps, results and live scores, weather alerts, etc..
In the financial field, the Italian Creval Bank has made IBM WatsProblems with all regulations that have been launched to manage information and privacy of all types of customers, as in the effective application of the GDPR).
and not only.In the experimental field, he has developed for example, an "electronic language" (IBM hypertas) that, inspired by the functioning of the human taste, has how to detect and analyze different types of liquid quickly and without the need to go to a laboratory,o Medical projects as interesting as IBM Watson for Oncology, capable of combining the experience of cancer oncologists to help doctors consider individualized treatments for their patients.
Watson in Spain
How could it be otherwise, the technology that IBM provides with Watson has raised the interest of not a few Spanish companies.We highlight below some of the most interesting:
Cerealto Siro Foods, which launches more than 250 new products derived from cereal every year, has incorporated the artificial intelligence of IBM Watson in its innovation process to detect early tendencies and as a source of inspiration and has already launched its first snack «Based on artificial intelligence »: Rice pancakes with peas and lentils.
Endesa has created a virtual assistant using IBM Watson Assistant technology that allows customers to obtain answers to their questions immediately, which makes it easier for the center agents to devote more time to the most complex requests and sell products or services of electricity.
Seat has presented "Mobility Advisor", which uses the artificial intelligence of IBM Watson to help the urbanites can make reported decisions about the different transport options: from car, motorcycle or bikesharing to public transport, sothat the chosen option is the fastest and efficient.
Helvetia Seguros has decided to facilitate the purchase of family assistance insurance with the help of a virtual assistant.Customers talk in natural language with the accessible virtual assistant on the Helvetia website, who collects the relevant data and offers a custom -to -measure contribution, reducing time, days, of a possible traditional hiring to minutes, of a possible traditional hiring.
Not to mention the Tax Agency itself, which since July 2018 helps companies to fulfill their tax obligations allowing them to support IBM's artificial intelligence to comply with the immediate supply of information (SII) of VAT, which currently requires theElectronic registration of your invoices during the 4 days of your issuance or accounting.
But there are plenty of examples.The Prisa Group collaborates with IBM to offer better weather information to its users, Carolina Herrera reinforces thanks to this technology its e-commerce strategy and secondary school institutes of the Community of Madrid already use Watson to help students to trainIn programming and development of AI applications.