IBM, Local Motors debut Olli, the first Watson-powered self-driving vehicle

Olli hits the road in the Washington, D.C. area and later this year in Miami-Dade County and Las Vegas.

Local Motors CEO and co-founder John B. Rogers, Jr. with "Olli" & IBM, June 15, 2016.Rich Riggins/Feature Photo Service for IBM

IBM, along with the Arizona-based manufacturer Local Motors, debuted the first-ever driverless vehicle to use the Watson cognitive computing platform. Dubbed "Olli," the electric vehicle was unveiled at Local Motors' new facility in National Harbor, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C.

Olli, which can carry up to 12 passengers, taps into four Watson APIs (

• Speech to Text, 
• Natural Language Classifier, 
• Entity Extraction and 
• Text to Speech

) to interact with its riders. It can answer questions like "Can I bring my children on board?" and respond to basic operational commands like, "Take me to the closest Mexican restaurant." Olli can also give vehicle diagnostics, answering questions like, "Why are you stopping?"

Olli learns from data produced by more than 30 sensors embedded throughout the vehicle, which will added and adjusted to meet passenger needs and local preferences.

While Olli is the first self-driving vehicle to use IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT), this isn't Watson's first foray into the automotive industry. IBM launched its IoT for Automotive unit in September of last year, and in March, IBM and Honda announced a deal for Watson technology and analytics to be used in the automaker's Formula One (F1) cars and pits.

IBM demonstrated its commitment to IoT in March of last year, when it announced it was spending $3B over four years to establish a separate IoT business unit, whch later became the Watson IoT business unit.

IBM says that starting Thursday, Olli will be used on public roads locally in Washington, D.C. and will be used in Miami-Dade County and Las Vegas later this year. Miami-Dade County is exploring a pilot program that would deploy several autonomous vehicles to shuttle people around Miami.

ORIGINAL: ZDnet
By Stephanie Condon for Between the Lines
June 16, 2016

IBM's Watson Personality Insights service

How it works

Personality Insights extracts and analyzes a spectrum of personality attributes to help discover actionable insights about people and entities, and in turn guides end users to highly personalized interactions. 

The service outputs personality characteristics that are divided into three dimensions: 

• the Big 5
  • openness, 
  • conscientiousness, 
  • extraversion, 
  • agreeableness, and 
  • neuroticism
• Values, and 
• Needs. 

While some services are contextually specific depending on the domain model and content, Personality Insights only requires a minimum of 3500+ words of any text.

Intended UsePersonality Insights is great for brand analytics and can help measure a brand's personality and compare/contrast with your customers personalities. It can also help with market segmentation and individualizing marketing campaigns or promotions. Personality Insights can also be used to help recruiters or university admissions match candidates to companies or universities. Overall, Personality Insights individualizes customer care and infers personality traits to drive a more tailored response.

YOU INPUT:JSON, or Text or HTML (such as social media, emails, blogs, or other communication) written by one individual

SERVICE OUTPUT:A tree of cognitive and social characteristics in JSON or CSV format

The IBM Watson™ Personality Insights service provides an Application Programming Interface (API) that enables applications to derive insights from social media, enterprise data, or other digital communications. The service uses linguistic analytics to infer personality and social characteristics, including 

• Big Five (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism), 
• Needs, and 
• Values, 

from text. 

These insights help businesses to understand their clients' preferences and improve customer satisfaction by anticipating customer needs and recommending future actions. Businesses can use these insights to improve client acquisition, retention, and engagement, and to strengthen relations with their clients.

You can see a quick demo of the Personality Insights service in action. The demo lets you analyze input text to develop a personality portrait for the author of the text. The applications 

• Speak Up, 
• NYC School Finder, and 
• Your Celebrity Match 

on the Watson Developer Cloud App Gallery also demonstrate the Personality Insights service.

We are always looking to improve and learn from your experience with our services. You can submit comments or ask questions about Personality Insights in the Watson forum. You can also read posts about Watson services that are written by IBM researchers, developers, and other experts on the Watson blog. 

Specifically, you might want to look at

• IBM Watson Personality Insights: The science behind the service,
• IBM Watson Personality Insights General Availability Announcement,
• Watson and the State of the Union, and
• Watson in the Wild from March 12 and 5, 2015.

The Personality Insights service is generally available (GA). For information about the pricing plans available for the service, see thePersonality Insights service in Bluemix.

Developing a Personality Insights application

• To begin working with the Personality Insights service by creating and running applications that communicate with the service, see the following sections:
• To create and run an example Node.js application that works with the service from the command line, see Watson Quick Start for Node.js.
• To create and run a sample Node.js application that works with the service from a web browser, see Developing a Watson application in Node.js. You need the link to the source code for the Node.js application at the personality-insights-nodejs repository in the watson-developer-cloudnamespace on GitHub.
• To create and run a sample Java application that works with the service from a web browser, see Developing a Watson application in Java. You need the link to the source code for the Java application at thepersonality-insights-java repository in the watson-developer-cloud namespace on GitHub.
• For the sample applications available from GitHub, you can download a .zipfile that contains the source code or, if you are familiar with Git, fork the repository into your Git namespace or clone it to your local system. To learn about Git or to download Git for your operating system, see git-scm.com/documentation.
• For a language-independent introduction to working with Watson Developer Cloud services and Bluemix, see Developing Watson applications with Bluemix. That page provides an overview of working with Watson services with the Bluemix web interface, the Eclipse IDE, or the Cloud Foundry command-line tool.

ORIGINAL: IBM Watson™ Personality Insights

IBM Watson Language Translation and Speech Services – General Availability

As part of the Watson development platform’s continued expansion, IBM is today introducing the latest set of cognitive services to move into General Availability (GA) that will drive new Watson powered applications. They include the GA release of IBM Watson Language Translation (a merger of Language Identification and Machine Translation), IBM Speech to Text, and IBM Text to Speech.

These cognitive speech and language services are open to anyone, enabling application developers and IBM’s growing ecosystem to develop and commercialize new cognitive computing solutions that can do the following:

• Translate news, patents, or conversational documents across several languages (Language Translation)
• Produce transcripts from speech in multi-media files or conversational streams, capturing vast information for a myriad of business uses. This Watson cognitive service also benefits from a recent IBM conversational speech transcription breakthrough to advance the accuracy of speech recognition (Speech to Text)
• Make their web, mobile, and Internet of Things applications speak with a consistent voice across all Representational State Transfer (REST) – compatible platforms (Text to Speech)
• There are already organizations building applications with these services, since IBM opened them up in beta mode over the past year on the Watson Developer Cloud on IBM Bluemix. Developers have used these APIs to quickly build prototype applications in only two days at IBM hack-a-thons, demonstrating the versatility and ease of use of the services.

Supported Capabilities

We have made several updates since the beta releases which was inspired by feedback from our user community.

Language Translation now supports:

• Language Identification – identifies the textual input of the language if it is one of the 62 supported languages
• The News domain – targeted at news articles and transcripts, it translates English to and from French, Spanish, Portuguese or Arabic
• The Conversational domain – targeted at conversational colloquialisms, it translates English to and from French, Spanish, Portuguese, or Arabic
• The Patent domain – targeted at technical and legal terminology, it translates Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, or Korean to English

Speech to Text now supports:

• New wideband and narrowband telephony language support – U.S. English, Spanish, and Japanese
• Broader vocabulary coverage, and improved accuracy for U.S. English

Text to Speech now supports:

• U.S. English, UK English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German
• A subset of SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) for U.S. English, U.K. English, French, and German (see the documentation for more details)
• Improved programming support for applications stored outside of Bluemix
• Pricing and Freemium Tiers

Trial Bluemix accounts remain free. Please visit www.bluemix.net to register, and get free instant access to a 30-day trial without a credit card. Use of the Speech to Text, Text to Speech, and Language Translation services are free during this trial period.

After the trial period, pricing for Language Translation will be:

• $0.02 per thousand characters. The first million characters per month are free.
• An add-on charge of $3.00 per thousand characters for usage of the Patent model in Language Translation.

After the trial period, pricing for Speech to Text will be:

• $0.02 per minute. The first thousand minutes per month are free.
• An add-on charge of $0.02 per minute for usage of narrowband (telephony) models. The first thousand minutes per month are free.

After the trial period, pricing for Text to Speech will be:

• $0.02 per thousand characters. The first million characters per month are free.

Transition Plan

We look forward to continuing our partnership with the many clients, business partners, and creative developers that have built innovative applications using the beta version of the four services: Speech to Text, Text to Speech, Machine Translation and Language Identification. If you have used these beta services, please migrate your applications to use the GA services by August 10, 2015. After this date the beta plans for these services will no longer be available. For details about upgrading, see:

• Language translation upgrading from Beta
• Speech to text upgrading from Beta
• Text to speech upgrading from Beta

We’re eager to see the next round of cognitive applications based on the Speech and Translation Services. For questions, join the discussion in our Forum, or send an email to HiWatson@us.ibm.com with “Speech” or “Translation” in your inquiry.

IBM is placing the power of Watson in the hands of developers and an ecosystem of partners, entrepreneurs, tech enthusiasts and students with a growing platform of Watson services (APIs) to create an entirely new class of apps and businesses that make cognitive computing systems the new computing standard.

Michael Picheny

JULY 6, 2015 AT 4:37 PM

For more info on our speech services, see our earlier speech blogs 

• https://developer.ibm.com/watson/blog/2015/02/09/ibm-watson-now-brings-cognitive-speech-capabilities-developers/ 

and

• https://developer.ibm.com/watson/blog/2015/05/26/ibm-watson-announces-breakthrough-in-conversational-speech-transcription/

ORIGINAL: IBM

JEROME PESENTI

JULY 6, 2015

Anyone Can Now Use IBM's Watson To Crunch Data For Free

You probably know IBM's Watson platform best from its winning performance on Jeopardy. But the supercomputer is more than just a mechanism for IBM to publicly shame smart people. It's arguably the most powerful natural-language supercomputer in the world, and thanks to a new public beta, its number-crunching abilities are open to all.

Specifically, IBM has opening the Watson Analytics platform up to everyone in a public beta. The analytics platform is meant to make 'big data' processing available to people without a statistics degree — in theory, you'll be able to chuck in a dataset, and Watson will pull out the interesting correlations, predictive analyses and the like, and present it all in a series of infographics and graphs.

It's an interesting proposition for IBM. Although Watson has been used to pull off a number of stunts — useful and otherwise — allowing for easy data analysis is potentially one of its most handy applications. [ZDNet]

ORIGINAL: Gizmodo

By Chris Mills

Pathway Genomics: Bringing Watson’s Smarts to Personal Health and Fitness

Michael Nova, Chief Medical Officer, Pathway Genomics

To describe me as a health nut would be a gross understatement. I run five days a week, bench press 275 pounds, do 120 pushups at a time, and surf the really big waves in Indonesia. I don’t eat red meat, I typically have berries for breakfast and salad for dinner, and I consume an immense amount of kale—even though I don’t like the way it tastes. My daily vitamin/supplement regimen includes Alpha-lipoic acid, Coenzyme Q and Resveratrol. And, yes, I wear one of those fitness gizmos around my neck to count how many steps I take in a day.

I have been following this regimen for years, and it’s an essential part of my life.

For anybody concerned about health, diet and fitness, these are truly amazing times. There’s a superabundance of health and fitness information published online. We’re able to tap into our electronic health records, we can measure just about everything we do physically, and, thanks to the plummeting price of gene sequencing, we can map our complete genomes for as little as $3000 and get readings on smaller chunks of genomic data for less than $100.

Think of it as your own personal health big-data tsunami.

The problem is we’re confronted with way too much of a good thing. There’s no way an individual like me or you can process all of the raw information that’s available to us—much less make sense out of it. That’s why I’m looking forward to being one of the first customers for a new mobile app that my company, Pathway Genomics, is developing with help from IBM Watson Group.

Surfing in Indonesia

Called Pathway Panorama, the smartphone app will make it possible for individuals to ask questions in everyday language and get answers in less than three seconds that take into consideration their personal health, diet and fitness scenarios combined with more general information. The result is recommendations that fit each of us like a surfer’s wet suit. Say you’ve just flown from your house on the coast to a city that’s 10,000 feet above sea level. You might want to ask how far you could safely run on your first day after getting off the plane—and at what pulse rate should you slow your jogging pace.

Or say you’re diabetic and you’re in a city you have never visited before. You had a pastry for breakfast and you want to know when you should take your next shot of insulin. In an emergency, you’ll be able to find specialized healthcare providers near where you are who can take care of you.

Whether you’re totally healthy and want to maximize your physical performance or you have health issues and want to reduce risks, this service will give you the advice you need. It’s like a guardian angel sitting on your shoulder who will also pre-emptively offer you help even if you don’t ask for it.

We use Watson’s language processing and cognitive abilities and combine them with information from a host of sources. The critical data comes from individual 
DNA and biomarker analysis that Pathway Genomics performs using a variety of devices and software tools.

Pathway Genomics, which launched 6 years ago in San Diego, already has a growing business of providing individual health reports delivered primarily through individuals’ personal physicians. With our Pathway Panorama app, we’ll reach out directly to consumers in a big way.

We’re in the middle of raising a new round of venture financing to pay for the expansion of our business. This brings to $80 million the amount of venture capital we have raised in the past six years—which makes us one of the best capitalized healthcare startups.

IBM is investing in Pathway Genomics as part of its commitment of $100 million to companies that are bringing to market a new generation of apps and services infused with Watson’s cognitive computing intelligence. This is the third such investment IBM has made this year.

We expect the app to be available in midi2015. We have not yet set pricing, but we expect to charge a small monthly fee. We also are creating a version for physicians.

To me, the real beauty of the Panorama app is that it will make it possible for us to safeguard our health and improve our fitness without obsessing all the time. We’ll just live our lives, and, when we need help, we’ll get it.

——-

To learn more about the new era of computing, read Smart Machines: IBM’s Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing.

ORIGINAL: A Smarter Planet

November, 12th 2014

By Michael Nova M.D.

IBM's new email app learns your habits to help get things done

Email can be overwhelming, especially at work; it can take a while to get back to an important conversation or project. IBM clearly knows how bad that deluge can be, though, since its new Verse email client is built to eliminate as much clutter as possible. The app learns your habits and puts the highest-priority people and tasks at the top level. You'll know if a key team member emailed you during lunch, or that you have a meeting in 10 minutes. Verse also puts a much heavier emphasis on collaboration and search. It's easier to find a particular file, message or topic, and there will even be a future option to get answers from a Watson thinking supercomputer -- you may get insights without having to speak to a colleague across the hall.

It's quite clever at first glance, although you may have to wait a while to give it a spin; a Verse beta on the desktop will be available this month, but only to a handful of IBM's customers and partners. You'll have to wait until the first quarter of 2015 to get a version built for individual use. It'll be "freemium" (free with paid add-ons) when it does reach the public, however, and there are promises of apps for Android and iOS to make sure you're productive while on the road.

SOURCE: IBM (1), (2)

ORIGINAL: Engadget

by Jon Fingas | @jonfingas

November 18th 2014

10 IBM Watson-Powered Apps That Are Changing Our World

IBM is investing $1 billion in its IBM Watson Group with the aim of creating an ecosystem of startups and businesses building cognitive computing applications with Watson. Here are 10 examples that are making an impact.

IBM considers Watson to represent a new era of computing — a step forward to cognitive computing, where apps and systems interact with humans via natural language and help us augment our own understanding of the world with big data insights.

Big Blue isn't playing small ball with that claim. It has opened a new IBM Watson Global Headquarters in the heart of New York City's Silicon Alley and is investing $1 billion into the Watson Group, focusing on development and research as well as bringing cloud-delivered cognitive applications and services to the market. That includes $100 million available for venture investments to support IBM's ecosystem of start-ups and businesses building cognitive apps with Watson.

Here are 10 examples of Watson-powered cognitive apps that are already starting to shake things up.

Image courtesy USAA/IBM Feature Photo Service/Flickr

USAA and Watson Help Military Members Transition to Civilian Life

USAA, a financial services firm dedicated to those who serve or have served in the military, has turned to IBM's Watson Engagement Advisor in a pilot program to help military men and women transition to civilian life.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 155,000 active military members transition to civilian life each year. This process can raise many questions, like "Can I be in the reserve and collect veteran's compensation benefits?" or "How do I make the most of the Post-9/11 GI Bill?" Watson has analyzed and understands more than 3,000 documents on topics exclusive to military transitions, allowing members to ask it questions and receive answers specific to their needs.

Wayblazer

Sofie 

LifeLearn Sofie is an intelligent treatment support tool for veterinarians of all backgrounds and levels of experience. Sofie is powered by IBM WatsonTM, the world’s leading cognitive computing system. She can understand and process natural language, enabling interactions that are more aligned with how humans think and interact.

Implement Watson

Dive deeper into subjects. Find insights where no one ever thought to look before. From Healthcare to Retail, there's an IBM Watson Solution that's right for your enterprise.

Healthcare

Helping doctors identify treatment options

The challenge

How Watson Changed IBM

Remember when IBM’s “Watson” computer competed on the TV game show “Jeopardy” and won? Most people probably thought “Wow, that’s cool,” or perhaps were briefly reminded of the legend of John Henry and the ongoing contest between man and machine. Beyond the media splash it caused, though, the event was viewed as a breakthrough on many fronts. Watson demonstrated that machines could understand and interact in a natural language, question-and-answer format and learn from their mistakes. This meant that machines could deal with the exploding growth of non-numeric information that is getting hard for humans to keep track of: to name two prominent and crucially important examples,

• keeping up with all of the knowledge coming out of human genome research, or 
• keeping track of all the medical information in patient records.

So IBM asked the question: How could the fullest potential of this breakthrough be realized, and how could IBM create and capture a significant portion of that value? They knew the answer was not by relying on traditional internal processes and practices for R&D and innovation. Advances in technology — especially digital technology and the increasing role of software in products and services — are demanding that large, successful organizations increase their pace of innovation and make greater use of resources outside their boundaries. This means internal R&D activities must increasingly shift towards becoming crowdsourced, taking advantage of the wider ecosystem of customers, suppliers, and entrepreneurs.

IBM, a company with a long and successful tradition of internally-focused R&D activities, is adapting to this new world of creating platforms and enabling open innovation. Case in point, rather than keep Watson locked up in their research labs, they decided to release it to the world as a platform, to run experiments with a variety of organizations to accelerate development of natural language applications and services. In January 2014 IBM announced they were spending $1 billion to launch the Watson Group, including a $100 million venture fund to support start-ups and businesses that are building Watson-powered apps using the “Watson Developers Cloud.” More than 2,500 developers and start-ups have reached out to the IBM Watson Group since the Watson Developers Cloud was launched in November 2013.

So how does it work? First, with multiple business models. Mike Rhodin, IBM’s senior vice president responsible for Watson, told me, “There are three core business models that we will run in parallel. 

• The first is around industries that we think will go through a big change in “cognitive” [natural language] computing, such as financial services and healthcare. For example, in healthcare we’re working with The Cleveland Clinic on how medical knowledge is taught. 
• The second is where we see similar patterns across industries, such as how people discover and engage with organizations and how organizations make different kinds of decisions. 
• The third business model is creating an ecosystem of entrepreneurs. We’re always looking for companies with brilliant ideas that we can partner with or acquire. With the entrepreneur ecosystem, we are behaving more like a Silicon Valley startup. We can provide the entrepreneurs with access to early adopter customers in the 170 countries in which we operate. If entrepreneurs are successful, we keep a piece of the action.”

IBM also had to make some bold structural moves in order to create an organization that could both function as a platform as well as collaborate with outsiders for open innovation. They carved out The Watson Group as a new, semi-autonomous, vertically integrated unit, reporting to the CEO. They brought in 2000 people, a dozen projects, a couple of Big Data and content analytics tools, and a consulting unit (outside of IBM Global Services). IBM’s traditional annual budget cycle and business unit financial measures weren’t right for Watson’s fast pace, so, as Mike Rhodin told me, “I threw out the annual planning cycle and replaced it with a looser, more agile management system. In monthly meetings with CEO Ginni Rometty, we’ll talk one time about technology, and another time about customer innovations. I have to balance between strategic intent and tactical, short-term decision-making. Even though we’re able to take the long view, we still have to make tactical decisions.”

More and more, organizations will need to make choices in their R&D activities to either create platforms or take advantage of them. 
Those with deep technical and infrastructure skills, like IBM, can shift the focus of their internal R&D activities toward building platforms that can connect with ecosystems of outsiders to collaborate on innovation.
The second and more likely option for most companies is to use platforms like IBM’s or Amazon’s to create their own apps and offerings for customers and partners. In either case, new, semi-autonomous agile units, like IBM’s Watson Group, can help to create and capture huge value from these new customer and entrepreneur ecosystems.

More blog posts by Brad Power

ORIGINAL: HBR

by Brad Power

August 22, 2014

IBM's Watson can now debate any topic

ORIGINAL: GizMag

By Dario Borghino

May 9, 2014

IBM's Watson can now debate (Image: IBM)Image Gallery (2 images)

Watson, IBM's supercomputer made famous three years ago for beating the very best human opponents at a game of Jeopardy, now comes with an impressive new feature. When asked to discuss any topic, it can autonomously scan its knowledge database for relevant content, "understand" the data, and argue both for and against that topic.

Watson's DeepQA is arguably the world's best computer system at natural language processing by a wide margin, which is an extraordinarily complex field of artificial intelligence. Perhaps the major difficulty in understanding human language is the lack of "common sense" in today's computers. For all its number-crunching power, Watson cannot "understand" the questions it is asked, at least not in a traditional sense. The way in which Watson answers questions is closer to symbol manipulation than to the way you and I understand and process information, but the end results are often impressive.

Watson looks at the question it is being asked and groups words together, finding statistically related phrases. Thanks to a massively parallel architecture, it then simultaneously uses thousands of language analysis algorithms to sift through its database of 15 terabytes of human knowledge and find the correct answer. The more algorithms find the same answer independently, the more a certain answer is likely to be correct. This is how, back in 2011, it managed to win a game of Jeopardy against two human champions.

In a presentation at the the Milken Institute Global Conference, IBM senior vice president and director of research John Kelly III demonstrated how Watson can now list, without human assistance, what it believes are the most valid arguments for and against a topic of choice. In other words, it can now debate for or against any topic, in natural language.

In a canned demonstration on stage, Watson was asked to present arguments for and against the sale of violent videogames to minors. After scanning Wikipedia for relevant information, Watson answered:

"I would like to raise the following points in support of the topic. Exposure to violent videogames results in increased physiological arousal, aggression-related thoughts and feelings as well as decreased social behavior. In addition, these violent games or lyrics actually cause adolescents to commit acts of real-life aggression. Finally, violent videogames can increase children's aggression.

On the other hand, I would like to note the following claims that oppose the topic. Violence in videogames is not causally linked with aggressive tendencies. In addition, most children who play videogames do not have problems. Finally, videogame play is part of an adolescent boy's normal social setting."

The answer wasn't just a mindless collage of sentences copied from various Wikipedia articles. Rather, in just a few seconds, Watson searched its sources for relevant information, scanned for arguments in favor and against the topic, selected what it believed were the strongest arguments, and then constructed sentences in natural language to illustrate the points it had selected.

For a computer that doesn't actually "understand" the questions it is being asked, this is a truly impressive achievement.

IBM believes that the technology behind Watson will prove very valuable in dealing with the exploding amount of information that we're currently facing. A fully automated system that can process huge amounts of data, extract information and find answers with a high degree of confidence could prove useful in a number of fields of human endeavor.

For instance, the system could have important applications in the medical arena. Oncologists could take a DNA profile from cancerous tissue, compare it to healthy tissue of the same organ, extract the mutations, and then use Watson to search the entire medical literature to find which specific combination of drugs will be best at targeting that specific mutation affecting that specific organ.

Back in February, IBM also announced it intends to use Watson to help countries in Africa find the answers to their development problems, with a focus on healthcare and education.

Watson is built on commercially available 750 Power servers, because IBM aims to market it to corporations in the future. The hardware to operate Watson at its minimum system requirements currently costs a relatively modest one million US dollars, but the price is expected to drop in the coming years.

The video below shows the new debating feature in action. The presentation starts at the 35 minute mark, the canned demonstration 46 minutes in.

Source: IBM via Kurzweil AI

DEBATER: DEBATING COMPUTING

• Relevant Claims
• Topic Selection
• Scanning (4M) documents
• Returning (10) Must Relevant Articles
• Scanning (3000) Sentences in top 10 Articles
• Detected Senteces which contain candidate claims
• Identified Order of Candidate Claims
• Assessed Pro and Con Polarity of Candidate Claims
• Constructed Demo Spech with Top Claim Predictions
• Ready to Deliver

Zuckerberg and Musk back software startup that mimics human learning

San Francisco startup Vicarious aims to create 'a computer that thinks like a person except it doesn't need to eat or sleep'

Vicarious is developing 'machine learning software based on the computational principles of the human brain'. Photograph: Sebastian Kaulitzki / Alamy/Alamy

Some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names are backing a hitherto low-profile tech startup that aims to recreate the human neocortex as computer code.

Vicarious, a four-year-old San Francisco-based startup, claims to be “building software that thinks and learns like a human”. According to the Wall Street Journal Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla's Elon Musk have just invested $40m in the company.

They join Peter Thiel, a PayPal billionaire, whose Founders Fund targets cutting edge technology. Ashton Kutcher, actor and tech investor, is also investing, as is Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

The neocortex is the outer layer of the cerebral hemispheres and in humans is crucial to the use of the senses as well as activities such as language, motor commands and spatial reasoning.

According to the company’s website, Vicarious is developing “machine learning software based on the computational principles of the human brain. Our first technology is a visual perception system that interprets the contents of photographs and videos in a manner similar to humans. Powering this technology is a new computational paradigm we call the Recursive Cortical Network.”

The company has already managed to create software that will solve Captcha, the online tests used by many websites to supposedly identify humans from computers. Company founder Scott Phoenix told the WSJ that if they are successful, Vicarious will have created "a computer that thinks like a person except it doesn't need to eat or sleep".

Phoenix said his aim was to create a computer that can understand not just shapes and objects but the textures associated with them. He said he hopes Vicarious’s computers will learn to how to cure diseases and create cheap, renewable energy, as well as performing the jobs that employ most human beings. “We tell investors that right now, human beings are doing a lot of things that computers should be able to do,” he said.

The investment comes amid a boom in funding for artificial intelligence ventures, In January IBM announced it was investing more than $1bn to create the Watson Group, a 2,000-employee division dedicated to developing its self-learning super-computer. The money includes $100m to fund startups that find creative uses for Watson.

Earlier this week IBM announced a partnership with the New York Genome Center that will attempt to use Watson to identify the genetic components of brain cancer.

ORIGINAL: The Guardian

Dominic Rushe in New York
21 March 2014

Advancing brain cancer treatment through genomics

IBM and the New York Genome Center testing Watson prototype on glioblastoma

We have put Watson to work in any number of different ways and in any number of different industries. Healthcare, though, was its first real job. It’s gone to medical school, and even studied health insurance. And now Watson is working with the New York Genome Center to launch a pilot that tackles a new medical challenge – glioblastoma.

Dr. Robert Darnell, MD, PhD, President, CEO and Scientific Director of the New York Genome Center (left) and Dr. Ajay Royyuru, PhD, Director of the Computational Biology Center, IBM Research (right)

The most common kind of brain cancer, glioblastoma annually kills 13,000 people in the US alone. As a cancer of the brain, it’s difficult to take tissue samples, for one, so it can’t be examined like most other kinds of cancers. And it moves quickly. Diagnosis to death is on average only 12 months.

All cancers are a disease of the genome. It’s the genome itself that’s progressively changing from normal to abnormal when someone has cancer. When we can determine which genes start to “go bad,” we can better-determine what specific treatment would work to stop it. Therein lies the challenge: How can we better understand what is happening at a genetic level?

The key to glioblastoma’s genetic code is in the human genome. So while we know our cells’ biochemical pathways, it’s also an overwhelming amount of data – billions of DNA base sequences, plus millions of studies, medical documents and clinical records.

Different kinds of brain cancers manifest in different ways and progression rates, so finding these details about glioblastoma is a molecule-sized needle in the genome haystack.

That’s why my team – with decades of research experience in biology as a data science – and NYGC, with the expertise and resources of a dozen top hospitals and medical schools, are collaborating on a project with Watson in genomics. Our goals with this prototype and ensuing studies are to assist physicians with discovering personalized treatment for patients with glioblastoma.

Watson can read millions of pages of medical literature in seconds. By applying its natural language processing and analytics to the genome, it could find connections between what’s buried in journals about the interaction of certain genes, and where those genes are in the genome. And so, in the same way Watson evaluates and hypothesizes on other medical diagnosis based on electronic health records and a doctor’s evaluation (see a demo), it could evaluate and hypothesize about mutations in a cancer cell’s genome that caused the disease, not based on a wide demographic swath of those with similar characteristics, but for an individual based on their personal genome.

Connecting medical literature to the genome 

Today, we know and have detailed medical literature on the biochemical pathways our genes take. But we don’t know where in the genome these cancerous perturbations happen in that molecular network of interactions. So, we’re loading Watson with genome data from NYGC, along with medical literature to map out where these deviations happen. Watson will be able to see that, in the context of given cancer mutations in the genome, which pathways matter. And in the context of those interactions, suggest evidence of potential treatments.

IBM Watson and New York Genome Center. Video: IBM SocialMedia

This journey takes clinicians from trials, to validating what genomic knowledge improves treatment, to routine analysis that helps patients. Ultimately, we want to see our partners at NYGC and physicians upload genomic data into the Watson Genome on the cloud, where the system could quickly synthesize a personalized report of available evidence of treatment options.

ORIGINAL: IBM Research

By Dr. Ajay Royyuru, Director of IBM Research’s Computational Biology Center

How IBM Is Using Watson And An Innovative Workspace To Crunch Big Data For Big Solutions

At the Accelerated Discovery Lab, the company is trying to create "strategic serendipity," with an open workplace and lots of cross-collaboration (and, of course, a genius super computer). The first task: Finding new cancer drugs.

IBM loves Big Data. The bigger it gets, the more servers, storage, and services Big Blue would like to sell you (a lot more, please). But the volumes involved have already grown so big that IBM’s own researchers struggle to get a handle on it.

Last year, for example, IBM fellow Laura Haas asked one of her colleagues at the company’s Almaden research center in Silicon Valley why he wasn’t using bigger data sets. Because, he replied, it takes 80% of my time just to prep the data I have. Haas realized that the more IBM’s research agenda was consumed by analytics, the more time and energy its experts would spend struggling with expanding data sets, slowing down the pace of discovery. 

The obvious thing was to hand the volumes in question over to dedicated data scientists, but removing researchers from the loop would only make things worse. Plus, it seemed to cut against the grain of Big Data, whose value isn’t governed by some function of Moore’s Law or Kryder’s Law in terms of the linear expansion of storage capacity or the falling costs of sensors.

Rather, it’s more a function of Metcalfe’s Law, which states that the value of a network is the square of the number of connected devices; the value is in the exponentially increasing connections, not the nodes. The same is true of IBM’s people, too. Instead of sidelining its researchers, how could it bring more eyes--and different ones--to opaque data sets being crunched in the cloud?

The solution, unveiled at Almaden last fall, is the Accelerated Discovery Lab, a large, open space amply equipped with comfy furniture, whiteboards, and lots of screens, not to mention an ever-evolving mix of project teams, systems managers, visiting clients, corporate anthropologists, and drop-ins, not to mention a sliver of Watson IBM's newest super computer. As the lab’s name implies, the goal is crack the code on the optimal combination of diversity, proximity, physical space, and cloud computing to spot opportunities in the gaps between disciplines faster and more often.

“We call it cultivating ‘strategic serendipity,’” says Haas, who is also the director of technology and operations for the lab. “It’s those ‘A-ha!’ moments you have in the shower or often around the water cooler. We want to bring people together in a rich enough environment they want to play in it, and then create serendipity by leveraging the connections in the room, the connections in the data, and our ability to see what users are doing.”

The lab’s first project was to apply Watson’s natural language-processing ability to new domains, with drug research at the top of the list. Working with computational biologists from the Baylor College of Medicine, IBM’s data scientists began plowing through millions of papers, patents, and clinical studies culled from databases and IBM’s pharma customers, before eventually narrowing their focus to the tumor-suppressing gene TP-53. Sifting through the literature for promising, but overlooked chemicals to treat mutated genes, within a few months the team found four candidates. According to Jeff Welser, the lab’s director of strategy and program development, “historically, you find about one per year.”

 

That’s pretty fast, but could it have been faster? Part of the lab’s mission is to test hypotheses about the space itself. “We’re trying to instrument our projects from the get-go, recording them from the day they start,” Haas says, benchmarking their progress against similar teams that aren’t in the lab to see whether all those whiteboards and multi-disciplinary teams yield better tangible results.

While there are currently no plans to build similar labs in any of IBM’s other research centers, Haas hopes to someday develop a software tool that might help the company manage its own far-flung resources. Imagine a version of Watson that recognizes who or what it is you’re searching for, then begins suggesting data sets and colleagues working in tangential fields the IBMer might have otherwise never thought of.

For now, however, when it comes to cross-pollination, “there is more than I expected,” she says. “And less than I want.”
[Painting by Paul Corio]

ORIGINAL: FastCo

The rapid progress of artificial intelligence

NEW YORK (MYFOXNY) -

Meet the humanoid robot called Robothespian. He is designed to interact with people even through Skype. Created by England-based Engineered Arts, the Robothespian runs on algorithms and codes, or a form of artificial intelligence. He recognizes people, and sees your emotional state and more.

New York News

Humanoid robots are the type of thing that are just the warm-up act for what is coming next in the world of A.I. But first, let's take a step back at just what defines these thinking machines.

For many people artificial intelligence is associated with Hollywood sci-fi like Hal 9000 in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" or more recently the film "Her," in which a guy falls in love with his operating system.

In everyday life A.I. is everywhere. We asked Tracey Lull, a doctor in computer science specializing in artificial intelligence for a basic definition. She says in her mind A.I. is systems that exhibit what we would traditionally call intelligence.

From cars that can drive themselves, filtering software utilized by Amazon to predict what you may purchase next, to Apple's voice activated SIRI are all a form of A.I. Like all software now, SIRI can't think on its own, but the advanced recognition technology allows it to intuitively answer questions.

Similarly, IBM's Watson can respond by crunching millions of pieces of data quickly. The results are possible advances in the health industry. And it crushes the human competition on "Jeopardy."

Now researchers are focusing more and more an advanced form of A.I. called deep learning, meaning software programs that won't only sort stored data but will learn to recognize things like photos and faces by mimicking logic, like a human brain just much, much faster.

Companies like Facebook, Netflix and Google are all investing heavily in this deep learning technology. Futurist Robert Wald imagines the possibilities.

"What if it starts providing more intelligence for how to do a search or say -- you asked about that last week -- here's something I've noticed," Wald says.

A Google researcher predicts that by 2029 the machines will match human intelligence.

That is a topic that Grey Scott, publisher of online tech site Serious Wonder, has often pondered.

"Imagine a machine that becomes so intelligent that it decides it wants to improve its own operating system," Scott says.

Luke Muehlhauser is executive director of California-based Machine Intelligence Research Institute, part of a growing field focused on making sure good things happen when machines surpass human intelligence. The company just published the ebook "Smarter Than Us."

"Humans rule the planet not because we're the strongest or the fastest -- but because we're the smartest and so once the machines become even smarter than we are," Muehlhauser says. "They'll be steering the future rather than us."

It is a rational human fear that brings us back to that robot. I asked him what he thinks of humans being worried that robots intend to take over the world.

"I would never want to take over the world," Robothespian says. "Politics leaves no time for acting."

Or maybe that's just what they want us to think.

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ORIGINAL: MyFoxNY

By DAN BOWENS, @danbowensfox5 

Feb 25, 2014