Summary: IBM Senior Vice President John E. Kelly says the
company has entered a new era in computing, and announces the company's
plans for future partnerships.
YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, NY – IBM began its colloquium on cognitive
computing today with a jewel in the company's crown. Senior Vice
President John E. Kelly took the stage following a video from January
14th, 2011 – the day when IBM's Watson machine handedly beat Jeopardy
champs Ken Jennings and Ken Rutter.
“I remember saying to the audience at that time,” recalled Kelly, “I
don't know if we're going to win today. But it's only a matter of when
not if a system like Watson is going to surpass human beings at this
task. People asked, 'When did you realize how important this was?' I
think I realized in the year coming up to this that this was really
special. Something was really changing in the way that computer systems
interacted with people – something very big beyond just a game show is
occurring here.”
So what is going on here? The world of data is now exploding, Kelly
said, and machines like Watson have arose to provide us with better ways
of harnessing this information.
“We are literally creating a digital universe,” he said. “And the way
we have to process that is different than we've ever experienced
before. What we were creating was a system that would be able to deal
with portions of this tsunami of data coming at us. If we try to use
first generation computing against this wave, it can't be done. So we
need a whole different set of systems, extracting information from noisy
data sources in order to come up with rational answers.”
Kelly broke down the history of computing into three eras. First,
there was the the tabulating era, with early calculators and tabulating
machines made of mechanical systems and later, vacuum tubes. “In the
first era of computing we basically fed data in on punch cards,” he
said. “There was really no extraction of the data itself, the data was
just going along for the ride.”
Next came the programmable era of computing, which ranged in form
from vacuum tubes to microprocessors. “It was about taking processes and
putting them into the machine,” Kelly explained. “It's completely
controlled by the programming we inflict on the system.”
And now, Kelly said, we are entering the era of cognitive computing,
where computers can help us to unlock the insights that this new wealth
of data holds. “If we don't make this transition,” Kelly argued, “the
data will be too big for us to have any impact on it. I think that this
era of computing is going to be about scaling human capability. The
separation between human and machine is going to blur in a very
fundamental way.”
Kelly says that following the Jeopardy victory his team at IBM has
focused their energy on the area of medicine. “It's very clear to many
people in the field,” he said, “that we're approaching a tipping point
in healthcare. We're at a point where genomic data is available, and
it's possible in fields like oncology to map the genome of a tumor. It's
also now possible to access all the information in journals and
databases. The problem is both sets of data are so massive, that by the
time a human being can look at all of it you are dead.” Kelly explained
that cognitive computing can allow access to this data in a time frame
that is actually useful.
He also suggested applications for Watson-like technology for
pharmaceutical companies. A machine can compile all the research
available, and then identify where gaps exist. “The system,” he said,
“can sort all known patent information and say your competitors are
here, but no one’s looking over here. Go look over here.”
Kelly also stressed the importance of collaboration in IBM's
cognitive computing efforts. The company today announced an academic
initiative that will pair it with researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT,
New York University and Rensselaer Polytechnic.
“This is no longer a game,” he said. “This is about unleashing a new
form of interaction between man a machine. And unleashing a new power in
that data we're generating.”
By: Audrey Quinn
Link: http://www.zdnet.com/ibm-research-stakes-its-future-on-cognitive-computing-7000021473/
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