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Tag: IBM Watson

  • 2021 IBM Call for Code Tackles Climate Change

    2021 IBM Call for Code Tackles Climate Change

    IBM has announced its 2021 Call for Code challenge, with the theme of tackling climate change.

    IBM’s Call for Code is currently in its fourth year, and calls on developers and problem-solvers to tackle some of the world’s biggest issues. This year, the theme is climate change, with IBM inviting developers to submit solutions on three sub-themes: zero hunger; clean water and sanitation; and responsible production and green consumption.

    A major theme of the Call for Code challenge is the use of open source software, and this year is no different. IBM is emphasizing solutions built on “Red Hat OpenShift, IBM Cloud, IBM Watson, IBM Blockchain, atmospheric data from IBM’s Weather Company, and developer resources and APIs from partners like Intuit and New Relic.”

    IBM is building on its decades-long environmental advocacy, in the hopes that participants will be able to help address one of the biggest challenges the world is currently facing.

    “Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time, and we must apply our collective ingenuity and cutting-edge technologies to make a lasting difference,” said Ruth Davis, director of Call for Code, IBM. “Together with our ecosystem of partners, IBM will work with the winning team to incubate and deploy their solution in communities where it’s most needed, just as we’ve done with past winners. I encourage every developer and innovator around the world to seize this opportunity through Call for Code to change our climate trajectory.”

  • IBM, ServiceNow In New AI Partnership

    IBM, ServiceNow In New AI Partnership

    IBM and ServiceNow are partnering to provide enterprise solutions that utilize AI to automate IT operations. The new joint solution combines IBM’s AI‑powered hybrid cloud software and professional services to ServiceNow’s intelligent workflow capabilities and IT service and operations management products. The solution raises up deep AI‑driven insights from their data and then recommends actions for IT organizations to take that help them prevent and fix IT issues at scale.

    “AI is one of the biggest forces driving change in the IT industry to the extent that every company is swiftly becoming an AI company,” said Arvind Krishna, Chief Executive Officer, IBM. “By partnering with ServiceNow and their market-leading Now Platform, clients will be able to use AI to quickly mitigate unforeseen IT incident costs. Watson AIOps with ServiceNow’s Now Platform is a powerful new way for clients to use automation to transform their IT operations.”

    “For every CEO, digital transformation has gone from opportunity to necessity,” said ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. “As ServiceNow leads the workflow revolution, our partnership with IBM combines the intelligent automation capabilities of the Now Platform with the power of Watson AIOps. We are focused on driving a generational step improvement in productivity, innovation, and growth. ServiceNow and IBM are helping customers meet the digital demands of 21st-century business.”

    ServiceNow says that in today’s technology‑driven organization, even the smallest outages can cause massive economic impact for both lost revenue and reputation. They note that this partnership will help customers address these challenges and help avoid unnecessary loss of revenue and reputation by automating old, manual IT processes and increasing IT productivity.

    Here is what IBM and ServiceNow are planning:

    • Joint Solution: IBM and ServiceNow will deliver a first of its kind joint IT solution that marries IBM Watson AIOps with ServiceNow’s intelligent workflow capabilities and market‑leading ITSM and ITOM Visibility products to help customers prevent and fix IT issues at scale. Now, businesses that use ServiceNow ITSM can push historical incident data into the deep machine learning algorithms of Watson AIOps to create a baseline of their normal IT environment, while simultaneously having the ability to help them identify anomalies outside of that normal, which could take a human up to 60% longer to manually identify, according to initial results from specific Watson AIOps early adopter clients. The joint solution will position customers to enhance employee productivity, obtain greater visibility into their operational footprint and respond to incidents and issues faster.

    Specific product capabilities will include:

    • ServiceNow ITSM allows IT to deliver scalable services on a single cloud platform estimated to increase productivity by 20%.
    • ServiceNow ITOM Visibility automatically delivers near real‑time visibility from a native Configuration Management Database, into all resources and the true operational state of all business services.
    • IBM Watson AIOps uses AI to automate how enterprises detect, diagnose, and respond to, and remediate IT anomalies in real time. The solution is designed to help CIOs make more informed decisions when predicting and shaping future outcomes, focus resources on higher‑value work and build more responsive and intelligent applications that can stay up and running longer. Using Watson AIOps, the average time to resolve incidents was reduced by 65 percent, according to one recent initial proof of concept project with a client.
    • Services: IBM is expanding its global ServiceNow business to include additional capabilities that provide advisory, implementation, and managed services on the Now Platform. Highly‑skilled IBM practitioners will apply their expertise to facilitate rapid delivery of valuable insights and innovation to clients. IBM Services professionals also will introduce clients to intelligent workflows to help improve resiliency and reduce IT risk. ServiceNow is co‑investing in training and certification of IBM employees and dedicated staff for customer success.

    “Businesses are facing increased pressures to match the digital pace of a cloud‑first market in order to meet the demands of their customers,” said Stephen Elliot, program vice president, DevOps, and Management Software, IDC. “The C‑ suite is transforming workflows to deliver insights and automation for more efficient customer engagement models and cost containment strategies for the business while simplifying IT operations and increasing collaboration between IT and business stakeholders.”

  • IBM Watson Brings AI to H&R Block Tax Preparation

    IBM Watson Brings AI to H&R Block Tax Preparation

    IBM announced a partnership with H&R block to use their artificial intelligent platform IBM Watson to radically improve tax preparation. “Introducing the biggest advancement in tax preparation technology,” exclaimed IBM in an announcement video. “Say hello to the partnership between H&R Block and IBM Watson. Imagine being able to understand all 74,000 pages of the US tax code along with thousands of yearly tax law changes and other information, plus locks deep insights built from over 600 million data points.”

    “Imagine being able to understand all that information,” noted IBM. “Watson will learn from it and help your tax pro find every credit, deduction and opportunity available. The one of a kind partnership between H&R Block and Watson is revolutionizing the way people file taxes.”

    H&R Block is marketing the new AI integration as “the future of tax prep” as seen in their new Google ad:

    “H&R Block is revolutionizing the tax filing experience,” stated Bill Cobb, President and Chief Executive Officer of H&R Block. “By combining the human expertise, knowledge and judgement of our tax pros with the cutting edge cognitive computing power of Watson, we are creating a future where every last deduction and credit can be found.”

    “Tax preparation is a perfect use for Watson,” noted David Kenny, Senior Vice President of IBM Watson. “Just like Watson is already revolutionizing other industries like healthcare and education, here H&R Block with Watson is learning to process incredible amounts of information, helping create tailored solutions for H&R Block customers.”

    IBM expects Watson to learn through H&R Blocks millions of unique tax filings how to maximize credits and deductions for every customer, elimination inconsistencies caused by human tax preparation experts. The more information Watson receives says Kenny, the smarter Watson gets.

    “This is a major shift in how man and machine work together to help us in our everyday lives,” says Kenny.

  • Historic Breakthrough: Microsoft Reaches Virtual Parity With Human Speech

    Historic Breakthrough: Microsoft Reaches Virtual Parity With Human Speech

    In an historic breakthrough, Microsoft’s AI team has developed technology that recognizes speech as well as humans. Their research team published a paper (PDF) showing that their speech recognition system makes errors at the same rate as a professional transcriptionists, which is 5.9%.

    The IBM Watson research team published a word error rate (WER) of 6.9% earlier this year. They noted that their previous WER was 8%, announced in May 2015 and that was 36% better than previously reported external results.

    Clearly, artificial intelligence technology is on a pace that will make machine word recognition superior to human word recognition in just a matter of months. Of course WER is only one way to measure and the technology must continue to improve for perfect comprehension and to prompt human level responses.

    Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Google, Amazon and a host of other companies are on a mission to use AI to integrate speech recognition technology into virtually every device. In order to truly make the IoT meaningful to people, we will need to be able to communicate with them in our language. By 2020, there will be over 30 billion things connected to the internet, according to Cloudera.

    “We’ve reached human parity,” said Xuedong Huang, who leads Microsoft’s Microsoft’s Advanced Technology Group and is considered their chief speech scientist. “This is an historic achievement.”

    Microsoft says that the milestone will have broad implications for consumer and business products including consumer devices like Xbox and personal digital assistants such as Cortana.

    “This will make Cortana more powerful, making a truly intelligent assistant possible,” notes Harry Shum, the executive vice president who heads the Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research group. “Even five years ago, I wouldn’t have thought we could have achieved this. I just wouldn’t have thought it would be possible.”

    “The next frontier is to move from recognition to understanding,” said Geoffrey Zweig, who manages the Speech & Dialog research group.

    The holy grail according to Shum is “moving away from a world where people must understand computers to a world in which computers must understand us.”

    At the rate the technology is advancing, that goal now seems within reach.

  • Blekko Shuts Down, Becomes Part Of IBM Watson

    Back in 2010, an alternative search engine called Blekko emerged. It came from Rich Skrenta, co-founder & former CEO of Topix and NewHoo (which went on to become The Open Directory Project or DMOZ). It aimed to crowd source search by using the public to refine its algorithms and make search results more relevant and less spammy.

    IBM has acquired its technology and team for Watson.

    If you go to Blekko.com now, you’ll just see this:

    IBM says the acquisition will provide Watson with more content to offer in its products and services. From the announcement:

    Blekko brings advanced Web-crawling, categorization and intelligent filtering technology. Its technology crawls the Web continually and gathers information from the most highly relevant and most credible Web pages. It uses classification techniques to create thousands of topical categories, making that data more useful and insightful.

    These capabilities complement the recent acquisition of AlchemyAPI as well existing technologies available on the Watson Developer Cloud. The combination of these technologies will further assist our clients in applying cognitive computing toward making more informed, evidence-based decisions.

    A metaphor to understand how this works is to think about the information on the Internet and other sources as a vast underground oil field. Blekko’s technologies are like oil exploration and production teams that locate the high-quality oil, drill, and deliver it to the refinery. AlchemyAPI’s technologies, together with Watson’s existing capabilities, are like the refineries that refine the oil into a multitude of finished products, such as gasoline, heating oil or jet fuel. IBM and its partners then distribute insights to the points of impact, the way tanker trucks deliver fuel to gas stations or depots.

    In its early days, Blekko showed signs of gaining some traction. Skrenta was appearing on search panels at conferences alongside Google’s Matt Cutts, and the company was making interesting partnerships and raising funding.

    In fact, Cutts even encouraged people to check Blekko out at one point:

    In 2012, Blekko launched a suite of SEO tools, and a few months later, it launched a new search app for tablets called Izik (which is apparently out of commission now as well).

    We’ve reached out to Skrenta for additional comment on the acquisition and the closure of the Blekko service, and will update accordingly.