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Tag: Watson

  • How IBM Watson AI Technology Was Used at the US Open

    How IBM Watson AI Technology Was Used at the US Open

    At the Streaming Media East 2018 conference, David Clevinger, Senior Director, Product Management & Strategy, IBM Cloud Video, discussed how Watson’s AI technology was used at the recently concluded US Open Tennis Championship:

    The typical use case that we’ve been seeing is media entities that have large back catalogs of content that was originally created when they didn’t have complex metadata toolsets, didn’t have necessarily the right people applying metadata, didn’t think of all the use cases on the output side, such as historical content.

    Teaching Watson About Tennis

    A very concrete example is work that we’ve done for the US Open. We actually took hundreds of thousands of video clips and photos and news articles and vocabulary terms and proper names and fed it to Watson and helped Watson to understand what tennis was about. This was so that it could do things like when you heard the word “ash” it was capital ASHE, Arthur Ashe, as opposed to lowercase. There was a lot of training around that.

    The output then became our ability to create clips based on what was happening within an event but also to describe historical video as well. That’s critical for companies with large media back catalogs who then need to optimize that before. You can apply it to live, of course, but that’s a typical use case that we see.

    It’s a Recursive Learning System

    It’s a recursive learning system where we took a cross-section of a set of video assets, described it to Watson, said this is what’s going on, this is who this player is, and this is what is being said. We were then able to turn it loose really on other unstructured assets, have it say what it thought it was finding, and then we were able to correct it.

    We were able to basically train it up to understand tennis specifically.

    Teaching Watson to Score Excitement

    Then the output was we could then turn it loose on a bunch of different kinds of outputs for the client. The outputs are closed captioning, video clips, and excitement scoring. We were able to do things like listen for crowd noise and then say this must be really exciting because the crowd is making a lot of noise at this moment, so we were able to turn that into an excitement score.

    We wouldn’t be able to do that if we didn’t really help the algorithm understand what it was looking at and how it should be thinking about that body of work. Then we just turned it loose and let it go.

    That’s the idea, to get it to the point where you can just turn it loose and let it run.

  • The Cognitive Era is the Next Societal Revolution That Will Change the World

    The Cognitive Era is the Next Societal Revolution That Will Change the World

    “The transformational nature of artificial intelligence requires new metrics of success for our profession,” says Guru Banavar who is responsible for advancing the next generation of cognitive technologies and solutions with IBM’s global scientific ecosystem including academia, government agencies and other partners. “It is no longer enough to advance the science of AI and the engineering of AI-based systems. We now shoulder the added burden of ensuring these technologies are developed, deployed and adopted in responsible, ethical and enduring ways.”

    IBM is at the cutting edge of the practical integration of artificial intelligence into real-world solutions as evidenced by IBM Watson’s recent integration with H&R Block software to improve tax deduction possibilities for the average consumer. Now that’s something that everybody can relate to!

    Dr. Banavar recently delivered the 2017 Turing Lecture, a prestigious annual lecture co-hosted by the British Computer Society (BCS) and the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). ”

    “Most of the really exciting work going on in AI today is not about this at all (referring to the movie Morgan which focused on artificial general intelligence)”, noted Dr. Banavar. “It’s not about machines that look and talk and feel like humans. It’s not about machines that work like humans, but its about machines that work with humans.” He says that although this is a rather fine distinction, it’s a really important distinction.

    The Cognitive Era

    “There is a big revolution going on and in my mind is of the same magnitude of the Industrial Revolution,” says Dr. Banavar. “Every time one of these revolutions has happened we have seen tremendous changes in society, in the economy’s of the world and in all our lives. I believe we are at the beginning of yet another such revolution. I call that the Cognitive Era.”

    “I think that we as human beings are now getting overwhelmed with respect to our cognitive capabilities,” commented Dr. Banavar. “Just trying to understand all of the data around us, all of the knowledge around us and trying make the right decisions about our daily lives, about our jobs, is getting really hard. We need to augment our cognition with the cognition of machines.”

    Dr. Banavar gave the example that we all know that doctors can often be years behind the latest research and data. “What if your doctor had the benefit of a machine that could help do this kind of analysis before they make their final decision?”

    View Dr. Banavar’s lecuture in its entirety starting at the 18:10 mark:

  • 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.

  • How to Use In-Store Behavioral Data to Increase Sales

    How to Use In-Store Behavioral Data to Increase Sales

    We all know that online shopping behavior is tracked in order to increase sales, but what about the behavior of brick and mortar shoppers? The Global Director of Marketing for IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT), Scott Neuman, points out that gathering data about a shoppers activity in a physical retail store is just as important as it is when the customer is shopping online.

    Capturing Offline Shopper Data

    “Over the past decade we have seen many advances in online retailing ranging from dynamic pricing to predictive buyer behavior, all with the goal of providing better service and driving increased revenue,” notes Neuman. “All of this has been achieved through the creative use of data captured through the experience. But have in store experiences kept pace with the online experience? Is the in store data that is being captured falling into a black hole? Is the potential data being captured at all?”

    Neuman suggests that just like how retailers track their online customers, knowing what products are viewed and in what order, physical stores could and should do the same in order to increase the bottom line. He says that by adding RFID tags on each item in the store, a retailer can track the movement of shoppers and know what order they put products into their carts.

    Adjusting In-Store Marketing Based on In-Store Behavior

    You can also know how long customers browsed in the vicinity of certain products. Neuman says that with this data retailers should ask, “What made them move on? Was there more you could have done with the display? Was the price point wrong?”

    Using IoT data a retailer can “correlate the current flow of customers with check out receipts” in order to adjust in-store promotions with in-store data. “Much the same way online retails can track a customer’s digital journey of page views and their shopping cart at checkout,” said Neuman. “Then you can tease out where opportunities lie to not only increase sales, but increase customer satisfaction.”

    How Will the Internet of Things Impact Marketing?

    IBM’s IoT marketing director was recently asked how will the Internet of Things impact marketing. “It really comes down to the data that’s available to marketers,” said Neuman. “When you think about the sensors and what they are connected to, reaching out to where customers are and where they are making decisions, that’s really the nirvana for marketing!”

    The IoT revolution is an “explosion of data” that is a significant opportunity for retailers, but also an extreme challenge. “How do you make sense of all of that?” asks Neuman. “That’s where technology really starts to play a role.”

  • IBM: Watson to Predict the Future and Truly Change the World

    IBM: Watson to Predict the Future and Truly Change the World

    Within 10 years, IBM believes that it’s artificial intelligence driven Watson will literally predict the future. “It won’t be long before Watson is predicting the future,” said Dr. John E. Kelly III, IBM senior vice president of Cognitive Solutions and IBM Research, at the World of Watson conference in Las Vegas yesterday. “Doctors, for example, may use Watson to help predict when a diabetic patient is about to have a blood sugar spike.”

    He added, “When that happens, then we truly, truly, have changed the world.”

    “The technology is not even moving fast,” he says. “It’s accelerating. It’s moving faster and faster every day. Honestly, it blows my mind and I’m an optimist.”

    Can Watson ever become creative? He noted the difficulty of that question and then realized that Watson is already being creative with Chef Watson and Cognitive music, where it’s actually writing songs.

    We are potentially reaching a world-changing moment with AI and its capability to think, create and even predict.

  • 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.

  • Watson-Powered Toy Uses IBM Supercomputer to Develop Relationship with Your Kid

    We’ve come a long way from Barbie.

    If you’re looking for an interactive toy that can talk with your kid, tell knock-knock jokes, and help them learn by getting to know their specific needs – there’s a Kickstarter campaign for you. It’s called CogniToys, and it’s a super-smart toy dinosaur with its own personality.

    “Each toy will get to know the child and grow with him/her, interacting directly with them to create an experience around each child’s personal interests. The toy will explore favorite colors, favorite toys, interests and use these to customize engagement. Even better, the toy has a personality of its own that changes over time,” says its makers, Elemental Path.

    The CogniToys dino will let kids “ask thousands of questions and receive age-appropriate answers, give commands to the toy allowing the child to discover hidden talents, and hear a number of stories and even create their own stories.”

    So, how does it do this? With the help of IBM’s supercomputer, Watson. You may remember it as the one kicking all the ass on Jeopardy a while back.

    Elemental Path recently won the grand prize in IBM’s Watson Mobile App Developer Challenge, which granted the company access to the supercomputer and all its knowledge. The company quickly moved into the pre-production/prototype phase, and are now fielding donations via Kickstarter to help get the toy’s production into full swing.

    And they’re doing pretty well. In fewer than three days, the project has already doubled its $50,000 goal and is approaching 1,000 individual backers.

    You can back the Kickstarter right now and a $99 pledge gets you a CogniToy Dino. Elemental Path says it’s going to make additional colors of its product with the extra money it receives. Although, with the current rate of pledges holding, the company is going to have to make up some new stretch goals.

    Image via CogniToys, Kickstarter

  • IBM Watson Analytics Now Available In Beta

    IBM announced that Watson Analytics is now available in beta. The offering was announced in September. It’s described as a natural language-based service to give businesses instant access to predictive and visual analytics tools. The company called it the biggest announcement it’s made in a decade as an analytics provider.

    “Since being announced in September, more than 22,000 people have already registered to access Watson Analytics, including an organization in the hospitality industry which is using Watson Analytics to better understand their clients at sporting events,” a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews. “They have identified two important business variables with an over 80 percent predictive strength — in fact, they mentioned that ‘it was a question they had been trying to answer for six months!’”

    That’s a pretty nice endorsement.

    “As part of its effort to equip all professionals with the tools needed to do their jobs better, Watson Analytics provides business professionals with a unified experience and natural language dialogue so they can better understand data and more quickly reach business goals,” says IBM. “For example, a marketing, HR or sales rep can quickly source data, cleanse and refine it, discover insights, predict outcomes, visualize results, create reports and dashboards and explain results in familiar business terms.”

    The availability of Watson Analytics follows IBM’s recently announced partnership with Twitter, which includes plans to offer Twitter data as part of the product.

    Image via IBM

  • IBM Announces New Watson-Powered Partner Apps, Developer Tools

    IBM Announces New Watson-Powered Partner Apps, Developer Tools

    IBM announced some new Watson-powered cloud apps for the financial services, healthcare, IT services, non-profit, retail, security, and travel industries. This comes as the company opens its new IBM Watson global headquarters in New York.

    The company is announced new ecosystem partners across these industries. These include: WayBlazer in travel; Red Ant, Reflexis, and Sellpoints in retail; Findability Sciences in non-profit, LifeLearn in veterinary care; GenieMD, Welltok, and @Point of Care in healthcare; nad SparkCognition and CHIPS Technology Group in IT.

    “Built on IBM Cloud with SoftLayer at its base, these apps use Watson’s cognitive intellect in areas as diverse as helping physicians work with patients to better manage their health, assist veterinarians in providing the best possible care to animals, and tapping into personal preferences to help travelers plan the perfect vacation, and many more,” IBM said.

    “These innovators, embodying the entrepreneurial spirit, are transforming the ways industry and individuals operate harnessing the power of Watson’s cognitive intellect and creating outcomes once thought impossible to achieve” said Stephen Gold, Vice President of IBM’s Watson Group. “This marks an important milestone for the Watson Ecosystem as we empower organizations to use next generation technology, using information as the cognitive fuel, to help solve formidable challenges across industries.”

    For more on what specifically each of these partners is doing, you can peruse the announcement here.

    IBM is also extending its cloud-based platform for mobile and web app development, Bluemix, which runs on SoftLayer. New services available include user modeling, machine translation, language identification, concept expansion, message resonance, relationship extraction, question and answer, and visualization rendering. Again, for specifics, click the link above.

    All of this follows IBM’s biggest announcement in a decade as an analytics provider – Watson Analytics for businesses to access predictive and visual analytics tools. More on that here.

    Image via Facebook

  • IBM Announces Watson Analytics For Businesses

    IBM announced Watson Analytics, a natural language-based service to give businesses instant access to predictive and visual analytics tools. The company calls it the biggest announcement it’s made in a decade as an analytics provider.

    Here’s a look:

    The first version will include a freemium version of its cloud-based service for desktop and mobile devices, and will offer access to data refinement and data warehousing services. It uses natural language to make interaction with predictive analytics easier to understand questions about things like the key drivers of product sales, which benefits are driving employee retention, and which deals are more likely to close.

    “Unlike analytics offerings designed primarily for data scientists and analysts predominantly focused on visualization, IBM Watson Analytics automates steps like data preparation, predictive analysis, and visual storytelling for business professionals across data intensive disciplines including marketing, sales, operations, finance and human resources,” the company says.

    “Watson Analytics is designed to help all business people – from sales reps on the road to company CEOs – see patterns, pursue ideas and improve all types of decisions,” adds Bob Picciano, Senior Vice President, Information and Analytics Group at IBM. “We have eliminated the barrier between the answers they seek, the analytics they want and the data in the form they need. The combination of Watson-fueled analytics to magnify human cognition, the vast potential of big data, and cloud-scale delivery to PCs, smart phones and other devices is transformational.”

    As with other IBm Cloud solutions, Watson Analytics will be hosted on SoftLayer and will be available through the IBM Cloud marketplace. It will also be available through IBM Bluemix for developers.

    The company says it will be available for beta test users within 30 days, and offered more broadly later this year in a variety of freemium and premium packages.

    Image via YouTube

  • IBM Soon To Offer Watson As Cloud Development Platform

    It has been quite a while since we have heard the name “Watson” in association with IBM. I am sure that for most of you, the last time that you heard of IBM’s Watson was his debut on Jeopardy!; however, Watson has been very busy lately. “He” has been working with Citigroup to analyze company data, actively learning the Urban Dictionary and now providing its cloud development platform to third-party businesses.

    According to ComputerWorld, the computing giant IBM will soon be offering access to Watson’s super-computing abilities to businesses in the hope that they will be creating more artificial-intelligence-based applications for their products and services. Watson’s “cognitive learning” talents will be utilized to help build these applications.

    Rob High, IBM’s CTO of Watson, stated the following in an interview with ComputerWorld:

    “We’ve been developing, evolving and maturing the technology. It’s stable and mature enough to support an ecosystem now. We’ve become convinced there’s something very special here and we shouldn’t be holding it back.”

    With its “cognitive learning” capabilities, Watson has been very beneficial and involved within the health care sector since his debut on Jeopardy! High elaborates “Cognitive systems are different in that they have the ability to simulate human behavior. For the most part humans have had to adapt to the computer. As we get into cognitive systems we open up the aperture to the computer adapting to the human.”

    With Watson’s cloud-computing options offered to businesses, IBM is offering the following tools:

    • Development Toolkit
    • Access to Watson’s API (Application Programming Interface)
    • Educational Materials/Documentation
    • Application Marketplace

    ComputerWorld states that some of the details for the Watson cloud service have yet to be finalized.

    [Image: YouTube]

  • IBM Layoffs Having Dramatic Effects Across North America

    IBM has initiated another round of layoffs, and while the national story is concerned with the total number of employees dismissed–anywhere from 6000 to 8000 employees, according to some estimations–if you take a closer look at the towns and cities affected, the story has much more impact. News organizations covering the areas where IBM employees entered unemployment present a much different picture when compared to the simple “statistical casualties of the economy” approach. The local reaction offers a personal look at how these layoffs, which are done to improve a company’s bottom line.

    In New York’s Westchester and Dutchess Counties, IBM’s clean sweep affected more than 700 people. In Ottawa, Canada, another 200 IBM employees were shown the door. Understandably, the word “overjoyed” would not be used to describe the tone:

    CTV Ottawa reporter John Hua has been talking to employees who say the mood inside the campus is “gloomy”. Employees told Hua that up to 20 per cent of the Ottawa staff have received layoff notices. Some have been employed with IBM/Cognos in the capital for more than 30 years.

    Meanwhile, the state of Vermont is waiting to hear how many IBM employees added to that state’s unemployment list:

    Gov. Peter Shumlin said in a statement released by his office, “We heard from IBM today that sites around the United States, including the Essex facility, will be notified of a workforce reorganization that will result in layoffs. I am always concerned when we learn that Vermonters face job losses.”

    Of course, if someone was talented to get a job working for IBM, it stands to reason they have acquired enough skills to be effective at other stops in the technology industry. That being said, most people like to make such decisions voluntarily, not because they were caught in a “workforce remix” whirlwind. Furthermore, if you are one of the employees who was laid off after 30 years of service, changing careers probably didn’t sound like the best idea, at least before the layoffs were announced.

    Thanks to the significant national attention that comes whenever a company like IBM cuts its workforce, many of the local governments for the areas involved are announcing the establishment of programs to assist those who were shown the door.

    Courtesies here, here, and here.

  • Multivitamins, Blueberries Could Complicate Late-Stage Cancer Treatment

    Multivitamins, Blueberries Could Complicate Late-Stage Cancer Treatment

    Noble Prize recipient James Watson this month published a proposal stating that antioxidants, such as those found in blueberries or multivitamin supplements, could actually promote late-stage cancer progression. The paper, published in the journal Open Biology, is considered by Watson to be “among my most important work since the double helix.” Watson and his colleague Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA in 1953.

    Watson believes that oxidants and antioxidants could play a role in currently incurable cancers. From the paper:

    For as long as I have been focused on the understanding and curing of cancer (I taught a course on Cancer at Harvard in the autumn of 1959), well-intentioned individuals have been consuming antioxidative nutritional supplements as cancer preventatives if not actual therapies. The past, most prominent scientific proponent of their value was the great Caltech chemist, Linus Pauling, who near the end of his illustrious career wrote a book with Ewan Cameron in 1979, Cancer and Vitamin C, about vitamin C’s great potential as an anti-cancer agent [52]. At the time of his death from prostate cancer in 1994, at the age of 93, Linus was taking 12 g of vitamin C every day. In light of the recent data strongly hinting that much of late-stage cancer’s untreatability may arise from its possession of too many antioxidants, the time has come to seriously ask whether antioxidant use much more likely causes than prevents cancer.

    All in all, the by now vast number of nutritional intervention trials using the antioxidants β-carotene, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E and selenium have shown no obvious effectiveness in preventing gastrointestinal cancer nor in lengthening mortality [53]. In fact, they seem to slightly shorten the lives of those who take them. Future data may, in fact, show that antioxidant use, particularly that of vitamin E, leads to a small number of cancers that would not have come into existence but for antioxidant supplementation. Blueberries best be eaten because they taste good, not because their consumption will lead to less cancer.

    Watson proposes that the cell-killing ability of some anti-cancer treatments is due to the action of a group of molecules called reactive oxygen species (ROS). If ROS induce cell death, Watson claims, it could explain why chemotherapy-resistant cancers also become resistant to radiation treatments.

  • IBM’s Watson Cursed Like a Sailor After Being Taught the Urban Dictionary

    IBM’s Watson Cursed Like a Sailor After Being Taught the Urban Dictionary

    It’s a fact that Watson, IBM’s massive AI project, is smarter than the average human. I mean, it kicked Ken Jennings’ ass on Jeopardy that one time. “Smart,” in that respect, meant the ability to pull knowledge from terabytes worth of Wikipedia data based on verbal clues.

    But Ken Jennings (and you and me) has Watson beat in one measure of intelligence: human language. Once that fact no longer holds true, well, we’re all in a hell of a lot of trouble.

    Nevertheless, IBM is trying to improve Watson’s human language prowess. And to do that, Watson needs to understand how humans talk – how they really talk. I’m talking about slang, of course. People simply don’t realize just how complicated human language really is. Teaching Watson proper and direct English is nowhere near good enough to turn it into a fully functional conversation partner. I mean, how the hell is it going to know how to respond to YOLO?

    So, to work on that slang element of human language, IBM researchers decided to teach Watson the Urban Dictionary – you know, the online database of anything and everything human begins say – from the inane to the foul.

    Apparently, this led to a problem. Watson developed a mouth like a sailor. From Fortune:

    Watson couldn’t distinguish between polite language and profanity — which the Urban Dictionary is full of. Watson picked up some bad habits from reading Wikipedia as well. In tests it even used the word “bullshit” in an answer to a researcher’s query.

    Ultimately, Brown’s 35-person team developed a filter to keep Watson from swearing and scraped the Urban Dictionary from its memory. But the trial proves just how thorny it will be to get artificial intelligence to communicate naturally. Brown is now training Watson as a diagnostic tool for hospitals. No knowledge of OMG required.

    Suck it, Trebek.

    [Fortune via The Atlantic]

  • IBM Submits Q1 Report

    IBM Submits Q1 Report

    IBM just announced its first quarter earnings report for 2012, with a net income of $3.1 billion, up 7% from $2.9 billion from Q1, 2011. Total revenue was $24.7 billion, up only 1% from last year.

    Diluted earnings were up $0.30 from 2011 at $2.61 per share, and operating (non-GAAP) diluted earnings were $2.78 per share, up 15% from $2.41. Regionally, Q1 revenues in the Americas was $10.5 billion, at the same increase of 1% up from 2011, revenues for Europe/Middle East/Africa were $7.6 billion, down 2%, and Asia-Pacific revenues increased 4% at $6.1 billion. OEM revenues came in at $509 million, a 17% drop from Q1 of last year. Revenues from IBM’s growth markets was up 9% across the board, with 40 countries coming in at at least 10% – BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China all increased by 10%

    As a whole, IBM services and software were up in revenue at $10 billion (a 2% increase) and $5.6 billion (a 5% increase) respectively. Though, hardware and financing sectors were down in revenue, $3.7 billion (down 7%) and $490 million (down 4%) respectively.

    Ginni Rometty, IBM president and chief executive officer, states, “In the first quarter, we drove strong profit and earnings per share growth. We delivered another excellent software performance, expanded services margins, and continued the momentum in our growth initiatives. Our investments in growth market countries continued to generate strong revenue growth across software, hardware and services while contributing to the company’s ongoing margin expansion. Based on this performance, we are raising our 2012 full-year operating earnings per share expectations to at least $15.00.”

    Below is a general report:

    Diluted EPS:
    GAAP: $2.61, up 13 percent;
    Operating (non-GAAP): $2.78, up 15 percent;
    Net income:
    GAAP: $3.1 billion, up 7 percent;
    Operating (non-GAAP): $3.3 billion, up 9 percent;
    Gross profit margin:
    GAAP: 45.1 percent, up 0.9 points;
    Operating (non-GAAP): 45.7 percent, up 1.2 points;
    Revenue: $24.7 billion, flat, up 1 percent adjusting for currency;
    Free cash flow of $1.9 billion, up $1.1 billion;
    Software revenue up 5 percent, 7 percent adjusting for currency;
    Services revenue up 1 percent:
    Services pre-tax income up 11 percent;
    Services backlog of $139 billion, down 2 percent, up 1 percent adjusting for currency;
    Systems and Technology revenue down 7 percent, 6 percent adjusting for currency;
    Growth markets revenue up 9 percent;
    Business analytics revenue up 14 percent;
    Smarter Planet revenue up more than 25 percent;
    Cloud revenue doubled first-quarter 2011 revenue;
    Full-year 2012 operating (non-GAAP) EPS expectations raised to at least $15.00 from at least $14.85.

    It was recently reported that IBM was tapped to handle all the data from Square Kilometre Array radio telescope that is being built, which will produce an exabyte of data daily. The company’s Jeopardy-winning ‘Watson’ supercomputer was also “hired” by Citigroup to crunch numbers on Wall Street. Perhaps this sort of outsourcing has contributing to the increase in IBM’s software and services revenues.

  • IBM’s ‘Watson’ on Wall Street

    IBM’s ‘Watson’ on Wall Street

    IBM’s ‘Watson’ supercomputer and Jeopardy champion just secured a gig on Wall Street, according to Bloomberg. Citigroup, the third largest lender in the U.S., will utilize Watson to “help analyze customer needs and process financial, economic and client data to advance and personalize digital banking.”

    IBM predicts that Watson will be able to “read” about 200 million pages in three seconds, with a little bit of programming, which could help Citigroup assess risks and customer needs that human analysts might overlook. IBM asserts that Watson’s skills, which include understanding and processing natural language, consulting vast volumes of unstructured information, and accurately answering questions with humanlike cognition, would suit a stint on Wall Street well. Manoj Saxena, who is responsible for applying Watson to real-world tasks, calls financial services the “next big one for us.”

    Stephen Baker, “biographer” of Watson states – “(Watson) can go through newspaper articles, documents, SEC filings, and try to make some sense out of them, put them into a context banks are interested in, like risk,” adding that the supercomputer can “give an edge” in finance.

    Watson as a financial service will be delivered to Wall Street as a cloud-based function, and will “earn” a percentage of all discovered revenues and cost cutting measures it allows companies to establish. Saxena says Watson will add billions to IBM’s projected analytics revenues for 2015, targeted at $16 billion. IBM is the world’s largest provider of computer services, posting a revenue of $107 billion last year.

  • Yahoo Highlights Role In Creation Of Watson

    Pretty much everyone knows by now that Watson, the Jeopardy-playing supercomputer that was able to cream two human champions, was created by researchers at IBM.  And IBM’s made clear that Watson doesn’t work its magic by searching the Internet.  But apparently Yahoo tech did play a role in the creation of the machine.

    A post on Yahoo’s official Yodel Anecdotal blog highlighted the connection by stating, "[W]hat makes Watson’s genius possible?  A whole lot of storage, sophisticated hardware, super fast processors and Apache Hadoop, the open source technology pioneered by Yahoo! and at the epicenter of big data and cloud computing."

    Then the post continued, "Hadoop was used to create Watson’s ‘brain,’ or the database of knowledge and facilitation of Watson’s processing of enormously large volumes of data in milliseconds.  Watson depends on 200 million pages of content and 500 gigabytes of preprocessed information to answer Jeopardy questions.  That huge catalog of documents has to be searchable in seconds.  On a single computer, it would be impossible to do, but by using Hadoop and dividing the work on to many computers it can be done."

    That’s an impressive boast for Yahoo to be able to make.  Watson represents a huge step forward in information processing, so any connection entitles Yahoo to bragging rights.  And since Watson is perhaps the most famous computer since Deep Blue, more than a few people should actually take note.

    YahooLots of researchers could reach out to Yahoo as a result.

    The link might also result in at least a handful of individuals giving Yahoo’s search engine a try again (never mind the fact that it’s now powered by Bing).

  • Watson

    Watson

    After wowing viewers and technophiles alike during that masterful Jeopardy appearance, IBM’s Watson and its incredible language-comprehension abilities will be targeted towards the assisting the medical industry.

    Now that IBM is finished showing off Watson’s ability to the world, and perhaps scaring some of us who grew up watching the Terminator movies, Watson’s celebrity will not be used in vain.  Clearly, making a Kardashian-esqe computer — that is, famous for being famous, but overall usefulness is negligble — was not IBM’s goal as plans for Watson’s capabilities have been made public.

    Instead of keeping Watson on the game-show circuit, IBM’s new superstar will be joining forces with Nuance Healthcare’s speech-recognition solution in order to make the life of physicians an easier undertaking.  Combining these language-comprehension technologies will assist the diagnosis process, if, for nothing else, by making research process faster.

    Watson’s considerable reaction-time will clearly come into play here.  TechNewsWorld has more:

    "There’s a tremendous amount of medical information for physicians to search, process and sort, and Watson provides a powerful way to do all that automatically," [Peter Durlach, senior healthcare marketing and product strategy vice president at Nuance] said.

    "Watson has the potential to help doctors reduce the time needed to evaluate and determine the correct diagnosis for a patient," noted Herbert Chase, M.D., professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

    For those of you who are concerned Watson might “replace” the human element of the medical industry, or if Watson makes a mistake, something it did during the Jeopardy run, these fears appear to be unfounded, at least for now.  TNW makes the point that ego possessed by doctors will make overruling Watson’s recommendations an easy thing.

    One does wonder, however, if a dependence on Watson’s vast computational power will form. Considering the potential workload being reduced, giving in to the seduction would be tempting. 

    Of course, another issue of concern is propagation of the Watson technology.  How many hospitals/doctors will have access to it?  Will the computing power needed to make Watson work, a large mainframe, hinder its introduction even before it begins? 

    Not so fast says the Nuance VP:

    Durlach envisions Watson — a room-sized mainframe system — "baked into a medical center’s IT cloud. It’s a scalable cloud system, and definitely an example of how — by centralizing data resources — cloud computing has helped bring supercomputing to a larger number of constituencies."

    Just don’t ask Watson anything about airports that sprung up in the World War II era.