IBM’s Watson technology can detect your personality type and the
personality of your employees, prospects and customers.
One of my areas of
research in nonverbal communication is how to recognize someone’s personality
by observing their body language and one of the ways I detect someone’s deceit
is by examining their grammar and word usage. So when I read an article in CyberTrend
about technology that can detect your personality I was intrigued. Watson, IBM
cognitive computing technology is able to detect someone’s personality by
analyzing 2,000 to 3,000 words that you have written. That’s right, think about
anything you have written that is available on the internet, think about how
you may want to be able to know the personality of your employees and your
customers and read this excerpt from an article in “CyberTrend.“
“We’re beginning to
move into services that let you understand more about the people themselves,”
says Abrams. What’s the personality of a writer? Turns out if you give Watson
2,000 to 3,000 words that you’ve written, it can come back with a personality
profile with 52 traits it will analyze you against. How open-minded or
close-minded are you? Are you open in new activities? Are you self-aggrandizing
vs. interested in altruism? Are you motivated by the need for openness or
excitement versus conservativism? And of course the big five of introvert,
extrovert, etc. It can analyze anything from a social media feed to a blog post
or an article you’ve written. It’s just another example of how we’re trying to
make Watson more aware of the interactions it’s having with people so we can
shape those interactions.
For the entire article
go to the link below.
How IBM Makes Its
Partners Smarter
IBM's Watson Turns Cognitive Computing Into
Business Success
POSTED
JANUARY 19, 2016
Key Points
·
IBM’s Watson is a
cognitive computing technology platform that uses machine learning to process
large amounts of data.
·
Watson made a big
splash on “Jeopardy!” and it quickly went on to play a major role in helping
doctors diagnose and treat illnesses, among other uses.
·
The Watson Ecosystem
gives partner organizations access to the Watson platform and offers expert
support from IBM.
·
IBM’s Watson can be
used in a wide range of industries from health and fitness to entertainment and
marketing.
It’s no secret that the technology around us
is getting smarter every year. Take speech recognition, for example. Not too
long ago computers struggled to read natural language, much less fully
understand it or use it to provide useful advice. But today you can speak into
your smartphone and a personal digital assistant will respond with a much
better degree of accuracy, offering up directions for a meeting across town,
say, or helping you decide what to get for dinner. For the younger set, this
ability to ask questions of our technology and receive solid answers may not
seem like anything new, but it was only in the past few years that it grew into
a truly beneficial and reliable feature.
Our smartphone speech recognition example may
or may not impress you. But there is a much larger world out there full of
complex business solutions that are based on cognitive computing and serve
virtually every industry. And what many of those cognitive computing
applications have in common is that they were built using IBM’s Watson
platform, which the company only recently opened up for third-party partners
and software developers to leverage.
You’ve probably heard about Watson’s coming
out party, which we’ll certainly talk about, but what’s even more exciting is
not necessarily where Watson has been as much as where it is now and where it
could go in the future.
Cognitive Computing
& Watson’s Debut
In 2011, IBM introduced the idea of cognitive
computing to the mainstream world when the Watson computer appeared on the
stage of the game show “Jeopardy!” and won in a competition with two other
trivia experts, including Ken Jennings, who owns the record for the longest
winning streak in the game show’s history. It was an impressive display for
Watson, to be sure, and one that was built on decades of research performed at
IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center on the topics of natural language
processing, information retrieval, and machine learning. These were “really key
technologies, necessary to build a system that is going to play that kind of
game,” says Steve Abrams, IBM distinguished engineer and director of
technology, solutions, and partner success for the Watson Ecosystem.
What’s most impressive cognitive computing in
general is that it doesn’t involve simply entering information and waiting for
a response. Cognitive computing requires the virtual approximation of human
thought in order to read information in a natural language format and produce
an answer to a given question. Watson, for instance, was able to quickly read
and comprehend “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages” of
information, which was equal to reading the entirety of Wikipedia at the time,
in a matter of minutes, Abrams says. Watson could also then store that
information in such a way that would allow it to rapidly find answers to
questions.
“When a question is posed to a system like
Watson, it’s not using a search technology,” says Abrams. “What it’s using is a
really deep language understanding. It’s able to take apart the question and
understand exactly what’s being asked and use the various keys and clues that
are stored in the question to find different answers. It finds all of the
possible answer, scores them against a number of criteria—like time frame,
geography, and characters—and then ranks them to produce what it thinks is the
most likely answer along with a confidence rating.”
If you watch the “Jeopardy!” appearance,
you’ll notice that for every question posed to it, Watson comes up with three
possible answers and assigns a percentage or confidence rating to each. The
more confident Watson is that it has the correct answer, the higher the rating
and the faster the answer. It’s important to note, however, that this
appearance marked a mainstream debut of sorts for Watson, and from that point
forward IBM researchers continued working hard to come up with as many
potential uses as possible.
From Game Show To
Health Care Facility
Abrams says the version of Watson that
appeared on “Jeopardy!” was large enough to fill a decent-sized eat-in kitchen
and was able to answer “one question at a time by one user in under three
seconds.” Needless to say, this was a somewhat limited use, but it was one in
which a few IBM researchers saw nearly limitless potential. “If you can build a
system that can process natural language that quickly and find answers to
questions, imagine what it could do for physicians,” Abrams says. “Physicians
are bombarded with tremendous amounts of research papers, clinical trials, and
new studies about what drugs are working or not working for various conditions.
They literally can’t keep up with them. They maybe only have a fraction of the time
available in their lives to read these papers, and if they were able to read
them all, they couldn’t remember them.”
Seeking help with this problem, the medical
community approached IBM and the Watson project to find out what might develop
from working with the Watson team. Some of Watson’s first partners were MD
Anderson and the Cleveland Clinic, which worked with IBM to help doctors better
understand potential diagnoses for cancer and “possible treatment plans for a
given patient based on the latest and greatest literature that’s out there and
what we know about this patients symptoms and treatments that have been tried
before,” Abrams explains. In this instance, Watson essentially served as a
personal assistant that could help a doctor make a diagnosis, or even help a
medical student think through the various tests that would be necessary to get
from point A to point B in a given health care situation.
These medical use cases were all built upon
Watson’s ability to “read and understand huge amounts of natural language, find
answers to questions, understand their likelihood, present a set of answers to
a human being, and then filter through to assist that person in making the
decision of what to do next,” Abrams says. It was a breakthrough for the Watson
project and one that would take up most of the two years that followed its
“Jeopardy!” appearance. It was also during this time that IBM became convinced
that Watson would become an actual business and that there was “a set of
capabilities that went far beyond game shows and even beyond the medical
domain,” says Abrams.
Opening Up The Watson
Ecosystem
Once IBM decided to establish Watson as a
business unit roughly two years ago, it started gaining attention from
financial services, insurance providers, retail, travel, and many other
industries. It was at this time that IBM decided it was going to bring Watson
to market in three ways. One was through “large transformational partnerships,”
which is how IBM typically worked with large-scale clients, according to
Abrams. The second was to take another traditional approach, selling access to
Watson and letting customers use its services to build their own solutions. The
third, and perhaps most interesting, approach is what IBM calls the Watson
Ecosystem. This allows developers to partner with Watson to build unique
solutions side-by-side with the experts that built the platform and continue to
improve upon it.
“With the Watson Ecosystem, what we did was
open up this incredible platform and allow third-party software developers,
independent software vendors, system integrators, and companies large and small
to come to us with their use cases, get access to our technology, and build
solutions on top of our platform,” says Abrams. “That was huge. Even at the
time, when we only had this one question and answer API [application
programming interface], it was clear that this was going to be one of the key
ways that Watson was going to change the world.”
Among the first non-medical partners to join
the Watson Ecosystem was WayBlazer, which built a travel and entertainment
information site on top of Watson where “you dialogue with the equivalent of a
personalized, virtualized travel agent,” Abrams says. Instead of using a search
engine or the website search bar to find a flight or make a dinner reservation,
you’re “really having a conversation where it understands what you’re looking
for and what you’re interested in so it can make recommendations
appropriately,” he says. Another partner, Fluid, used similar technology to power
a retail shopping advisor that offered a personal online shopping experience
that went beyond just shopping for products on a retail website.
Since those earlier examples, Watson has grown
from one API to 30 and has evolved far beyond answering questions to being able
to understand the intent and sentiment behind a statement. Keeping with the
retail example, Watson would be able to read shoppers’ reviews on a specific
product or type of product, pick up whether individual shoppers are positive or
negative about certain aspects of a product, determine the true sentiments
behind the words, and then use that information to make better recommendations
for future products and changes. It transcends the “if you bought this, you
might like that” feature and takes personal taste into account.
“We’re beginning to move into services that
let you understand more about the people themselves,” says Abrams. “What’s the
personality of a writer? Turns out if you give Watson 2,000 to 3,000 words that
you’ve written, it can come back with a personality profile with 52 traits it
will analyze you against. How open-minded or close-minded are you? Are you open
in new activities? Are you self-aggrandizing vs. interested in altruism? Are
you motivated by the need for openness or excitement versus conservativism? And
of course the big five of introvert, extrovert, etc. It can analyze anything
from a social media feed to a blog post or an article you’ve written. It’s just
another example of how we’re trying to make Watson more aware of the
interactions it’s having with people so we can shape those interactions.”
IBM has also imbued Watson with speech
recognition, speech detection, and text-to-speech capabilities, so it can
actually talk to you. IBM also wants to give Watson sight with image
recognition, so “you can give Watson photographs and it can begin to identify
the items that are in those photographs,” Abrams says. “When you add all of
that together, it’s now really a platform with 30 incredible capabilities that
are available to software developers in all of these different domains to build
groundbreaking solutions.”
A True Partnership
Developers joining the Watson Ecosystem
receive not only access to the platform, but also to IBM’s expertise. IBM
offers a dedicated team that works side-by-side with partners throughout the
process of building an application, commercializing it, and bringing it to
market. It’s rare for a company with a sophisticated artificial intelligence
developer platform to open it up, let alone let others experiment with it, but
the project has been a great success for IBM. In fact, Abrams points out, at
this time IBM has 500 partners that are in active development and over 100
businesses that have commercially viable Watson applications already on the
market.
Watson partners come from virtually every
industry, from legal firms using Watson to better understand building codes to
the health and fitness industry, where they’re using Watson to power
personalized health advisors. One major industry that has been taking advantage
of Watson is sports. “We’re seeing a huge number of sports technology companies
that are growing up around Watson with everything from better fan engagement
and understanding social media to direct marketing of products and services to
fans in the stadium to improve the stadium experience,” Abrams says.
There’s essentially no limit to how companies
can use Watson to improve their businesses. Abrams says Watson can come into
play whenever there’s an opportunity to “simplify access to a tremendous amount
of information” or to “change and improve the way that a company engages with
its customers through a more personalized, virtualized, and automated
experience.” For him, those are two clear indicators that Watson could have a
positive impact. “Who’s not stuck dealing with an avalanche of unstructured
information and who doesn’t want to change or improve the way that they engage
with their customers?” Abrams asks.
Watson In the Future
Even with all of the solutions already
available today, Abrams still believes that “the most interesting Watson
application is the one that has yet to be built.” If you think about how the
technology has evolved since the “Jeopardy!” appearance five years ago, it will
be fascinating to see where Watson goes in the near future once more partners
are onboard and as IBM continues to add new functionality and capabilities to
its already robust platform.
“Both in terms of our understanding of what
the technology is capable of as well as our partners’ understanding of what
solutions they can build, I really think we’re just at the tip of the iceberg,”
says Abrams. “I couldn’t begin to tell you what they’re going to do, but one of
the cool things about IBM is that we have really the largest dedicated
corporate research division in the world and we still have a very strong
connection between the IBM Research Labs and the Watson development
organization. I’m continuously amazed by our friends in research with the stuff
they’re working on. I can’t even begin to tell you what’s next.”
SIDEBAR
IBM Watson Analytics
If the wheels in your head have started
turning when it comes to potential business use cases for Watson, then look no
further than Watson Analytics. Big data analytics is a natural evolutionary
point for the Watson technology considering the fact that it is capable of
reading through massive amounts of information in minutes or even seconds, and
IBM is heavily leaning into that arena.
With Watson Analytics, you can analyze data
quickly in order to gain insights and use those insights to make well-informed
business decisions. And because Watson is already designed to offer a
confidence rating when it answers a question, you know that you’ll get valuable
information based on the problem you’re trying to solve. Watson Analytics is
also a cloud-based solution, so you get access to the robust data discovery
service without having to build a complex and potentially expensive system
onsite.
Once you get the platform up and running and
ask your question, it won’t take long for Watson to come up with relevant
information and then help you organize it into a dashboard or even an
infographic. Watson Analytics isn’t about searching through information and
then coming to your own conclusions. Watson will help you every step along the
way and give you insights you can use with confidence.
Copyright © by Sandhills Publishing Company
2016. All rights reserved.
- See more at: http://www.cybertrend.com/article/19837/how-ibm-makes-its-partners-smarter#sthash.v6WWhnLx.dpuf
Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at
www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at
www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at
http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.
