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IBM Watson’s Next Venture

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63 pointsnikunjk28 comments

"it will make its IBM Watson technology available as a development platform in the cloud".

Future tense, and no bucket to drop an email into for notifications :( Would take no time at all to buy the parked watsoncloud.com domain (or something!) and flip up a launchrock page (... or something!).

I wonder if this could be used in conjunction with Wolfram's new project, mentioned yesterday.

http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2013/11/13/something-very-big-i...

If anyone from Watson every wanders through HN, I - and everyone that have replied to this comment - am interested in API access.

christian [dot] genco (at) gmail

Me too :) varun [at] semantics3 [dot] com

Don't mean to throw a wet blanked over your enthusiasm, but this is a very new technology, and unless you work at a major partner, the chances are slim that you'll get access to the API soon. Or, come work at IBM :-)

Why haven't Google, Microsoft, etc built a similar machine to Watson and play a fully-computerized version of Jeopardy? Ken Jennings optional.

Because it's hard?

Because they aren't selling supercomputers?

I would estimate that Google and Microsoft each operate more servers than IBM and they are definitely in the analytics business. (I consider Watson more analytics than HPC.)

Not true. Watson style analytics requires HPC, the kind that Google and Microsoft do not (need to) build. Although, that might change with time as (cheaper) computers get faster.

With the troubles they are having in non-US markets, along with other American companies, thanks to NSA, they need something else to survive.

http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-leaks-hurting-us-tech-sal...

That is wishful thinking, the US dominates the internet now more than ever.

Glad to see that they've finally backed off from the "Watson will revolutionize healthcare" pitch.

I honestly believe it will. Maybe not Watson per se, but a distributed Waston-like system that can provide cutting edge diagnostic / treatment suggestions to the entire world will be hugely beneficial.

Just imagine if anywhere on earth with cell-phone service can have 'first-world' medicine without the need for dedicated doctors. That'll probably be worth a few years of life-expectancy by itself.

According to a presentation I heard two month ago it's not good enough yet. They can make accurate predictions in many cases, yet not in all/enough. At the moment they see more potential in analyzing health insurance claims, as falling back to a human expert is easier.

Do you still have a link to the presentation ? It sounds interesting.

I'm sorry, it was a presentation of an IBM researcher during the BioASQ workshop. Perhaps you can find the slides/a summary on the BioASQ.org website.

Watson is already better at diagnosing some cancers better than human doctors.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/11/ibm-watson-me...

Well, even allowing that its feasible in the medium term it would give you worldwide 'first-world' diagnosis, not treatment.

For most maladies, the treatment is some combination of pharmaceuticals, lifestyle changes, or diet changes. The latter two can be undertaken anywhere, so that leaves pharma.

Name-brand pharmaceuticals are expensive, but in almost all cases, there are less expensive options available that are almost as good. Most of these are off-patent, can be manufactured anywhere on earth, and can be acquired for pennies.

An intelligent diagnostic / treatment computer would know where the patient was located, their access to medical facilities, their access to drugs, and make a recommendation based on those qualifiers.

My father's life was save by early cancer diagnosis a couple years ago so it is a topic that I care about. But it's a complex and difficult topic.

I find it fascinating how information technology continually seems like something that could save/improve/revolutionize healthcare but which so far consistently fails and not for a "we couldn't implement the right algorithm" kind of way.

Just in the cancer topic, as I understand it, cancer now is either found by blood-test plus further examination method or by a doctor or patient "just feeling something is wrong". In the case of a lab result any improvements are going to be marginal until there are tests which taking into individual physiological/genetic differences.

In the case of "something is wrong", once the flag is set, I believe you have a reasonable number of ways to check things (though without enough symptoms, you often have too many things to check, something that AI may be able to "do better at" without doing significantly better since you can't information from a brick wall any more than you can squeeze blood from a stone). The "flagging something as wrong" thing may be the most important but I strongly suspect that this part comes from doctors and patients simply having more information than is communicated by any list of symptoms.

I mean, just in general, consider that "first world medicine" might be less useful for third world people who have a widely different constellation of health problems.

And the discussion could go on and on.

Has anyone tested whether a crack team of human doctors who only get their information discreet database formats could be useful?

Imagine making a portable device that use watson to analyze your blood and health, you could give your self an medical exam every week.

Are you kidding with this statement, i just finished reading some good research papers with focus studies on this. Do you think docs in the ER hold all the information in their head of the different types of diagnosis? The biggest mistakes usually happen when faced with a rare disorder but doctors don't have the time to find the edge cases in the ER so they go with whats familiar. My wife is a therapist and most therapist just push bipolar because they are lazy to go through all the material to find these edge cases. You should also read Mckinsey's latest report on the value of intelligent knowledge bases to the economy. This is not a some time in the future benefit, it is now and lots of business are making a shitload of money, you just don't hear about it in techcrunch, since snapchat takes all the headlines.

Regarding cancer specifically this is a huge help to doctors who are actually using it but when drugs cost $300000 a year and the drug companies then give the doctors rebates. This results in doctors then billing insurance companies $300000 and making up the difference as extra cash, which drug do you think a doctor is going to prescribe to you? A lot of cancer drugs will only be effective on maybe 6% of cancer patients and the companies know this based on genetic screening but they still push it onto everyone regardless of your genetics. A company like 23andme, paired with transparent drug trial results and a knowledge base like watson will save the economy a shitload of money, but a lot of drug companies will lose out on revenue and doctors on their kickbacks. At least insurance premiums will drop but this is capitalism.....goodluck!

Does this [1] lead to the PDF report you mean?

[1] http://digitalinnovationtoday.com/speed-summary-mckinseys-12...

So, will they actually let you run your code on Watson supercomputer? Or is it just an access to API documentation?

You call an API, and it returns a result. The Watson hardware is nothing more than a Power 7 box.

Actually, it's many Power 7 boxes (original Watson had 90) clustered together. But it's really cool if they provide access to their hardware (via API).

I can't wait for the Watson API.

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