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Comment by pesenti | Hacker News Reader

IBM is about to make these APIs (and many others) much more accessible as part of BlueMix (https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/ - the IBM PaaS/Heroku). I lead the team in charge of developing the Watson platform. Ask me questions!

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I fully admit you may not be the right person for this question, but IBM has made a lot of hay about Watson in healthcare: lots of booths and talks at industry conferences, trotting out partner medical centers, PR pieces in the Wall Street Journal, etc... Despite all the noise, I have yet to see any sort of peer-reviewed clinical study that demonstrates the application of Watson in a real healthcare setting to improve patient outcomes. Has any study like this been conducted?

We do have many actual projects with several healthcare providers. We have functioning systems (see one here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lGJ0h_jAp8) and we are starting to deploy them. But the deployments are made very cautiously and in stages (and not yet broad enough for full study) because that's the nature of healthcare.

While this is not peer-review , it's interesting :

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/43231.wss

Hey there. The startup I co-founded has been accepted by IBM partner for Watson. A few weeks into it, we are still doing the "form-filling" marathon and have not had access to an instance. Seems like the API, when available to public will be a faster way to access it. Punekale at google's mail.

Not completely. The first set of APIs won't let you provide your own content - it will let you play with the Q&A API (and also do a lot of other fun things not directly related Q&A). The instance you will get access to through the application will let you provide your own content. We are working hard to make that available as self-service but that's going to take a little more time.

Thank you.

I'm curious about the "copyright" field. Do you return the original sources from where Watson learnt the information he is presenting? What are the major sources? Have you faced copyright or legal restrictions to access information and has this affected Watson's ability to answer questions in a certain area?

When you create a Watson instance, you basically load it up with what they call a "corpus" of information. They are supposed to check the source of all your info etc that you have copyright to it. I don't know what it will be like once it is opened up more, but as of now they have pretty tight hands on Watson and will only accept projects with monetization and with revshare agreements...

1. How does Watson know to share only public data and not confidential data if it comes across it? How does it gather data?

2. Does it cache answers or does it try to "learn" and modify/improve the response each time?

1. Right now data comes from our customers (not shared) or public sources (shared). Watson does not decide on its own what is shared or not.

2. Watson can learn from feedback (i.e., a user grading the quality of an answer).

1. Watson has to be trained on a specific corpus of information. Each instance is it's own Watson, and needs to be trained. They say that each Watson starts off as a kindergartner. 2. Watson needs to be trained by an expert using sample questions and it learns from that.

Bluemix has a impressive list of IBM technologies available: https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/#/pricing/cloudOEPaneId=pricing

Until Watson is available in Bluemix, what is the best way to get access to the q and a API for exploration?

Right now you need to apply here: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/form_ecosys... but many Watson APIs will be available on BlueMix very very shortly (think weeks not months).

That's amazing news - thanks a tonne. Any chance there's someone at the mothership (maybe you!) we can reach out to, for support? Specifically I'd like to toss out some questions about data sources and whatnot - to understand if Watson is worth playing with for us.

Best would be to ask the questions on the forum: https://developer.ibm.com//answers/?community=watson&cmp=usb...

Is BlueMix a Heroku competitor or compliment? I want to develop on the Watson API but I also want to use a stack I'm familiar with. Also, do you have range estimates for the price of accessing the Watson API?

Yes BlueMix is a Heroku competitor. It is the easiest way to consume Watson APIs but won't be the only way. I can't disclose pricing yet.

I went for an info session and a few events for Watson a couple of months ago at the IBM office in NYC. They are doing pricing with revenue shares. A lot of devs, including myself, were not happy about this. They basically were not open to projects that weren't directly making money off of Watson...

BlueMix is based on Cloud Foundry and is very easy to use. Pushed an app there yesterday as a test.

while this technology looks interesting, the marketing effort is terrible.

There is no link on the webpage pointing to access request. I had to find it from the comments.

there is no example questions other than that michael jackson example. and that example is not a question. why does it reply michael jackson as an answer? there is no explanation.

there should be a web access point for potential developers to play with the api. I still have no idea what question I can ask and what answer I can expect.

...

Basic dev marketing.

Yes we know and are working on it. The soon-to-come next version should fix all these issues.

>Data: at least 50 percent of content is unstructured, and sufficient volume exists

Not quite what I expected. Does this mean the developers provide the data?

The soon to come Watson platform will also come with a set of curated content. So it will be a mix of the content you provide and existing (free and paid) content.

A given instance of Watson is unique based on it's corpus (documents that have been uploaded to it) and it's level of training and fine tuning. So far each instance has had to be trained from scratch, although they are making some Watson instances available that will come pre-trained in specific fields (like medicine).

The Q&A is not particularly interesting...are there other api's we can experiment with? Also, is there any precedent for getting clojure up on bluemix?

Yes many others - think NLP, multi-lingual, social media, speech, vision, etc. We'll start with a small set and keep expanding.

I don't know about Clojure, I would ask that question on their forum: https://developer.ibm.com/answers?community=bluemix

(Another) IBMer here. As far as I am aware, Bluemix doesn't have built-in support for Clojure but a few of us have played with it and there are a few ways that you can run Clojure apps:

I wrote a blog post about my experiences running a Hello World app using the Heroku buildpack for Clojure which you can find here:

http://mytediousblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/running-clojure-...

In addition, since Bluemix natively supports Java apps, you can export a Clojure app as either an uberjar or an uberwar and run it directly on Bluemix that way. So for example, if you create an uberwar of your Clojure webapp then you can push it to Bluemix by doing:

  cf push your-app-name -p target/my-app-uberwar.war

... and Bluemix will run your app on a WebSphere Liberty Profile app server.

I'm happy to help if you have any questions - contact details in my HN profile.

When will BlueMix have Watson access?

Do you mind emailing me? My email is in my profile.

When will Watson instances be open for access?

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