Small Companies Competing with Watson

I am part of this ecosystem myself. Certainly the small company cannot  afford a complete installation from IBM.  But IBM has made open capabilities available via Watson Bluemix, so assembly work can be done by cheaper contractors,  or the work can be done internally.  IBM has also published a number of end to end tutorials for cognitive AI use.   And in a number of cases provided fully autonomous, focused domain systems like Watson Analytics.

Watch Out Watson: Small Companies Threaten IBM’s Artificial Intelligence
Innovative, smaller companies show that there can be a more cost-effective way to approach AI than complex systems like IBM's Watson. .... " 
By Teresa Riva

Watson Machine Learning Now Publicly Available

I note that this also includes 'visual' machine learning,  using methods that look like the Clementine system they acquired long ago for System Modeler.   Good direction.   Explored some of this via their Bluemix services, but this takes it further, for both professionals and for non professional use.

I contractually examined several examples of enterprise use in real projects, impressive plug-in power.  Natural links to Watson Analytics?  Looking at the new usability here and cost.

Watson Machine Learning is now Generally Available
Today we are excited to announce the general availability of the IBM Watson Machine Learning service. Over the past 12 months we've got feedback from hundreds of beta users of the Watson Machine Learning (WML) service. During the beta period, we’ve been actively collecting feedback provided via email, Slack, and targeted surveys. The WML product team has been actively engaged in those conversations and wherever possible we’ve worked to incorporate your feedback in to the service. With today’s announcement, we are now opening this service to the general public and rolling out a number of new features. Read on to learn more…

What is WML and why are we building it?
WML is a Bluemix service that enables users to perform two fundamental operations of machine learning. .... 

Training: this is the process of refining an algorithm so that it can 'learn' from a dataset. The output of this operation is called a model. A model encompasses the learned coefficients of mathematical expressions.

Scoring: the operation of predicting an outcome using a trained model. The output of the scoring operation is another dataset containing predicted values.   ... " 

More details.

Home Automation Virtual Agent

Interesting approach that I had not seen .... highlighting the Watson conversation service.

Build a Home Automation Virtual Agent on Bluemix

With the home automation trend growing, have you wondered how you could build your own home automation virtual agent on Bluemix? Check out this blog post to see how a PubNub developer used PubNub BLOCKS and Watson Conversation to do it.
 by: Shyam Purkayastha

Man’s desire to be a part of the social ecosystem has led to the invention of many communication and information sharing tools. This trend is now morphing to include use cases where we interact with non-living things, as well. Let’s look at one such application where we can communicate with our things through chat, just like way we would Whatsapp our family and friends.

Home automation is an ubiquitous application. We talk to our appliances, and they obey our orders. That is so cool! But let’s take it a step further. We’ll want to make it a bit more seamless, so that we talk to our home in a natural conversation. But how do we do it? Machines talk in binary code which is cumbersome for humans. In this blog article, we will show you how to build a home automation app. So follow along and check out the demonstration provided later in this article to help you understand how to build a virtual assistant for your home. .... 

Watson Conversation service provides a drag and drop dialog builder. This dialog builder is the key to designing dialogs that are intuitive for human users and, at the same time, can be deciphered by machines.

A typical human-to-machine conversation is very different from human-to-human conversation. Machines do not usually engage in a conversation flow like we humans do. They take commands and respond with an action. The Watson Conversation service allows us to build specific dialogs that convey commands and actions between humans and machines. The image below illustrates how this is achieved via intents and entities:  .... " 

New Watson Analytics Add-Ons

New in Watson Analytics.  Will take a closer look.

Four additional capabilities satisfy your appetite for more. You’ll be discovering insights like a champ in no time.

1. Watson Analytics for Social Media
The first of the four Watson Analytics add-on is Watson Analytics for Social Media, which guides you through social data. With automatically created graphics, you quickly take the pulse of your audience or market. And, it’s easy to compare results with other data sources. Now, you can get new insights based on different views of information.

2. Expert Storybooks
Number 2 of the Watson Analytics add-ons is Watson Analytics Expert Storybooks. If you’re struggling to understand your data analysis, Expert Storybooks can be your guide. You bring your data, and we take care of the rest. You get new insights and we interpret results for you. It’s that simple.

3. Datawatch Monarch and Monarch Server for IBM Analytics
Data preparation shouldn’t slow you down, and that’s where number 3 of the Watson Analytics add-ons comes in. Datawatch Monarch for IBM Analytics transforms data for upload into Watson Analytics. With the click of a button, it prepares messy data for analysis. Datawatch Monarch Server for IBM Analytics automates many data preparation tasks. You’re free to get on with data analysis so your precious time isn’t wasted.

4. Analytics Exchange
Wouldn’t it be great if you could easily find data when you need it? With the fourth of the Watson Analytics add-ons, IBM Bluemix Analytics Exchange, you have access to free and open data. Do you need economic, business, leisure, transportation, and more information to support a theory? This is the place for you.  .... " 

IBM Integrates Weather APIs into Bluemix

We were early users of weather data in retail and supply chain analytics, this would have been very useful. Integration with cognitive links in particular are intriguing.  Note this includes both data and forecasting capabilities from the Weather Co.  Which could let you predict things like the demand of products influenced by weather, both current and future. Will be interesting to see what other things
come out of this evolution.

(Update)    I missed mentioning one of the most obvious direct applications: Agribusiness. When we were still in the coffee business could we have predicted flavor components based on past weather data? Which then could have been used to change components of green coffee blends?  .....

IBM Just Made It Easier to Build Apps That Harness the Weather

" ... Today’s announcement—putting the Weather Company API on BlueMix—means it will be less of a hassle for developers to add weather data to their next great app. “If you were building an app on BlueMix and wanted to add weather prior to this Weather Company add on, you’d have to open a new window go to the Weather Company’s platform, get an API key, deal with billing, subscription services, all the normal administrivia that comes from sourcing data from many places,” says Bryson Koehler, the Weather Company’s chief information and technology officer. Which isn’t necessarily a huge pain, but think about it this way: If you were building a couch, would you visit one store for the lumber, another for the screws, another for the saws to cut the lumber, another for the drill to use the screws … or would you just go to Home Depot and grab all that crap at once? .... " 

But hey, not everyone likes Home Depot. So how is BlueMix as a one-stop API shop? (If you don’t know, APIs are programs that let other programs and apps talk to each other.) Well, it’s IBM, so it is pretty thorough. Beyond the basic starter kits for various API fucntions (banking, Internet of Things, cloud computing), it lets you access cool stuff like Watson’s cognitive computing tools, so you can do creepy things like build psychological profiles of the consumers using your app. .... "

Build a Chat Bot in 10 Minutes

Though this is not the depth of conversation and language that I implied in my previous thoughts, it does represent some aspects of conversation like flow, intent and knowledge that are important. This takes you through the whole process of using Watson services on Bluemix.  Not technical, worth a look if you want to understand it:

Build a Chat Bot in 10 Minutes Using Watson Conversation on Bluemix
Simplify the process of automatically understanding and responding to customers with Watson Conversation, a new cognitive service on Bluemix. Learn how to train and configure intents while optimizing dialog flow in 10 minutes, by reading this post by one of our developer advocates. ... " 

Bluemix Supports Hangout Analytics

Nice to see some now sevices in Bluemix Cloud that support real time stream analytics.  This is notably of interest to applications like Retail.   Updates in their blog give some detailed outlines and descriptions of analysis value.  Possibility of use with Beacons, Supply chain decisions, IOT and others.   Ultimately this looks at the dynamics of all sorts of geospatial data.

" ... Hangout is a concept in geospatial analysis where an entity is said to be hanging out or in a hangout if it has been dwelling in the same region for a specified period of time.  Once an entity (for example, a smartphone or a vehicle) has been in a region longer than a specified dwell time, it is considered to be hanging out in that region.  You can use hangout detection in a variety of mobile device and Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios, including:

Marketing: Offering real-time promotions to people who remain in a particular area for a significant period of time.

Intelligence: Are two ships passing in the night, or are they hanging out together, possibly indicating some nefarious activity?

Transportation: Has a vehicle in your fleet made its stops at the anticipated locations?  ...  "

Smarter Bathrooms on the Supply Chain

A look at making consumer demand points made more intelligent.  An intelligent endpoint in the supply chain.   Here work by IBM and Kimberbly Clark.  In Readwrite:

" ... Kimberly-Clark Professional’s new Intelligent Restroom app was built using IBM Bluemix development platform and through the use of the IBM Internet of Things Foundation service, facilities managers collect data and alerts from sensors integrated into restroom amenities, from soap dispensers to air fresheners, as well as non-amenities like entrance doors. All the data is managed and monitored through a central dashboard that can be viewed on desktops or mobile devices remotely. ... " 

IBM Internet of Things Educator Guide

Via IBM:   for IBM resources.

Use this educator guide for step-by-step guidance through recommended tutorials, labs, and other resources to teach others how to expand upon their Internet of Things skills.

Description
Rapidly compose and extend apps that take advantage of data and analytics from your connected devices and sensors

This educator guide helps you:
Understand the importance of developing skills around the IBM Internet of Things platform.
Obtain a basic understanding of IBM’s Internet of Things Foundation on Bluemix.
Find classroom assets, labs, training and other resources to use in your classroom. .... " 

Using Bluemix Watson Cognitive Services

 Want to see how to utilize the 28 APIs now available that derive from Watson, for your own applications?  Or even determine what is possible today?   Here is a self contained piece that tells you how to sign up for Bluemix services free, and how to do a data intense problem. Very instructive. Technical, but not overly so.  This is the kind of approach that is being used by many students in schools worldwide who are being trained to implement cognitive services.

IBM Bluemix Local

Just announced, I have been a subscriber to Watson on Bluemix for some time, for access to their growing list of Watson services.  Also check out the blog link below for updates and hints.  Lets you better control your security, and interaction with your data.  Have downloaded and exploring.

Introducing IBM Bluemix Local
With Bluemix Local, you can move with the speed and agility of public cloud, but behind your firewall. Check out the Bluemix blog to learn more about Bluemix Local and how we’re making hybrid cloud seamless.  ....  " 

Watson Personality Insights for Shoppers

A demonstration of Watson's personality services capability for shopping.  " ... The Watson Personality Insights service uses linguistic analytics to extract a spectrum of cognitive and social characteristics from the text data that a person generates through text messages, tweets, posts, and more. ... ".   You can test it with own text and see how you the author is classified.    Aimed at segmenting shoppers based on streams like those from Twitter. See my previous post on this.  It also has a link to the science and cautions about the methods.  Have yet to see the personality classification tested  in retail.   Note that this basic service can already be tested and integrated free in the Bluemix services cloud.   This demo appears to show how this can be used with a data and analysis wrapper.   CGT registration required.

Analytics Tools in Bluemix

IBM adds analytics (Watson Analytics,etc), data warehousing tools to Bluemix
"With built-in Netezza analytics libraries, and integration with Watson Analytics, R, Cognos and third party BI toolsets including Looker, Aginity Workbench and Tableau, dashDB can integrate with Twitter data and Open Data..."         ...  Crystal North.

About time.  Pondering the value and implications of this.

Insights for Twitter Service on Bluemix

Providing Service 

Last October, IBM and Twitter announced that they were combining forces to integrate Twitter data with IBM analytics services on the cloud that will help transform how businesses understand their customers, markets and trends – and inform every business decision. ... 

Today, we’re excited to announce the availability of IBM Insights for Twitter service on Bluemix. Developers can now take advantage of the collective intelligence of hundreds of millions of people to create unique, social media applications quickly and easily, directly in the IBM Bluemix environment. The service enriches tweets, based on deep natural language processing algorithms from IBM Social Media Analytics. Real-time processing of Twitter data streams is fully supported; configurable through a rich set of query parameters and keywords. .... " 

Watson Tradeoff Analytics

Watson tradeoff analytics has become generally available on their Bluemix cloud.  An example of a cognitive service. Here is a good report on how it works and access instructions.   Good place to start, as the analytic concept is simple.   I had someone comment to me that this is not very sophisticated. Perhaps, but it can be applied to real problems.   The link shows how.  Has freemium accesibility.

More on SocioPragmatic Text Models

Yesterday posted about the talk on SocioPragmatic text Modeling.   More has been published in the Cognitive Systems Institute Linkedin Group,    I quote some of my recent input below   This is a new kind of text classification modeling based on consumer cognition .

" .. Also mentioned in this talk, the potential use of this approach for market research. Suppose a subgroup is the collection of likely buyers of your product? Then classification based on this approach would predict sales. This is another example of 'non conscious' classification, like methods called 'neuromarketing', which often use electroencephalographic techniques, being used by some companies today to augment classic market techniques. This would be far cheaper to implement on more people, even in mobile environments. Using this with multiple languages could provide global reach, also a plus. Consider its use with Twitter streams.  There is real potential here. ... 

This Sociopragmatic method also relates to the 'User Modeling' Watson capability, now available free to test on Bluemix. That method claims a psychological, rather than social-linguistic classification basis. A comparison of the two methods value would be very interesting. Say with the same Twitter stream? Will bring this up with a retailer or manufacturer.  ... "

Hope there will be more input there, feel free to connect and join in.

Knowledge Graph Creation and Analytics

At today's Cognitive Systems Institute Group meeting a presentation by Costas Bekas of IBM  Research:  Knowledge Graph Creation and Analytics for Cognitive Systems. Slides here.  You can get the recording here.

An improved methodology for knowledge graph analytics that is approximately Order (N).  (Technical).  Previous methods for analytics on complex knowledge graphs were of Order (N Cubed) making them computationally impractical for typical knowledge graphs.

Typical use would be to get a measure of similarity approximation between two graphs.  An example of metallurgy in materials science was shown.  This method will eventually be included in the Watson Discovery Advisor, and likely among the online blue mix services by the end of this year. Quite impressive development, look forward to challenging it in other domains.

(Update) Further ongoing discussion on this and related topics in Linkedin Group.

Goal: Cognitive Assistants for all Jobs

Via Jim Spohrer, how can you join into the task?  I have joined in.

Cognitive Systems Institute Group (CSIG)'s mission is cognitive assistants for all occupations:
What is CSIG?   

Getting started developing cognitive assistants on IBM Bluemix:
http://service-science.info/archives/3721

Watson Services on Bluemix - including AlchemyAPI acquisition
http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/services-catalog.html

Read a lot and take the survey if you are planning a grant proposal:
http://cognitive-science.info/

Read more and see what the community is talking about:

Some award winners working on cognitive:
http://cognitive-science.info/award-recipients/

Weekly calls and speaker series:

IBM's Cognitive Systems Institute Group (CSIG) service-science.info
As background on IBM's broader interests and to summarize IBM's Cognitive Systems Institute Group (CSIG): (1) over the next decade cognitive assistants will begin appearing for all occupations, job...  " 

Watson Cognitive is Part of Cloud Service

Some of the functionality of IBM's Watson is available on their cloud.    More on this in Computerworld.  Have worked with this for a while now.  The services are by no means complete, and are Betas that have been constructed for particular problem domains.   So don't expect it to solve your problems.  It does give you a good idea of what they mean by cognitive solutions.  A big part of it is how we can effectively communicate with systems.  Mostly we still just type.  But we are starting to increasingly see more cognitive (sensory, verbal, textual, behavioral, pattern, contextual ... ) interaction.

Twitter Services on BlueMix Creating Collective Intelligence

Results from the collaborative work between IBM and Twitter.  Relates to other things I have posted here recently on User Modeling.    To what degree does Twitter act as 'Collective intelligence'?    will continue to follow.

  " ... Last October, IBM and Twitter announced that they were combining forces to integrate Twitter data with IBM analytics services on the cloud that will help transform how businesses understand their customers, markets and trends – and inform every business decision.

Today, we’re excited to announce the availability of IBM Insights for Twitter service on Bluemix. Developers can now take advantage of the collective intelligence of hundreds of millions of people to create unique, social media applications quickly and easily, directly in the IBM Bluemix environment. The service enriches tweets, based on deep natural language processing algorithms from IBM Social Media Analytics. Real-time processing of Twitter data streams is fully supported; configurable through a rich set of query parameters and keywords. ... "