IBM to Use AI for Upcoming US Open

Apparently IBM has no fear with using AI for its long running live commentaries on sports.

From ChatGPT & GPT-4:

IBM has been the technology partner for the US Open for more than 30 years, and it has been using AI technology to enhance the fan experience for several years. However, this year, IBM is taking things to the next level by using Watson AI to provide more in-depth analysis of matches.

Watson AI will analyze data from the matches, such as ball speed, player movements, and shot placement, and provide insights into the performance of players. The technology will also be used to generate highlights of matches, which will be available to fans on demand.

According to IBM, the use of Watson AI will allow fans to have a more immersive and engaging experience of the matches. Fans will be able to follow the matches in real-time and gain a deeper understanding of the game.

The use of Watson AI is part of IBM's ongoing efforts to use AI technology to enhance the fan experience of sporting events. The company has previously used the technology in the Wimbledon tennis tournament and the Masters golf tournament. ...' 

More on IBM and AI Today

 We worked with IBM for years,  Saw the kind of methods they were pressing that connected their work with Watson and game playing, but never got the impression that that could provide the kind of general management of general corporate data management we were exploring  Seem to making those moves now. 

IBM Consulting recently revealed its Center of Excellence (CoE) for generative AI, aiming to advance artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and capitalize on the transformative potential of generative AI for business outcomes. Operating parallel with IBM Consulting’s global AI and Automation practice, the CoE encompasses an extensive network of over 21,000 skilled data and AI consultants who have completed over 40,000 enterprise client engagements.  In Venturebeat

The company stated that the Center of Excellence (CoE)’s primary objectives include enhancing customer experiences, transforming core business processes and facilitating innovative business models.

The Center of Excellence (CoE) will leverage IBM’s expertise in enterprise-grade AI, including the recently announced IBM watsonx and cutting-edge technology from IBM’s esteemed ecosystem of business partners, to actively expedite clients’ business transformations. It will also develop new solutions and assets with clients and partners.

“Our Center of Excellence for generative AI has over 1,000 consultants globally with generative AI expertise who are helping clients drive productivity in IT operations and core business processes like HR or marketing, elevate their customer experiences and create new business models,” Glenn Finch, global managing partner, data and technology transformation at IBM Consulting, told VentureBeat. “It stands alongside IBM Consulting’s existing data and AI practice and will focus on solving client challenges using the full generative AI technology stack, including foundation models and 50+ domain-specific classical machine learning accelerators.”  ... ' 

Position of IBM Watson Assistant

 Revisiting this.     We were closely connected with IBM on their excellent earlier efforts.    I get the feeling they are now scrambling now.  Looking to see this closely, to follow.

Watson Assistant: Build better virtual agents, powered by AI

Deliver consistent and intelligent customer care across all channels and touchpoints with conversational AI

263 Reviews - G2 Crowd, Book a demo, Try Watson Assistant

Conversational AI for fast and friendly customer care

We bet both you and your customers would like interactions to be friendlier and faster. To help you deliver that full functionality, IBM Watson Assistant (PDF, 63 KB) brings you a conversational artificial intelligence platform designed to help remove the friction of traditional support, and to deliver exceptional customer care based on the advantage of AI.

While you improve customer experience with a single path to providing improved chat, intelligent AI virtual agent, and human agent contact center support, you also gain a new, intuitive interface that empowers everyone in your organization to build and maintain AI-powered virtual agents and AI-powered chatbots — without having to write a single line of code.  ... ' 

IBM Watson AI Patent Assistant

Mentioned earlier, examining. 

IBM Watson Demos AI Patent Assistant

ERIC HAL SCHWARTZ on October 31, 2022 at 4:00 pm in Voicebot.ai

IBM and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) are testing a new AI tool for exploring and analyzing intellectual property data. The IBM IP Advisor uses Watson’s conversational AI to help people look for patents, both submitted and granted, to help inventors avoid potential rejection for repetition and spot where their ideas would fit.

AI PATENT DIVE

Inventors need to know about patents that may overlap with their own ideas, information known as ‘prior art.’ The sheer volume of patents and applications makes assessing the prior art difficult without enormous resources or expertise in patent law. The IBM IP Advisor leverages Watson’s natural language processing to rapidly gather and analyze patent information based on questions posed by a user about patents, application statuses, and what kind of refinements they might need to make to their inventions to avoid repeating or infringing on someone else’s intellectual property. The service is available for public testing until the end of November on the USPTO’s Open Data Portal.

“Prior art research and analysis is the foundation of a successful product or service launch, but the growth of prior art coupled with the need for appropriate keywords and the right patent classifications can be a barrier to entry for the every-day inventor,” IBM’s general manager for the U.S. public and federal market Steve LaFleche said. “I’m proud of our work with the USPTO in support of their objective to not just deploy smarter technology, but to build a better, more accessible IP system.”  ... ' 

Watson as an IP and Patent Advisor

Could have used this in the enterprise and with US Government work some time ago ... talked this and Watson Discovery with IBM, seemed to lay fallow for some time.   Demos?

IBMAnnounces Demonstration Project with U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to Help Make Patent Research Insights More Accessible and Usable

NEWS PROVIDED BY  IBM 

Oct 31, 2022, 09:00 ET

WASHINGTON, Oct. 31, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announces a demonstration project with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to test an artificial intelligence (AI) driven intellectual property (IP) analysis tool, the IBM IP Advisor with Watson® Demonstration System. Leveraging conversational AI technology with IBM Watson Assistant, and content insight mining and guided navigation solutions with IBM Watson Discovery, the system is designed to help users more efficiently uncover and analyze relevant patent data, allowing more time for strategic, value-added tasks.

Information known publicly before the actual filing date of a U.S. patent application, such as currently held and similar U.S. patents and published patent applications, is called prior art. When an inventor has an idea for a new product, a prior art study can be helpful in understanding the landscape of the field of invention by assessing not only prior art, but also competitors and opportunities for innovation in the field. However, with the continued rise in the number of patent applications being filed and the increasing volume of patent data, finding relevant, accurate information and analyzing prior art can be difficult and time consuming – especially for new inventors, 'Main Street' retailers and consumers not steeped in patent law. IBM aims to help address this challenge and promote greater participation in the innovation process with the IBM IP Advisor with Watson® Demonstration System.

By enabling natural language processing of queries with IBM Watson Discovery technology, the Demonstration System can help users locate relevant information using their own terminology, without the need to use specific terms and complex methods. And leveraging IBM Watson Assistant conversational AI technology as a guide, users can ask questions of embedded virtual agents to further inform and optimize their patent analysis.

The IBM IP Advisor with Watson® Demonstration System uses a subset of publicly obtainable U.S. patent data and is available for public testing and feedback on the USPTO's Open Data Portal through November 30, 2022.

"Prior art research and analysis is the foundation of a successful product or service launch, but the growth of prior art coupled with the need for appropriate keywords and the right patent classifications can be a barrier to entry for the every-day inventor," said Steve LaFleche, general manager, U.S. public and federal market for IBM. "I'm proud of our work with the USPTO in support of their objective to not just deploy smarter technology, but to build a better, more accessible IP system."  ... 

Watson Addressing Grid Failures

 Important domain to cover.  

MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab Tackles Power Grid Failures with AI  in Datanami   By Jaime Hampton

Next time your power stays on during a severe weather event, you may have a machine learning model to thank.

Researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab are using artificial intelligence to solve power grid failures. The manager of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, Jie Chen, and his colleagues have developed a machine learning model that works to analyze data collected from hundreds of thousands of sensors located across the U.S. power grid.

The sensors, components of what is known as synchrophasor technology, compile vast amounts of real-time data related to electric current and voltage in order to monitor the health of the grid and locate anomalies that could cause outages.

Synchrophasor analysis requires intensive computational resources due to the size and real-time nature of the data streams the sensors produce. There can be difficulty with quickly extracting data for anomaly detection, or the “task of identifying unusual samples that significantly deviate from the majority of the data instances,” as defined in the researchers’ paper.

The ML model can be trained without annotated data on power grid anomalies, which is advantageous because much of the data collected by the sensors is unstructured.

“In the case of a power grid, people have tried to capture the data using statistics and then define detection rules with domain knowledge to say that, for example, if the voltage surges by a certain percentage, then the grid operator should be alerted. Such rule-based systems, even empowered by statistical data analysis, require a lot of labor and expertise. We show that we can automate this process and also learn patterns from the data using advanced machine-learning techniques,” said Chen in an MIT News article. .... '

Detecting Data Anomalies

Looks to be a useful thing, depending on your goals and definitions of anomaly.  Like the definition of usage cases.    

Using AI to Find Anomalies Hiding in Massive Datasets

MIT News, Adam Zewe, February 25, 2022

A machine learning model developed by researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab can identify anomalies in massive data streams automatically, in real time. The researchers used artificial intelligence (AI) to model the interconnectedness of the power grid to better detect glitches, without needing annotated data on power grid anomalies for training. This means the model could be applied in real-world situations where the availability of high-quality, labeled datasets is limited. The researchers indicated the model could be applied to other circumstances where a large number of interconnected sensors collect and report data. The framework was tested on power grid, traffic, and water system datasets that contained anomalies previously identified by humans, and outperformed the baselines by identifying a higher percentage of true anomalies in each dataset.

McDonald's Automating Drive Throughs

 Mentioned this previously,  and our connection with the project.  Long pre Covit.  This should heavily influence such automated takeout capabilities.   Watson involvement of interest. 

McDonald's and IBM could bring AI-powered drive-thrus to more restaurants  In Engadget By Jon Fingas @jonfingas 

Expect fewer humans taking your orders.

McDonald's might not be the only restaurant experimenting with AI-based order taking in the near future. Restaurant Dive reports McDonald's is selling its McD Tech Labs to IBM in order to "further accelerate" work on its automated voice ordering systems. The deal will help apply the technology to a wider variety of countries, languages and menus, McDonald's said, while bolstering IBM's Watson-powered customer service offerings.

The deal is expected to close in December. McD Tech Labs will join IBM's Cloud & Cognitive Software team.   .... "

A Look at Blockchain Hype

Good somewhat technical examination of work underway, including work by IBM, Hyperledger and hype of this space in general. 

Blockchain For What, Exactly?  By Doug Meil   in CACM   February 4, 2022

Blockchain is built upon multiple previously established technologies and techniques, such as consensus protocols and append-only data structures. Nearly everyone at this point should know that cryptocurrencies today run on blockchain, but not all blockchains need be cryptocurrencies. Which raises the question about what precisely blockchain can be used for in the non-cryptocurrency use-case, and according to some, the answer is "everything."

Every new technology has a hype cycle, but blockchain's hype cycle has an amplitude that few technologies have matched. Unfortunately, the lion's share of misunderstanding about blockchain has come from within its own community. It didn't have to be like this.

IBM, Blockchain, and Healthcare

IBM has been loathe to miss a hype-cycle, and it did not disappoint with blockchain. For example, in a January 2017 article titled "IBM Watson, FDA aim to tackle, tame blockchain for data exchange," an IBM executive said:

"Blockchain technology has advanced and has matured.  At the core, this technology can address various frictions in the health system, such as meaningful collaboration and coordination in healthcare that require addressing privacy concerns, lack of interoperability, and the issue of trustworthiness of data."

… and then went on to also say …

"For providers it can provide the continuity of the health record and the longitudinal 360 view of the patient that the providers need in order to provide the health services to the patient."

I have emphasized certain words in the quotations, as the phrases "privacy concerns," "continuity of the health record," and "longitudinal 360 view of the patient" mean specific things in healthcare. Yet how blockchain would specifically address those points is never made clear.

The reason this specific article is so personally important is that I had to respond to a customer about it back when I was at IBM Watson Health.  One of our unit's (healthcare) customers saw the story and wondered what these words meant for them, and wondered and worried if their data was going to wind up on a blockchain. I had to start learning about blockchain defensively, and the task was made more complicated because IBM's Blockchain group couldn't explain any of the claims in the article. I started reading about Hyperledger, a blockchain framework favored by IBM for private blockchain use-cases.

Consider the following high-level blockchain architecture diagram from the Hyperledger project, with respect to key questions that I typically don't see addressed well enough with private blockchain use-cases:  .... ' 

IBM Adds NLP to Watson Discovery

 In our early looks at Watson, precisely what we wanted to add to Discovery to make it useful.  For better links directly to business decision makers.   This cou d be key for novel uses, Show me some examples.

IBM to Add New Natural Language Processing Enhancements to Watson Discovery  in PRNewswire.

New planned features are designed to help business users quickly start applying AI to find more precise document insights with less training time and data science skills

Businesses in financial services, insurance and legal services turn to Watson Discovery to help automate processes and enhance customer care

NEWS PROVIDED BY IBM

ARMONK, N.Y., Nov. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new natural language processing (NLP) enhancements planned for IBM Watson Discovery. These planned updates are designed to help business users in industries such as financial services, insurance and legal services enhance customer care and accelerate business processes by uncovering insights and synthesizing information from complex documents.

Businesses are increasingly turning to NLP and machine learning to help them comb through rising volumes of documents and data sets in a wide range of formats1. By applying AI to get document insights, business users can reduce research time and help their employees make more fact-driven decisions during complex, time sensitive tasks such as processing insurance claims, conducting financial analyses and reviewing legal agreements or contracts.

The new planned features that IBM announced today are designed to make it easier for Watson Discovery users to quickly customize the underlying NLP models on the unique language of their business. Stemming from NLP advancements developed by IBM Research, business users can train Watson Discovery to help read, understand and surface more precise insights from large sets of complex, industry-specific documents even if they don't have significant data science skills.

Pre-trained document structure understanding: Watson Discovery's Smart Document Understanding feature, available now in the Plus, Enterprise and Premium plans, includes a new pre-trained model that is designed to automatically understand the visual structure and layout of a document without additional training from a developer or data scientist. This helps users quickly find answers that were previously hidden or difficult to find like text in complex table structures or images.

Automatic text pattern detection: IBM has released a new advanced pattern creation feature in beta in the Plus, Premium and Enterprise plans that is designed to help users quickly identify business-specific text patterns within their documents. This is key for tasks like analyzing massive amounts of contracts or financial reports, which may report the same type of information, such as an increase or decrease in revenue, in different formats or using different phrases. Developed by IBM Research, it helps provide efficient ways of labeling data and training models. It is designed to start learning the underlying text patterns from as few as two examples and then refines the pattern based on user feedback. This helps users more rapidly train a model without manual and time-intensive tasks like defining rules and expressions.

Advanced NLP customization capabilities: Training NLP models to identify highly customized, business-specific words and phrases – for example insurance claim forms may include specific claim reasons or affected products – is a time-consuming task that requires significant data prep, labeling, and orchestration. Models trained on generic data sets often fail to retrieve the right information. With a new custom entity extractor feature, now available in beta for Watson Discovery Premium users, IBM is simplifying this process by reducing the effort for data prep, simplifying labeling with active learning and bulk annotation capabilities, and enabling simple model deployment that can accelerate training time.

The planned updates announced today are part of a pipeline of developments stemming from IBM Research. For example, answer finding was recently made generally available in Watson Discovery and Watson Assistant's Search Skill. It is designed to help busy professionals and customers identify the precise insights they need.  .... ' 

Did IBM Lose the Cloud?

Did IBM Lose the Cloud and was Emphasis on Watson to Blame?   Interacted with them during the early Watson days and there was quite an investment in that.  

How IBM lost the cloud  in Protocol

Insiders say that marketing missteps and duplicated development processes meant IBM Cloud was doomed from the start, and eight years after it attempted to launch its own public cloud the future of its effort is in dire straits.

The words stunned IBM's cloud executives in November 2013. Former CEO Ginni Rometty had just told them that Watson, IBM's dubious crown jewel, should run on the company's own Power chips inside SoftLayer, IBM's recently acquired cloud-computing division.

There was one big problem: SoftLayer, like all major cloud efforts at that point, only used x86 chips from Intel and AMD.

What came next can only be described as a scramble, according to sources who worked for IBM at the time. After throwing together a barely working demo for IBM's Pulse conference in February 2014, where Rometty publicly announced the news, executives quickly convened in Texas, home to SoftLayer. They realized fulfilling Rometty's pledge would be daunting: They would have to rewrite parts of the Watson code base for the cloud, and quickly find, and then configure, enough Power servers to run alongside the all-x86 SoftLayer environment.

So began IBM's experiments with cloud computing, imperiled from the start by a maniacal focus on selling Watson at the height of its public awareness and doting obedience to a customer base that still didn't trust the cloud.

IBM was once — and still is, for people whose main sources of information about technology are television ads during sporting events — an American innovation icon, a company that literally created what we now think of as information technology. Its fortunes have risen and fallen with broader trends in computing, but around the time of that meeting in late 2013, its business and technology reputation began a steady decline that it has yet to avert.  .... '

IBM and Watson, on Again

It would seem that IBM has been talking less about Watson/AI of late, especially in the business space. But here indications of new features and emphasis.  Had not heard of Intelepeer.  Which sounds like some sort of chat and customer service extension. Involved in several Watson examples.

IBM Focuses on AI Business, Adds New Features to Watson

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is working toward enhancing IBM Watson's functionality to improve its AI-powered automation offering...

By Zacks Equity Research September 10, 2021

International Business Machines Corporation IBM recently announced the addition of new functionalities to IBM Watson Assistant. This will enhance Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered automation offerings and make it easier for businesses to create enhanced customer service experiences across multiple channels.

Among the announcement is an add-on for IntelePeer Atmosphere Communications Platform-as-a-Service. Users with a Watson Assistant Plus and Enterprise plan can set up voice capabilities and a new phone number for a virtual agent. IntelePeer can also connect Watson Assistant to the users’ existing phone systems.

Other new features for Watson Assistant include short-answer retrieval based on a question-answering system from IBM Research. The new feature allows the virtual agent to shorten longer sentences or passages and provide context on where answers came from.

Also, IBM’s collaboration with IntelePeer includes a new agent app feature to provide human customer service agents a transcript made with IBM’s speech detection models.

- Zacks

What Happened to Watson? Still here.

We were invited early on to work with Watson's prototype.     But then it did clearly slow behind its stated expectations.  Yet a number of things also came out of it, like means to construct pieces that could be assistants in useful ways.  Colleagues and friends worked there and also saw it as as beyond what had initially been seen as 'AI'.  Why?  Its still very hard to do complete human AI.   Expectations were too high and some key aspects, like 'machine learning' were not emphasized from the beginning.  Intelligence must include learning.   

As the article below mentions, no industries have been completely reinvented.   I have now worked with several 'Watson' applications.  Can Watson be usefully integrated formally with business?  I think so.  Just keep the expectations reasonable.   Don't overuse the term 'AI',  it is overused both in and outside the realm of  'Watson'.   Watson is still here, despite what the technologically challenged NYT thinks.   - FAD 

What Ever Happened to IBM’s Watson?    via the ACM, full article in NYT linked to below.

By The New York Times, July 19, 2021

Watson has not remade any industries. And it hasn't lifted IBMs fortunes.

A decade ago, IBM's public confidence was unmistakable. Its Watson supercomputer had just trounced Ken Jennings, the best human "Jeopardy!" player ever, showcasing the power of artificial intelligence. This was only the beginning of a technological revolution about to sweep through society, the company pledged.

"Already," IBM declared in an advertisement the day after the Watson victory, "we are exploring ways to apply Watson skills to the rich, varied language of health care, finance, law and academia."

But inside the company, the star scientist behind Watson had a warning: Beware what you promise.

Full article From The New York Times  

IBM Cloud Satellites: Watson and the Edge

Towards more secure data via satellites.  Secure Data as a Service.

IBM Cloud Satellite Enables Clients to Deliver Cloud Securely in Any Environment Including at the Edge 

Lumen Technologies is a key edge compute partner to integrate IBM Cloud Satellite for 180,000 enterprise locations.  More than 65 ecosystem partners, including Cisco, Dell Technologies and Intel, to build hybrid cloud services

IBM Cloud Pak for Data as a Service with IBM Cloud Satellite extends Watson Anywhere AI

ARMONK, N.Y., March 1, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that its hybrid cloud services are now generally available in any environment -- on any cloud, on premises or at the edge -- via IBM Cloud Satellite. Lumen Technologies and IBM have integrated IBM Cloud Satellite with the Lumen edge platform to enable clients to harness hybrid cloud services in near real-time and build innovative solutions at the edge.    ... "

IBM and AI. An Abandonment of Watson?

 I see that our interesting correspondent and critic from before the first AI winter, Roger Schank, has posted a note strongly criticizing IBM on AI and cognitive claims.  Below an excerpt, link through to more: 

They are not doing "cognitive computing" no matter how many times they say they are  Update: February 2021

Commentng on WSJ article: IBM’s Retreat From Watson Highlights Broader AI Struggles in Health

I was chatting with an old friend yesterday and he reminded me of a conversation we had nearly 50 years ago. I tried to explain to him what I did for living and he was trying to understand why getting computers to understand was more complicated than key word analysis. I explained about concepts underlying sentences and explained that sentences used words but that people really didn’t use words in their minds except to get to the underlying ideas and that computers were having a hard time with that.

Fifty years later, key words are still dominating the thoughts of people who try to get computers to deal with language. But, this time, the key word people have deceived the general public by making claims that this is thinking, that AI is here, and that, by the way we should be very afraid, or very excited, I forget which.

We were making some good progress on getting computers to understand language but, in 1984, AI winter started. AI winter was a result of too many promises about things AI could do that it really could not do. (This was about promoting expert systems. Where are they now?). Funding dried up and real work on natural language processing died too.

But still people promote key words because Google and others use it to do "search". Search is all well and good when we are counting words, which is what data analytics and machine learning are really all about. Of course, once you count words you can do all kinds of correlations and users can learn about what words often connect to each other and make use of that information. But, users have learned to accommodate to Google not the other way around. We know what kinds of things we can type into Google and what we can’t and we keep our searches to things that Google is likely to help with. We know we are looking for texts and not answers to start a conversation with an entity that knows what we really need to talk about. People learn from conversation and Google can’t have one. It can pretend to have one using Siri but really those conversations tend to get tiresome when you are past asking about where to eat.

But, I am not worried about Google. It works well enough for our needs.

What I am concerned about are the exaggerated claims being made by IBM about their Watson program. Recently they ran an ad featuring Bob Dylan which made laugh, or would have, if had made not me so angry. I will say it clearly: Watson is a fraud. I am not saying that it can’t crunch words, and there may well be value in that to some people. But the ads are fraudulent. ... ' 

On IBM Factsheets

 On IBM Factsheets, their overview:   https://aifs360.mybluemix.net/introduction  Looking more closely.

Why IBM’s AI Fact Sheets should be the industry standard  in thenextweb

Every once in awhile an idea comes along that’s so good it makes you wonder why it took so long for someone to think of it. IBM’s AI Fact Sheets is one of those ideas.

AI Fact Sheets are a lot like packaged food nutrition labels. They contain information about an AI model’s development, capabilities, benchmark performance, and more.

Big Blue today announced its plans to “commercialize key automated documentation capabilities from IBM Research’s AI Factsheets methodology into Watson Studio in Cloud Pak for Data throughout 2021.”

In other words: businesses and developers using Watson Studio in Cloud Pak for Data will soon have access to an automated AI Fact Sheets tool to create transparency and info reports.  The tool would generate most, if not all, of the AI Fact Sheet’s information automatically.

Per IBM:

The goal of the FactSheet project is to foster trust in AI by increasing transparency an increased understanding of how AI was created and deployed and enabling governance the ability to control how AI is created and deployed. Increased transparency provides information for AI consumers to better understand how the AI model a program component that is generated by learning patterns in training data to make predictions on new data, such as a loan application. or service an executable program, deployed behind an API, that allows it to respond to program requests from other programs or services was created. This allows a consumer of the model to determine if it is appropriate for their situation.

Quick take: We love this idea. While it’s a bit more complex than we can get into in this article (research paper here), the bottom line is that anything that standardizes transparency in machine learning models is a good thing.

This comes as part of IBM’s “AI Governance” initiative along with new AI consultation services. The company also announced several interesting new Watson capabilities.   ....'

IBM Delivers New AI Capabilities

New developments from IBM, and based on this it seems they are attempting to make AI easier to use and deliver.   Notably things like delivering FAQ is the simplest thing you might want to provide information quickly in a conversation.    And Explain-ability to needed convince.  Plus the ability to translate existing documents into usable intelligence.  All things we did with early AI efforts. so I  see this as good direction for Watson.

IBM announces new AI language, explainability, and automation services

Kyle Wiggers  @Kyle_L_Wiggers   In Venturebeat December 9, 2020 5:00 AM

During IBM’s virtual AI Summit this week, the company announced updates across its Watson family of products in the areas of language, explainability, and workplace automation. A new feature called Reading Comprehension surfaces answers from databases of enterprise documents in response to natural language questions, assigning a confidence score to each response. A novel module in Watson Assistant called FAQ Extraction automatically generates question-and-answer documents. And AI Factsheets automatically captures key facts on a machine learning model’s performance and generates reports to “foster transparency and ensure compliance.”

According to IBM, Reading Comprehension, which was built atop a top-performing question-answering system from IBM Research, is intended to help identify more precise answers in response to queries referring to business documents. Reading Comprehension provides scores that indicate how confident the system is in each answer and is currently in beta in IBM’s AI-powered search service Watson Discovery.    ... "

IBM Launches Watson Works

Addressing return to work challenges

IBM launches Watson Works to address the challenges of returning to the workplace
Provides data-driven insights to help employers make informed decisions on workplace re-entry and safety
ARMONK, N.Y., June 18, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced Watson Works, a curated set of products that embeds Watson artificial intelligence (AI) models and applications to help companies navigate many aspects of the return-to-workplace challenge following lockdowns put in place to slow the spread of COVID-19.

Returning people to the workplace during the continuing global pandemic demands new approaches to promote the health, safety and productivity of workers in a privacy-preserving way. Watson Works provides data-driven insights to help employers make informed decisions on workplace re-entry, facilities management, space allocation and other COVID-related priorities.

"We've designed Watson Works to help businesses navigate the workplace with the ongoing COVID-19 health crisis as effectively as possible," said Bob Lord, Senior Vice President, Cognitive Applications, Blockchain and Ecosystems, IBM. "Applying AI models and applications is especially useful in this context, where there are so many different sources of information businesses must consider, and every aspect of the situation is in flux."

Watson Works is designed to help companies with these elements of returning to the workplace as they respond to COVID-19 related challenges:  ... " 

IBM Introduces Watson Works with AI

Newly introduced:

Watson Works
Work safe, work smart, and ensure the health and productivity of your people in a changing workplace  ... 

Watson Works is a curated set of products that embeds Watson AI models and applications to help you:

Decide when employees can return to the workplace 
Organize and manage facilities and adhere to new protocols
Answer customer and employee questions on COVID-19
Maximize the effectiveness of contact tracing
Secure and protect your employees and organization

Schedule a consultation  ... 

Anaconda and IBM Watson Team to Simplify Enterprise AI

This was needed to provide easier to use capabilities in the enterprise.

Anaconda and IBM Watson Team to Simplify Enterprise Adoption of AI Open-Source Technologies
Anaconda, Inc.​, provider of the leading Python data science platform, and IBM Watson (NYSE: ​IBM​) today announced a new collaboration to help simplify enterprise adoption of AI open-source technologies.  ....

- Anaconda will feature IBM’s Watson Studio no-charge plan to its community of 20 million data scientists

AUSTIN, Texas, and ARMONK, New York, June 04, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Anaconda, Inc.​, provider of the leading Python data science platform, and IBM Watson (NYSE: ​IBM​) today announced a new collaboration to help simplify enterprise adoption of AI open-source technologies. By working together, the two companies plan to help fuel innovation and address the AI and data science skills gap that many enterprises face today.

Today, we see that data scientists rely on open-source technologies for innovation and to tap into a wealth of AI skills and talent. However, using open source in the enterprise could be complex to adopt and manage from both a technical and operational standpoint.

To help enterprises overcome this challenge, Anaconda Team Edition repository will be integrated with IBM Watson Studio on IBM Cloud Pak for Data, enabling organizations to better govern and speed the deployment of AI open-source technologies across any cloud. Additionally, Anaconda’s community of 20 million users will now be able to access a no-charge lite plan of Watson Studio, offering the opportunity to manage their data science projects within IBM’s enterprise-grade environment. ..... '