Watson IBM presentation

IBM's Watson

Addie Prince

What is Watson?

In short, a massive supercomputer with AI abilities

Watson is a data analytics processor that uses natural language processing. This means that itanalyzes human speech for its meaning and syntax It was named after Thomas J Watson, former CEO and chairman of Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (renamed to International Business Machines (IBM)) Mainly used as a problem solving device to answer human posed questions Like a predecessor to ChatGPT (TechBrew)

How does it work?

Compiles data from multiple sources to answer human questions Gets better over time, as it is fed more information, it's reserves of data get larger and it can more accurately respond to questions When asked a question, the first set of algorithms analyze the question and utilize data reserves to put together hundreds of possible answers From there, a different set of algorithms rank the answers and look for sources that either support or refute the answers After this, each answer is given an individual score and the highest ranking one is be the answer Watson displays Can do all of this in about 3 seconds

History of watson

2004 to 2011

Watson is developed and improved by IBM

2011

Watson went on the game show, Jeopardy, and proceeded to beat two all-time champions

2014

A focus on business

IBM launched the IBM Watson group, commercializing the supercomputer to help answer questions for business professionals

2015

Shift to healthcare

They began to focus on healthcare by creating the Watson Health business unit in order to help patients, physicians, researchers, and insurers

2016

Further developments

Waton learns eight different languages: English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic, and Korean Announce a year long project to teach Watson how to deal with cybercrime

Applications of Watson

Online Sports

Retail

Cybersecurity

Healthcare

Finance

It is even used to analyze NFL data to help Fantasy Football players

Used to data analysis abilities to determine when it is most appropriate and what products are best to advertise to customers

Helps clients analyze cybersecurity threats faster than before

Used for cancer research (speeds up DNA analysis) Helps with diagnoses for physicians by taking patient data and identifying treatments

Uses question and answer abilities to give financial advice as well as manage finacnial risk

Overall, because of it's evergrowing data reserves and AI qualities, the possibilities for Watson are nealy endless

What went wrong?

Watson over promised and under delivered.They put so much effort and time into marketing the project, but weren’t able to follow up with actual results, especially in the healthcare field.

Sources

https://ggu.libguides.com/c.php?g=1163426&p=8493172

https://theconversation.com/from-a-deranged-provocateur-to-ibms-failed-ai-superproject-the-controversial-story-of-how-data-has-transformed-healthcare-189362#:~:text=Many%20of%20the%20elegies%20written,many%20health%20technology%20start%2Dups.

https://www.emergingtechbrew.com/stories/2023/05/12/ibm-watson-history-generative-ai

https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/definition/IBM-Watson-supercomputer

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3129269/milestones-along-the-way-in-watsons-colorful-history.html

THANK YOU!