IBM Senior Vice President and Research Director Dr. John E.
Kelly III and IBM writer Steve Hamm have authored a book, Smart Machines:
IBM’s Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing, which will be published by
Columbia University Press this fall. The book presents a comprehensive
perspective on the future of technology and calls for government, academia and
the global tech industry to help power this coming wave of innovation.
Steve answered a few questions about the book and its focus
on cognitive computing in a recent interview, below. You can also read a free
sample chapter at Columbia
University Press.
IBM Research: What is the era of cognitive computing?
 |
| Steve Hamm |
Steve: John and other leaders at IBM believe that
we’re on the cusp of a new era in computing. Scientists at IBM and elsewhere
are creating machines that sense, learn, reason and interact with people in new
ways. These machines will help people penetrate complexity and make better
decisions.
You can think of a cognitive system as a truly intelligent assistant that helps individuals live and work more successfully, and that helps organizations become more efficient and effective. The implications are huge for individuals, businesses and society as a whole. With these technologies, we will be able to make the world work better and more sustainably.
You can think of a cognitive system as a truly intelligent assistant that helps individuals live and work more successfully, and that helps organizations become more efficient and effective. The implications are huge for individuals, businesses and society as a whole. With these technologies, we will be able to make the world work better and more sustainably.
IBM Research: Why write a book now?
Steve: The idea that we’re entering a new era of
computing emerged over the past couple of years. It began when a small group of
IBM Research scientists engaged in the mental exercise of envisioning how
computing would evolve over the next century. They realized that, because of
recent and anticipated advances in science and technology, computers of the
future would be fundamentally different than the machines that evolved since
the 1940s. But revolutions don’t happen on a timetable. You need a forcing
function to get things going.
So the idea behind the book is to stimulate new thinking
within industry and academia. Just as importantly, we hope to inspire
university and high school students
to pursue studies and careers in science, technology and mathematics. Amazing
progress has been made in computing, but we believe a lot of effort by a lot of
people and organizations will be needed for the era of cognitive computing to
come on strong.
IBM Research: John Kelly will be talking about the
era of cognitive systems at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley next
Tuesday. How can people find out what he says?
Steve: Anybody who wants to can attend the fireside
chat between John and museum director John Hollar. The museum will later
post a video of the conversation on their YouTube channel a couple
of days later. In addition, we’ll have coverage at IBM's Research homepage and the Smarter Planet blog.
Steve Hamm is a communications strategist and writer at
IBM. Previously, he was a journalist for 30 years, most recently at
BusinessWeek magazine. He has authored two books, Bangalore Tiger, about the rise
of the Indian tech industry, and The Race for Perfect, about innovation in
mobile computing; and co-authored Making the World Work Better, which IBM
published in connection with its centennial.
I think this is an important timely book. I very much look forward to reading it and figuring out a way to bring it to the attention of business school students and executives. It will be a shame if this is seen as an evolution in computing architecture only. I see it as an important driver of next-generation organizational architecture that brings attention to key ideas of expertise as driver of value creation. I could not access the sample chapter but will try it at a different time.
ReplyDeleteI hope the book Smart Machine will not only enlighten the general audience about the 'Watson' but also outline to some extent on the types of techniques and machine learning/NLP techniques used. I heard it has only supervised classification, that too, specifically logistics regression to find out best results to the questions. If the Watson has already maintained a repository of large pool of information and with some class labels. If in any area data is sparse and no class label or not much ground truth is available, how Watson gonna work? May be the book has some answer. Finger crossed.
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