IBM Bets on Cognitive Computing
LAS VEGAS—IBM is putting all its chips into the cognitive computing pot at its PartnerWorld Leadership Conference here this week.
“Cognitive computing, and Watson in particular, are becoming the essence of transformation at IBM,” IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said during her keynote address here.
According to Rometty, IBM is betting the company on cognitive computing in the cloud, dedicating its 54 cloud data centers to support Bluemix—the dashboard for Watson’s cognitive computing capabilities and application programmer interfaces (APIs).
Rometty said the architectural changes made by Bluemix at IBM would trickle-down to influence everything downstream in computing.
“There are three areas affecting all businesses today—one is the need for new architectures like the open worldwide data platform in the cloud offered by Bluemix and Watson,” she said.
IBM CEO Ginni Rometty explains how IBM is putting all its chips into the Cognitive Computing pot at Las Vegas’ PartnerWorld Leadership Conference. SOURCE: IBM
“Secondly, artificial intelligence (AI) is adding meaning to both structured and unstructured data. And thirdly, transparent machine learning specifically targets each user’s domain resulting in insights never before uncovered,” Rometty said.
She predicted that one billion users from 45 countries in 20 industries would be using the Bluemix model by the end of 2017. By 2022, every decision made by consumers will be influenced by this model, she added.
And as the knowledge base of known valid solutions to everything from medical conditions to cybersecurity grows, the movers and the shakers writing those apps will become the world’s leading companies, Rometty predicted.
IBM claims it is already opening a $2 trillion market for using cognitive computing for decision support by 2025, and another $1.5 trillion market in increased productivity by 2020. SOURCE: IBM
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IBM also announced a “Watson Build Challenge” to kick-off efforts to open the cognitive-market to all by challenging users to contribute IBM tested and verified apps on the IBM market place site, which previously had only IBM-written Watson apps.
The Watson Build Challenge will allow anyone, from the top 45 Fortune 50 companies already on-board to the smallest startups, to participate. The effort was modeled on an internal contest where all 380,000 IBM employees were asked to build a Watson app last year. The winners of that contest now have their apps for sale on the IBM Marketplace. Winners are expected to be announced by the end of this year.
For medical applications, the difference between machine learning, artificial intelligence and cognitive computing is, for example, the ability to detect a tumor from x-rays (machine learning), to the ability to detect cancer before the tumor grows by analyzing the dynamic flow of blood in vessels/capillaries to the ability to comparing the above data with that of every cured case of cancer from the relevant literature to accurately diagnosis and ultimately cure it. SOURCE: IBM
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“We now have about 70 percent of our data center workloads running IBM APIs with about 30 percent of all Bluemix calls going to Watson,” said Dave Wilson, vice president of IBM cloud business partners and channel innovation, in an exclusive interview with EE Times. “BlueMix is being used for Watson and IoT apps of all sorts and sizes.”
Wilson echoed Rometty in confirming that IBM is putting all of its eggs into the cognitive basket. Not only is IBM selling BlueMix and its Watson links to its partners to develop their own apps, but almost 30 percent of its partners are selling BlueMix to their customers to run their built-for-purpose solutions, he said.
More = > http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1331363
