2012年6月8日星期五

Watson Won Jeopardy, But How Might It Help Finance


IBM’s Watson is the powerful computer that defeated its human rivals in a Jeopardy match against Jeopardy’s two grand champions. You can check out Watson here.

In this case Watson replaces Dr. House, the scruffy, gruff curmudgeon genius from the popular TV show. Watson may lack the sex appeal of actor Hugh Laurie replica oakley sunglasses, but its boasts impressive specs. The machine competing on Jeopardy consisted of 90 tightly integrated IBM Power 750 servers running Linux and contained 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 15TB of memory. The same commercially available off-the-shelf components are available to you today.

IBM didn’t go to all this trouble just to win a trivia game. It expects to sell Watson’s technology to solve real problems, including business problems. Here are some ways a CFO might use Watson.

The technology behind Watson oakley, according to IBM, can be adapted to solve business and societal problems. Already IBM, for example has targeted its first application—medical diagnosis.






So, what can Watson do for the CFO? Procurement is an immediate area that comes to mind. Another could be global supply and logistics. IBM already has targeted fraud prevention and the parsing vast tracts of legal documents as key opportunities. Litigation can involve massive amounts of material, often as email; put Watson to work on ediscovery too.

Another slam dunk for Watson should be customer support. Supported, if necessary, by some text-speech conversion, Watson could be optimized and configured to respond to questions from a company’s existing and prospective customers or its support agents. It certainly couldn’t do worse than some of the offshore support agents. Of course, Watson would have to be loaded with customer, product oakley, and company data and maybe industry and regulatory data. Compared to Jeopardy that should be trivial.



IBM has been selling the commodity technology that makes up Watson for a few years, and it already has a business track record. For example, the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance is using Watson-like analytics to transform its approach to refunds from pay-and-chase to next-best-case. In its five years of operation, the system has preserved more than $889 million against fraudulent requests.

Watson represents an amazing achievement of computer science from many standpoints. The most important thing it demonstrates, however, is the machine’s ability to respond to natural language. Alex Trebek, the host of Jeopardy, asked regular Jeopardy questions in the normal way. OK replica oakley sunglasses oakley, Watson would get the questions simultaneously as text, but they contained all the convoluted syntax, puns, double entendres, and tricks that characterize Jeopardy game questions.

The system that won Jeopardy was far bigger and more expensive than any single organization probably needs. Scaled back to the size of your organization, Watson might be a downright bargain.

The idea is to optimize a version of Watson for the medical industry, meaning that it will be loaded comprehensive medical knowledge from books, archives of medical journals, and the very latest research to respond to queries from doctors. This actually is tame compared to Jeopardy, which required IBM to load up Watson with information on a seemingly endless array of subjects. The medical queries, presumably, will consist of lists of complicated symptoms and conditions that Watson will analyze and correlate to its medical knowledge to return an ordered list of the best diagnoses.

Related:

没有评论:

发表评论