In an interview on Feb. 22 IBM Watson’s Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, Rob High spoke enthusiastically about Watson with Craig Zamary.
Craig Zamary: What excites you most about Watson?
Rob High: Joining the IBM Watson team was the first time in my career that I had the opportunity to work on something that wasn’t just about creating a business outcome, it was really about creating a social outcome and helping people. We’re not trying to replicate the human mind; we are trying to figure out what humans are good at, what humans are not good at, and what can a cognitive computer do to fill in the gaps. There’s lots of things we don’t do very well as humans and that’s the great power and advantage of the work we are doing with Watson: to balance out the shortcomings of mental processes while also playing to the complex, sophisticated strengths of the human mind.
Craig Zamary: What are the top 3 coolest things that Watson can do? What are developers and young entrepreneurs building with Watson?
Rob High: Watson is a variety of different developer services or a set of APIs in the cloud for people to build their own cognitive solutions. There are now three (3) main categories of services on the Watson platform. What I call Foundation Cognitive Skills, Higher Reasoning Skills, and Knowledge Organization Skills. When people build applications today, they can choose what kinds of capabilities they need to plug into their solutions to build really robust and interesting things. For example, one current Stanford student developer created a robo-lawyer called “DoNotPay” that uses Watson to help people challenge traffic tickets in the UK, New York, and Seattle.
Craig Zamary: Can you share why people shouldn't fear AI?
Rob High: AI is a broad term. I don’t think anyone has really figured out how the human mind really works. We are about augmenting the human mind. Our focus on AI is on things that are beneficial to help humans, not the typical things you find in Hollywood movies.
Craig Zamary: In what ways is Watson smarter than humans, and how are humans smarter than Watson? How can they work together?
Rob High: Well they’re not. They’re neither smarter than humans nor are humans smarter than Watson. Watson can quickly answer a question from very large bodies of knowledge. Watson can examine the linguistics of your question and evaluate all the potential answers. Watson for Jeopardy! read through over 200 million pages in less than 3 seconds. That’s a form of algorithmic evaluation that humans don’t possess. It doesn’t mean it’s smarter, it just means Watson does that task better.
Craig Zamary: What makes Watson different from competitors?
Rob High: Watson is solely focused on this problem of how to amplify human cognition. We are focused on, “how do we take what people are really good at and make them better?”.
Craig Zamary: Should AI be taught in 1st Grade?
Rob High: I think it should be. That probably doesn’t mean that we teach 1st graders the mathematical principles behind statistical analysis. AI or augmented intelligence is going to be such a natural part of the fabric of our life, kids ought to be learning at a very early age how to harness that, how to exploit that, how to get advantage of that with their use of cognitive systems, very much the same way kids learn how to exploit the advantages of tablet computers at an incredibly early age.
Craig Zamary: How can educational institutions engage with Watson? What is IBM doing to encourage students to engage with Watson?
Rob High: We are already teaching Watson in over 300 universities world-wide. Watson is already being woven in the fabric of the educational process at the university level. At Georgia Tech, a team of researchers created a teaching assistant named “Jill Watson” with Watson technology that provided feedback and answers to students' questions as part of an artificial intelligence class last year.
We are also doing a number of things around STEM in High Schools, Junior High and elementary schools and with our partnership with Sesame Street, also assisting teachers building customized syllabi as a technology to learn about, with and to facilitate. Beyond the formal classroom, we have several other initiatives and programs for students to gain the knowledge and skills of building with Watson that forward-looking employers need. For example, IBM and Udacity introduced a new AI Nanodegree to empower the next generation of developers to hone their AI skills.
Craig Zamary: Any other thoughts/ideas that you would love to share with readers about the exciting work going on at IBM Watson?
Rob High: I think what we are doing with Healthcare continues to be fascinating to me. Helping doctors make use of not only the latest advances in medicine and also shared knowledge and making expertise democratized. Everyone wants the best Financial Advisors, Real Estate Agents, etc. One of the things a cognitive system can do is take the best humans skills and experience, and democratize this expertise. This is something I think we are going to see replicated over and over again.
For more information Contact Craig Zamary