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IBM Research

IBM Proprietary - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE

Dr. Carl E. Abrams

Financial Services Sector Business Executive

IBM Research

The Business Implications of WATSON

IBM Research

IBM Research Hawthorne

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IBM RESEARCH

Outline

► IBM Research Overview

► What is Watson and Why Now?

► How it Works

► Business Implications

IBM Research


IBM Research OverviewIBM Research Overview


IBM RESEARCH

IBM Research OverviewFamous for its science and vital to IBM

Innovation that Matters

FOAKFirst of a Kind

EBOEmerging

BusinessOpportunities

ResearchServices

Briefings

Business

TechnologySociety

New Insights

1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s

Collaborate on client-specific technology and business solutions

Centrally Funded

Joint Programs

Research in the Marketplace

Collaborative Innovation

� Corporate funded research agenda

� Technologytransfer

� Collaborative team

� Shared agenda

� Effectiveness

� Work on client problems

� Create business advantage for clients

� Industry-focused research

Almaden Research Center, 1955

Austin Research Laboratory, 1995

India Research Laboratory, 1998

Zurich Research Laboratory, 1956

China Research Laboratory, 1995

Haifa Research Laboratory, 1972

Tokyo Research Laboratory, 1982

Thomas J. WatsonResearch Center, 1961

ResearchPartnership

Brazil Research Laboratory, 2010

Melbourne Laboratory, 2010


IBM RESEARCH

Diversity of Disciplines at IBM Research

ChemistryComputer Science

ElectricalEngineering

Materials Science Mathematical

Sciences Physics

Service Science, Management &

Engineering

Behavioral Sciences

BusinessInnovation

TechnologyInnovation

Social Innovation

Demand Innovation

Science & Engineering

Business & Management

Social & Cognitive Sciences

Economics & Markets

IBM Research


What is WATSON and Why Now?What is WATSON and Why Now?

© 2010 IBM Corporation

IBM Research

7 IBM Proprietary - DO NOT DISTRIBUTEIBM Confidential

What is WATSON today?

Watson is a workload optimized system based on IBM DeepQAarchitecture running on a cluster of IBM®POWER7® processor-based servers.

Given an English language question on almost any subject, Watson can provide a set of potential answers in 3 to 5 seconds.

Watson, purpose built for Jeopardy! is powered by 90 POWER7 servers with 2880 cores and 15,000 Gigabytes of memory

It was built to do one thing extremely well – play Jeopardy!

Today Watson is a system

designed for Jeopardy!

question and answers

© 2010 IBM Corporation

IBM Research

8 IBM Proprietary - DO NOT DISTRIBUTEIBM Confidential

What is WATSON today?

� 90 x IBM Power 7501 servers

� 2880 POWER7 cores

� POWER7 3.55 GHz chip

� 500 GB per sec on-chip bandwidth

� 10 Gb Ethernet network

� 15 Terabytes of memory

� 20 Terabytes of disk, clustered

� Can operate at 80 Teraflops

� Runs IBM DeepQA software

� Scales out with and searches vast amounts of unstructured information with UIMA & Hadoop open source components

� Linux provides a scalable, open platform, optimized to exploit POWER7 performance

� 10 racks include servers, networking, shared disk system, cluster controllers

1 Note that the Power 750 featuring POWER7 is a commercially available server that runs AIX, IBM i and Linux and has been in market since Feb 2010


IBM RESEARCH

The Brain vs. the Computer

► The Human Brain

■ The human brain is very slow( about a million times slower than electronic circuits)

■ Parallel architecture

♦ hundred billion neurons ( if each neuron is equated to a byte then the human brain can store about 1 petabyte)

♦ each of which has an average of a thousand connections to other neurons.

♦ hundred trillion simultaneous computations

■ Although each interneuronal connection is capable of performing only about two hundred computations each second, a hundred trillion computations being performed at the same time add up to about twenty million billion calculations per second!

► The Computer

■ Essentially single computation at a time

■ Simulate two billion computations per second

■ About 2018 machines will reach the computational capacity and storage density of the human brain…however….it is the connectivity that counts as much as the speed

Ref; http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0267.html


IBM RESEARCH

Processing Power

2010-02-16

Compute-power is abundant:Yesterdays supercomputers are today's mobile phones

Tera FLOP

Giga FLOP

Mega FLOP

Kilo FLOP

1 FLOP

0

Te

ra F

LO

Ps

Te

ra F

LO

Ps

IBM Blue Gene/P*

84% CGR

ASCI WhiteUS Dept of Energy

SETI@HomeEarth

Simulator

$1000 buys

DesktopGaming

IBM Roadrunner

http://www.top500.org

ATMs GlobalTrading Floors

Batch Processing

Calculation Machines

Web Channels

Natural Language

Early Tabulators

after Kurzweil, 1999 & Moravec, 1998

IBM Blue Gene/Q (10 Petaflops 2012)

IBM Sequoia (20 Petaflops 2013)


IBM RESEARCH

What can you do with 20 Petaflops? Or 20 quadrillion mathematical processes per second?

► If each of the 6.7 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 320 years to do what Sequoia will do in one hour.

►20 petaflops could offer a 50x improvement in our capability to predict earthquakes, allowing scientists to predict an earthquake's effects on a building-by-building basis across an area as large as Los Angeles County.

►20 petaflops could also provide a 40x improvement in our capability to monitor and forecast weather. This would allow forecasters to predict local weather events that affect areas 100 meters to one kilometer in size, down from their current ten-kilometer ability.

►The Sequoia will be powered by 1.6 million cores (specific 45-nanometer chips in development) and 1.6 petabytes of memory. It will be housed in 96 racks spanning roughly 3,000 square feet.

►20 petaflops coupled with a petabyte of real memory will enable discrete event simulation of the entire financial system at the transaction level


IBM RESEARCH

Storage Class Memory – Timeline & Systems Impact

2010-02-16

Storage Class Memory Characteristics:

– Holding Petabytes in memory can lead to new levels of real-

time analytics for fraud, pattern detection, business

optimizations , …

ArchivalActive StorageMemoryLogic

2008

1990

2014+ RAM Storage Class Memory Disk Tape

RAMFlash

SSD Disk Tape

RAM Disk Tape

Storage Class Memory is the next major advance in memory and storage systems

SSD Improvement:•300% throughput•45%-75% IO

SCM Improvement:•100X less power•2X denser than Flash•1000X more durable•Scalable beyond 22nm•By 2020 1000X to 10000x better performance, power and floor space usage

Racetrack Memory Nears the Finish Line

Physicsworld.com (Institute of Physics Jan 10, 2011

IBM researchers have moved another step closer to commercializing "racetrack memory" – a new technology that uses magnetic nanowires as high-density data storage devices. Racetrack involves moving magnetic domain walls – the boundaries between regions of opposite magnetization – along a nanowire using small spin-polarized current pulses. It could make for a new type of magnetic memory that can store up to 100 times more data than existing random-access memories (RAMs).


IBM RESEARCH

Answer please in the form of a question…

What is Watson?

Financial Services GTO 2011 - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE[14]

IBM RESEARCH

Jeopardy - The IBM Challenge

2011-02-23Financial Services GTO 2011 - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE

► 1997 - Chess

■ A finite, mathematically well-defined search space

■ Large but limited number of moves and states

■ Everything explicit, unambiguous mathematical rules

► 2011 - Human Language

■ Ambiguous, contextual and implicit

■ Grounded only in human cognition

■ Seemingly infinite number of ways to express the same meaning

[14]

© 2011 IBM Corporation1515

Broad Domain

Our Focus is on reusable NLP technology for analyzing vast volumes of as-is text. Structured sources (DBs and KBs) provide background knowledge for interpreting the text.

We do NOT attempt to anticipate all questions and build databases.

In a random sample of 20,000 questions we found2,500 distinct types*. The most frequent occurring <3% of the time.

The distribution has a very long tail.

And for each these types 1000’s of different things may be asked.

*13% are non-distinct (e.g, it, this, these or NA)

Even going for the head of the tail willbarely make a dent

We do NOT try to build a formal model of the world


IBM RESEARCH

Watson’s analytics is more than search

►Web search returns a ranked list of “possible” web pages containing the requested data ■ Search engines results are based on

popularity and page ranking■ User must still analyze results – sift

through a web page – to find the best answer

►Watson’s analytics understand the structure and wording of the question asked■ Finds a specific answer■ Ranks its answer and provides a level of

“confidenc” that it is correct based on experience

►Watson answers “natural language”questions■ Can contain puns, slang, jargon and

acronyms that must all be evaluated

2011-02-23Financial Services GTO 2011 - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE[16]


What Computers Find HardComputer programs are natively explicit, fast and exacting in their calculation over numbers and symbols….But Natural Language is implicit, highly contextual, ambiguous and often imprecise.

�Where was X born?One day, from among his city views of Ulm, Otto chose a water color to

send to Albert Einstein as a remembrance of Einstein´s birthplace.

�X ran this?If leadership is an art then surely Jack Welch has proved himself a

master painter during his tenure at GE.

Structured

Unstructured


Basic Game Play

Technology Classics The Great

Outdoors

Speak of

the Dickens

Mind Your

Manners

Before and

After

$200 $200 $200 $200 $200 $200

$400 $400 $400 $400 $400 $400

$600 $600 $600 $600 $600 $600

$800 $800 $800 $800 $800 $800

$1000 $1000 $1000 $1000 $1000 $1000

6 Categories6 Categories

5 Levels of Difficulty

5 Levels of Difficulty

�1 of 3 Players Selects a Clue

�Host reads Clue out loud

ALL POLICEMEN CAN THANK STEPHANIE KWOLEK FOR HER INVENTION OF THIS POLYMER FIBER, 5 TIMES TOUGHER THAN STEEL

TECHNOLOGY

� All Players compete to answer

� 1st to buzz-in gets to answer

� IF correct

�earns $ value

�selects Next Clue

� IF wrong� loses $ value � other players buzz again (rebounds)

� Two Rounds Per Game + Final Question

� ONE Daily Double in First Round, TWO in 2nd Round


Different Types of Evidence: Keyword Evidence

celebrated

India

In May 1898

400th anniversary

arrival in

Portugal

India

In May

Garyexplorer

celebrated

anniversary

in Portugal

Keyword MatchingKeyword Matching





19

arrived in

In May, Gary arrived in India after he celebrated hisanniversary in Portugal.

In May 1898 Portugal celebrated the 400th anniversary of this explorer’s arrival in India.

Evidence suggests “Gary” is the answer BUT the system must learn that keyword matching may be weak relative to other types of evidence


On 27th May 1498, Vasco da Gama landed in Kappad Beach


celebrated

May 1898 400th anniversary

arrival in

In May 1898 Portugal celebrated the 400th anniversary of this explorer’s arrival in India.

Portugal

landed in

27th May 1498

Vasco da Gama

Temporal Reasoning

Statistical Paraphrasing

GeoSpatialReasoning

explorer


On the 27th of May 1498, Vasco daGama landed in Kappad Beach

Kappad Beach

Para-phrase

s

Geo-KB

DateMath

20

India

Stronger evidence can be much harder to find and score.

The evidence is still not 100% certain.

�Search Far and Wide

�Explore many hypotheses

�Find Judge Evidence

�Many inference algorithms

Different Types of Evidence: Deeper Evidence


IBM RESEARCH

Question100s Possible

Answers

1000’s of Pieces of Evidence

Multiple Interpretations

100,000’s scores from many simultaneous Text Analysis Algorithms100s sources

. . .

HypothesisGeneration

Hypothesis and Evidence Scoring

Final Confidence Merging & Ranking

SynthesisQuestion &

Topic Analysis

QuestionDecomposition

HypothesisGeneration

Hypothesis and Evidence Scoring

Answer & Confidence

DeepQA: Massively Parallel ProbabilisticEvidence-Based Architecture



IBM RESEARCH

Watson Today: Processes Unstructured Text & 200 Hypothesis/3 seconds

Statistical Ensembleof 600 to 800

Scoring Engines

~30 Machine Learning Models Weigh Scores, Produce

Confidence for Each Question 0<P<1

Hypothetical Question With Greatest Confidence is Chosen

Evidence-Based

Decision Support System

Evidence-Based


S1S1 S2S2 S3S3 SNSN. . .

StaticData

Corpus

StaticData

Corpus

Answer: A large country in the Western Hemisphere whose capital has a similar name.

Hypothesis Generated from “Answer”Guess Questions Q1, Q2 … Qi

Hypothesis Generated from “Answer”Guess Questions Q1, Q2 … Qi

Question: What is Brazil?

Element Refresh Time

DataCorpus

2 Weeks

Hypothesis Engines

Weeks toMonths

Scoring Engines

Weeks toMonths

Decision Support Engine

4 Days

Watson

3,000 cores;100 TFlops2 TB memory

~ 200 KW



IBM RESEARCH

Building on Watson to Expand Domains and Autonomy

Evidence-Based


Evidence-Based


S1

S1

S2

S2

S3

S3 SiSi. . .

DynamicData

Corpus

Hypothesis GeneratorHypothesis Generator

Sj

Sj

1

2

3

4

1. Dynamic Data Corpus: constantly mine

data sources (including crowd-sourcing) to

build and update libraries of background

knowledge across domains.

2. Expand Hypothesis Generation to different

domains; leverage crowd-sourcing

3. Add Scorers for Different Input

Modalities: images, video, voice,

environmental, biological…

4. Deeper Reasoning: Improve learning

algorithms to make them real-time and on-

line, and to allow higher-levels of semantic

abstraction.

5. Domain Adaptation Tools: Develop

software tools to help automate domain

adaptation.

Autonomously & accurately identify essential features across multiple domains.Learning systems must understand context to disambiguate.



IBM RESEARCH

WatsonIt’s about much more than a quiz show: What it means for business

►A new paradigm in IT■ The computing paradigm for business has changed – traditional computing models are

being replaced by systems that underlie every business process, and the hardware and software performance in those systems is closely tied to actual business performance

■ Watson harnesses IBM’s commercially available, workload optimized POWER7 system which can process thousands of simultaneous tasks at rapid speeds – ideal for complex analytics workloads.

►The future of business is in the data■ Watson-like analytics applied to business can provide answers with a confidence ranking

that can be gleaned from both structured and unstructured data by running hundreds of different kinds of analytical queries across all different kinds of information

■ Applying those innovations from Watson to an organization can help transform business models – meaningful insights from information can help anticipate and shape better business outcomes, improve business operations and boost service to customers

►A “smarter” way to get things done■ Beyond Jeopardy!, the technology behind Watson can be adapted to help solve

business and societal problems – diagnose disease, handle online technical support, parse vast tracts of legal documents

■ Watson-like capabilities applied to healthcare, government, transportation, and other industries can enable Smarter Planet transformations


[25]

IBM RESEARCH

Training Watson

Baseline 12/06

IBM Watson playing in

the "Winners Cloud"

25

Watson will lose badly!

…. Watson will perform admirably against humans

…Watson can win!

Watson requires training based on a history of right / wrong (or good / bad) answers to questions – just like any expert

Source: IBM Research, MI, SCIP, BCG analysis

IBM Research

© 2006 IBM Corporation26 IBM Proprietary - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE

What makes a good domain for Watson?

1. A large corpus of unstructured information (text at present)

2. Dynamic refresh of the corpus (static at present)

3. Corpus internal to the firm and external to the firm

IBM Research


Industry Focus for Watson

� HealthCare

� Financial Services

IBM Research


Financial Services

� Supplement to trading information

� Investment banking

� Affluent/Private Banking

� Knowledge management

IBM Research

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The EndThe End

IBM Research

IBM Research Hawthorne2008-02-11

the business implications of watson - ibm · pdf filethe business implications of watson ......

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