IBM showed off their AI capabilities in Malaysia during the Watson Malaysia Summit.
Watson, IBM’s augmented intelligence (AI) technology, is already in use in more than 45 countries and across 20 different industries, including health care, financial services, retail and education markets. For IBM, AI isn’t Artificial Intelligent, but Augmented Intelligence – both of which IBM regards as part of cognitive computing.
“AI is here and it’s a reality. It’s no longer a dream, and it’s now a prerequisite for a competitive advantage,” speaking at the Watson Malaysia Summit, IBM Malaysia Managing Director Chong Chye Neo addresses the audience. “The 4th industrial revolution is here, and the impact to human lives is so significant it is given its own revolution, although it is based of the 3rd revolution, which is Information Technology.”
The summit was attended by over 300 customers and business partners from the banking, financial services, manufacturing, government, and healthcare industries; showcasing live demonstrations of cognitive technologies currently deployed today in Malaysia as well globally by companies such as Silverlake Axis, Sunlife-I, MDT Innovations and Skymics.
With many fears surrounding the rise of AI, Chong notes that IBM’s vision “isn’t about machines replacing humans, but machine and man working together.” During her welcome address she shares and highlights the three principles that IBM and their partners follow for building with AI – purpose, transparency and skills.
“There needs to be a purpose – it does not mean anything if AI is not deployed in the context of an industry domain. Your information needs to be transparent – cognitive is about learning, so the source of information is important. It has to be reliable and verified. Finally, every profession will be disrupted. The question is who will take responsibility to teach the skills for using AI, not let the AI use you.”
Since its first fame in 2011 after winning a game show, IBM has advanced Watson’s capabilities and made it available via the cloud. Watson is being trained in eight additional languages (apart from English) including German, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, French and Italian. Watson is designed to understand context and complexity of the natural language, and sorting through structured and unstructured data.
As of today, Watson can run a set of over 50 APIs, with services across language, speech, vision, and data insights. IBM has also opened the Watson platform to developers and entrepreneurs, enabling them to build and bring to market their own powered by Watson applications for a variety of industries. Currently, Watson has been deployed for use in diagnosing cancer, detecting autism, advance early childhood education, transforming banking practices, improving farming practices and inventing new recipes.
Some of the capabilities showcased by Watson includes IBM Bluemix, a cloud platform that helps customers solve business problems and drive business value with applications, infrastructure and services. Bluemix is used to help build systems that use data to understand, reason, and learn.
IBM Watson Analytics is a smart discovery service available on the cloud that guides data exploration, automates predictive analytics and enables effortless dashboard and infographic creation; providing new insights quickly and easily with automated data analysis, automatic visualization and predictive analytics.
Watson is also used for helping recruitment and training within the company. Other Watson APIs are integrated into chat applications such as Telegram and Slack as a chatbot; enhancing Alexa’s capability with implementation on Echo Dot; as well as other wearables.
Watson lives in the cloud – so any services accessing Watson will require a data connection. However, during a press address, Jimmy Kwang, General Manager for IBM Software Malaysia said Watson is designed to be light – without using up too much bandwidth. Chong also joined the media address, telling the press that IBM is working on creating a “playground” to bring together developers for co-creation. The centre will be announced soon.
While most of Watson’s capabilities are globally available, Kwang and Chong notes that many systems are still subjected to local laws and regulations, which will take time before Watson can be integrated and deployed into certain industries, for example medical and law.
