Unless you’ve been living in cave – although even caves are wired these days (just ask Batman) – you’ve probably heard about Watson, IBM’s latest Research Grand Challenge, designed to further the science of natural language processing through advances in question and answer (QA) technology. Make no mistake about it. IBM didn’t develop Watson to play games. The advances in Watson’s QA technology are poised to help support professionals in a variety of critical and timely decision-making areas like health care, business intelligence, enterprise knowledge management and customer support. In this ebook, we take a brief look at four of the areas in which Watson’s DeepQA technology holds the most promise for businesses.

1. IBM Watson & Your Organization

2. SECTION 1:
What can Watson do for you?
Unless you’ve been living in cave – although even caves are to transform how computers can help people accomplish tasks in Here’s how he explains some of that potential affecting students:
wired these days (just ask Batman) – you’ve probably heard business and industry.
about Watson, IBM’s latest Research Grand Challenge, designed “We’re now developing new standards in science, math,
to further the science of natural language processing through In this ebook, we’ll take a brief look at four of the areas in history, and English. But if you’re still stuck with the same
advances in question and answer (QA) technology. which Watson’s DeepQA technology holds the most promise, multiple-choice testing, even if you have higher standards,
beginning with the quest to better understand customers. it won’t raise people up, it will dumb things down so people
In February 2011, Watson competed against two human base their teaching and learning on those multiple-choice
Jeopardy! champions and beat them. Quite an achievement 1: Better understanding customers tests. The technology behind Watson blows that up. It says you
for something IBM describes as a “workload optimized system could have long-answer questions, you could have the ability
based on IBM DeepQA architecture running on a cluster of As IBM’s Craig Rhinehart describes it: “[Watson’s] DeepQA to grade lengthy paragraphs of information. If the testing
IBM® POWER7® processor-based servers that hold roughly the technology provides humans with a powerful tool for their system incorporates that, it will allow teachers to test to higher
equivalent of one million books.” In other words, it’s a big fancy information gathering and decision support.” standards and children to learn at higher levels. And it will
computer – but what a computer it is. save lots of money in what is currently a very ineffective and
Take customer relationship management, for instance. Imagine inefficient testing and assessment system.”
Make no mistake about it. IBM didn’t develop Watson to play a tool built on DeepQA that has a deep understanding of natural
games. The advances in Watson’s QA technology are poised language to the point where it’s able to process users’ questions
to help support professionals in a variety of critical and timely and quickly deliver and justify precise, succinct, high-confidence
decision-making areas like health care, business intelligence, answers. That’s the sort of potential descendants of Watson will
enterprise knowledge management and customer support. offer organizations.
In fact, Watson’s ability to understand the meaning and context Stanley S. Litow, president of the IBM International Foundation,
of human language, then rapidly process the information to find sees other exciting ways DeepQA may help better understand
precise answers to complex questions, holds enormous potential “customers,” in areas like non-profit and education.
1.

3. 2: Making better decisions in real-time That’s where network computing blogger David Hill sees DeepQA investments or pricing decisions or trying to understand what
technology headed: customers and consumers want. How many of them depend on
In Part 1, we took a look at how the DeepQA technology behind asking the right questions and then of course selecting the right
Watson – IBM’s latest language-deciphering supercomputer – “A ‘Dr. Watson’ for the health care field is likely to be the first answer with the highest level of confidence and giving it really
can help better understand people, whether they’re customers, commercial instance of the technology. The purpose would be really quickly?”
donors or students. to complement a physician by helping examine all the evidence
(such as from medical journals and medical images) for a A lot, of course. Watson’s deep analytics capability could help
But what about going beyond understanding? What about patient to form a broader, deeper perspective. For example, businesses extract knowledge from these mountains of data and
making, quite literally, life or death decisions? Dr. Watson could examine evidence outside of a specialist’s make more informed, quicker financial decisions.
area of knowledge that may apply to the patient. IBM believes
“Built into Jeopardy!,” says IBM’s Katharine Frase, “is this notion that a Dr. Watson could save lives and that seems very likely “Watson represents a way to look at all this data and extract
of confidence. And in the real world there are lots of problems the case.” and [find] the key insight that’s useful,” says Iwata. “[In other
just like that. You don’t want your doctor to guess. You want words,] the needle in the haystack.”
him to have confidence in his answer before he decides to give In other words, Watson’s DeepQA technology ought to be able
you a treatment.” to gather and assess many disparate data sources – more than In the next section we’ll look at how Watson can help
any one human could – then prompt human users like doctors with collaborative decision-making, for instance helping to
Some of the leading minds believe Watson’s DeepQA technology for help with missing pieces of information and finally, in the transform the customer service industry into a faster, more
and the robustness of its hardware – 90 Power 750 servers with case of medicine, arrive at the correct diagnosis. Or Watson could accurate experience.
2,880 POWER7 cores, 500GB per second on-chip bandwidth provide summaries of the likely diagnoses and allow the doctor
and 35 terabytes of memory and clustered disk storage – could to assess them and select the most likely one.
significantly impact the way doctors diagnose and treat patients.
But it’s not just healthcare where DeepQA holds promise
How? of course. Think Finance. Enormous amounts of data are
generated every day in the financial industry and as the globe
Imagine medical records, texts, journals and research documents becomes even more interconnected, the amount of data grows
all stored in a Watson-type machine, one that doesn’t simply call exponentially. You only need to turn on the news to see that
it up the way search technology would, but rather understands what happens in China or Egypt or Indonesia can have a direct
the stored information and instantly delivers answers to impact on the markets here at home.
healthcare providers.
“Business people make decisions every day,” says IBM
Marketing and Communication’s Jon Iwata, “whether it’s about
2.

4. 3: Transforming customer service Dr. Eduard Hovy at the University of Southern California agrees. According to banking.com, “if a financial institution could harness
Watson’s computing power, it could determine the proper actions as
As we saw in Parts 1 and 2, health care and finance hold a lot of “I would like nothing more than to have my little PDA … that I they happen. Watson has the ability to analyze multiple scenarios,
promise when it comes to Watson, but Dr. Paul Bloom from IBM can speak to and [if] my computer stops working I can say ‘what’s many broader, more impossible and complex than those able to be
Research believes the first level of Watson application in the happening now with my computer?’ and that it goes through the executed on the average statistical model.”
marketplace will not be around either. Rather it’ll be around an web to the right little collection of knowledge, runs this [DeepQA]
industry that’s judged on the same two criteria as Watson – speed technology and brings me back the answer – just the answer. I don’t Shankar Ramamurthy puts it another way.
and accuracy. That industry is call centres, and Dr. Bloom believes want 7,000 pages out Google.”
Watson is poised to change the business models of how those “What if you had 50 or 100 of the best economists available to
centres are set up. Will technology like Watson completely eliminate the human element you when you look at a scenario … and what if each expert had
to customer service? Probably not. But nor will it be unsuccessful the ability to access not just structured data but also unstructured
“It’s really going to change the way businesses interact with their because customers can’t relate to it, as some critics suggest. data – voice streams, video, etc. – and what if you could add more
customers,” Bloom says. “Call centres are very large costs for experts as you learn and could bring them all together and respond
industries where they get literally millions and millions of phone “I can’t relate with the self-serve kiosk at the airport,” says the to events as they happen on a real time basis?”
calls [and] sometimes you’ll get very frustrated because you have to Customer Contact Council’s Matt Hoffman, “but I prefer using the
wait minutes and sometimes hours to get an answer.” kiosk to waiting for a relatable airline employee to check me in.” Banks, says Ramamurthy, would be able to put that power and
insight to good use analyzing risk and a whole host of other
The promise is that the DeepQA analytics technology and POWER7 4: Enabling visibility and understanding risk business challenges.
processing capabilities behind Watson would enable the improvement
of service quality and provide answers quickly. Unlike a well-trained “The recent financial crisis,” says financial services executive Jay In healthcare, finance, customer service, is Watson poised to solve
but decidedly human customer service representative, a Watson-type Dweck, “highlights the problem of systemic risk. One thing that all our pressing problems? Of course not. But in this age of big data
rep would be pre-programmed with all the organization’s relevant causes this systemic risk is interdependency and these failures that and as with the advent of the internet before it, Watson’s DeepQA
policies, any of which could be accessed 100% accurately and, most start to go like dominoes. You could use something like Watson to technology and processing power are offering up new ways to find
importantly for customers like us, quickly. understand what creates those interdependencies.” clearer answers.
One way to look at the customer service potential of Watson, says Whether an extension of banking or insurance or any business really, “When you have data and also the tools to make sense of the
network computing blogger David Hill is as the quantum evolution of Watson’s understanding of language, its capability to learn and its data, you can begin to make things better,” says IBM Marketing
search engines. sheer processing power – 2,800 Power Unix processors running in and Communication’s Jon Iwata. “Business people would say we
parallel – could put a significant dent in enterprise visibility – or the can make things more productive, more efficient, more optimized.
“[Imagine] making Watson available via a cell phone. [It] would ability to see an organization’s processes and operations in action – Others would say we can address some real societal issues.”
allow people to ask a natural language question and get back a not to mention understanding, managing and simplifying the types
very precise answer verbally (rather than having to try to review of risks every organization continually faces.
information on a small screen in text).”
3.

5. SECTION 2:
Digging into the technology
IBM DeepQA 2. Many experts: Facilitate the integration, application and running at 3.55 GHz. Running the Linux® operating system, the
contextual evaluation of a wide range of loosely coupled servers are housed in 10 racks along with associated I/O nodes
DeepQA is a massively parallel probabilistic evidence-based probabilistic question and content analytics. and communications hubs. The system has a combined total of
architecture. For the Jeopardy! Challenge, more than 100 16 Terabytes of memory and can operate at over 80 Teraflops
different techniques are used to analyze natural language, 3. Pervasive confidence estimation: No single (trillions of operations per second).
identify sources, find and generate hypotheses, find and score component commits to an answer; all components
evidence, and merge and rank hypotheses. Far more important produce features and associated confidences, scoring With its innovative, eight-core processor design, POWER7 is
than any particular technique is the way all these techniques different question and content interpretations. An ideally suited for massively parallel processing of Watson’s
are combined in DeepQA such that overlapping approaches can underlying confidence processing substrate learns analytics algorithms. POWER7 also features 500 gigabytes of
bring their strengths to bear and contribute to improvements in how to stack and combine the scores. on-chip communications bandwidth, contributing to exceptional
accuracy, confidence, or speed. efficiency of both memory and processor utilization. And since
4. Integrate shallow and deep knowledge: Balance the use of each server packs 32 high performance POWER7 cores with up
DeepQA is an architecture with an accompanying methodology, strict semantics and shallow semantics, leveraging many loosely to 512 GB of memory, the Power 750 makes an ideal platform
but it is not specific to the Jeopardy! Challenge. IBM has begun formed ontologies. for Watson’s processor and memory-hungry Java processes.
adapting it to different business applications and additional
exploratory challenge problems including medicine, enterprise Harnessing POWER7 Designing Watson on commercially available Power 750
search and gaming. servers was a deliberate choice to ensure more rapid adoption
Watson harnesses the massive parallel processing performance of of optimized systems in industries such as healthcare and
The overarching principles in DeepQA are: its POWER7 processors to execute its thousands of DeepQA tasks financial services. That goal was a fundamental difference
simultaneously on individual processor cores. Each of Watson’s between Watson and Deep Blue, which was a highly
1. Massive parallelism: Exploit massive parallelism in the 90 clustered IBM Power 750 servers features 32 POWER7 cores customized supercomputer.
consideration of multiple interpretations and hypotheses.
4.

6. Deep Blue was based on an earlier generation of Power
processor technology, featuring a 30 node RS/6000 SP system,
with each node containing a single 120 MHz POWER2 processor.
But in addition to the regular POWER2 processors, Deep Blue’s Used by Watson
performance was enhanced with 480 special purpose chess
processor chips. IBM Content Analytics
Natural language processing
and content analysis leveraging UIMA
The same Power 750 server used by Watson is already deployed
today by thousands of organizations in optimized systems that
provide for both complex analytics and transaction processing. InfoSphere BigInsights
“Big Data” analysis (Hadoop)
A system designed for answers
IBM Power Systems
Thousands of parallel processes
After four years of intense research and development by a
team of IBM researchers, Watson has demonstrated its ability
to compete on Jeopardy! against champion players, performing Workload Optimized Systems
Integrated, Optimized by Workload
at human-expert levels in terms of precision, confidence and
speed. The project has advanced the fields of unstructured
data analytics, natural language processing, and the design of
workload optimized systems. Beyond Jeopardy!, the technology
behind Watson can be adapted to solve business and societal Related Innovations
problems—for example, diagnosing disease, handling online
technical support questions, and parsing vast tracts of legal InfoSphere Warehouse DB2, Informix, Netezza ECM Solutions
documents—and to drive progress across industries. Aggregating and storing data and content IBM eDiscovery analyzer, IBM classification module,
Watson’s ability to understand the meaning and context of IBM OmniFind enterprise search
human language, and rapidly process information to find precise InfoSphere Streams
answers to complex questions, holds enormous potential to Massively parallel analysis IBM Global Business Services
Research, expertise and analytical assets
transform how computers can help people accomplish tasks in
Business Analytics
business and their personal lives. BI, Predictive analytics and more
5.

7. SECTION 3:
How to get Watson working for you.
Better Insight. Better Business
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6.

8. Better Insight. Better Business.
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