Join Chris Madison and Nathan Vega as we explore Watson services on Bluemix and how developers can harness the services to build the most innovative applications to meet their needs.
4. 4
Chris Madison (Speaker)
Solution Architect, Watson Innovations
@ChrisMadisonIBM
Nathan Vega (Moderator)
Developer Engagement, IBM Bluemix
@IBMBluemix
Bluemix Blog
The instant power and speed of cloud has brought about new expectations for building applications on it.
Developers now expect:
To be able to deploy updates to their applications in seconds
To write their code in whichever tool or language they choose
Each has its own distinct “personality” and followings of developers have evolved around each of these
To be able to continually integrate working copies of code into a shared mainline at multiple points during the day
To focus on writing code, not on the administration of servers, virtualization, operating systems, and middleware.
To “fail fast” - or ensure applications fail immediately and visibly to speed debugging and fixes
To integrate useful APIs into their applications - who wants to write code that’s already been written and tested?
To build applications that are mobile ready - as users today expect their experience to be tailored to whatever device they happen to be using.
Key themes
Speed
Instant environments
Quick deployments
Sign up in minutes
Ease of Use
Instant Environments
Services prebuilt for your use - IBM, Third Party, Community
DevOps tools to monitor, plan, deploy, and manage your apps
Flexibility
On-Prem integration
Flexible pricing
Security
IBM secures the platform and infrastructure - leveraging experience with softlayer and proven on-prem security implementations
Provides you with the tools to secure your apps
We’ve seen over 30,000 beta applications thus far and have spoken to numerous developers about the value Bluemix provides. We’ve learned that developers are joining for 3 key reasons (go through reasons on the page).
Rapid setup and time to production
Frequent releases - delivery of fixes or new functionality quickly
Integrating apps with on premise infrastructure
Main point: Watson today is a cognitive learning system that enhances our abilities to perceive, reason and relate
Based on our initial learnings, our Watson program has grown much bigger and much more valuable as the foundation for this next era of computing
We have expanded the ways in which Watson can scale our:
Perception – or the ways we understand the world, beyond the initial challenge of language
Reasoning – not only thinking through questions, but synthesizing information, evaluating pros and cons, and creating inferences… types of thinking that traditional systems cannot perform
Relating – adapting our interaction to the user, not only in understanding how they communicate, but also customizing our interactions to what we know about them
Learning -- enabling us to build experience quickly by accelerating how many cases we can process
What is it?
Solution to analyze social media footprints, e.g. Twitter, to derive customers’ personality characteristics, and provide a deeper understanding
How does it work?
User modeling uses linguistic analytics to predict person's personality traits from linguistic "footprints" people leave in social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), digital communications, or from any originally written text.
The derived personal traits create a psychological portrait of an individual, including their personality, fundamental needs, basic values, and social genome (the make-up of one’s social network and potential)
This information can then be used to augment information a company already has about the person (e.g. transaction history, demographics) to develop a comprehensive and enhanced digital portrait of individuals to tailor and time engagement via the preferred channel
Value:
Targeted marketing improving customer interaction and acquisition via personality-driven engagements (offers, etc.)
Individualized customer care by establishing, maintaining, and enhancing customer equity via hyper-personalized care
A smarter workforce using derived personality characteristics for recruiting talent for “stronger” fit or better understanding potential “risks” of existing employees for potential fraud, insider threats, etc.
Tool to build concept detectors and relations between concepts.
How does it work?
An application developer defines the concepts (PER, ORG, etc.) and relations (LocatedAt, OwnerOf, etc.) they want to extract from a corpus for their application domain.
Representative pages of the corpus are manually annotated for mentions of the concepts and relations between concept mentions.
SIRE toolkit is used to train/adapt a statistical annotator that can be used to annotate the whole corpus with the defined concepts and relations.
The machine processed corpus can be used to improve to enable multiple functions such improved answer selection, enable downstream applications such as mapping unstructured content to a database records, and/or enable BigData text analytics.
Value:
Enables automated processes to understand unstructured content in healthcare, drug discovery, financial reports, news and blog monitoring, etc.
Making sense of large unstructured data sets; enable browsing of large collection of data via predefined set of concepts and relations among them; e.g. a collection of scientific papers on Hypersonics: who are the major inventors, what technologies are being developed, etc. that are mentioned in a document collection on Hypersonics.
Question is passed through he API
Watson decomposes the question to understand multiple interpretations of it
Generates hypothesis through multiple sources
Scores the hypothesis and evidence
Synthesis the scoring to generate a response
Delivers response Evidence
What is it?
Dictionaries are a cornerstone of any natural language processing. Concept Expansion searches a domain relevant body of text for seed words. It identifies the context that those words are used in and returns other words from the text that are used in the same context . The user then edits the list glimpse returned to ensure accuracy
How does it work?
Dictionaries tell programs “cool” means “good” and “ride” means “car”
Value:
Connecting different words into natural language processing allows greater insight across multitude of documents.
How does it work?
Dictionaries tell programs “cool” means “good” and “ride” means “car”
Value:
Connecting different words into natural language processing allows greater insight across multitude of documents.
What is it?
Tool to analyze the popularity of a given word within a set “community” based on several factors. Using this ranking system it is then possible for the tool to recommend more resonant words to use when crafting messages targeted at specific audiences.
How does it work?
Ingests and analyzes a selected community’s tweets enabling a user to explore what people are talking about how many people are talking about it
Ranks words based on the frequency with which a word is tweeted, the frequency with which it is re-tweeted, and the lifetime of tweets containing that word.
Provides recommendations for the most effective words to use when addressing a given community.
Value:
Enables enterprises to best engage their customers
Allows a brand to facilitate consistent messaging by a multitude of brand posters
How does it work?
Ingests and analyzes a selected community’s tweets enabling a user to explore what people are talking about how many people are talking about it
Ranks words based on the frequency with which a word is tweeted, the frequency with which it is re-tweeted, and the lifetime of tweets containing that word.
Provides recommendations for the most effective words to use when addressing a given community.
Value:
Enables enterprises to best engage their customers
Allows a brand to facilitate consistent messaging by a multitude of brand posters
What is it?
Simple services connecting data to visualization. Develop visual rendings that help tell a story. It is a system for the general visualization of all forms of data and is intended to provide a tool that can be used for the overwhelming majority of visualization needs across all business and research needs.
How does it work?
The traditional visualization engine is type-based. A provider will give you the ability to create one of a fixed set of charts (bar chart, line chart, pie chart, etc.) and customize that chart using an API to set details. In contrast Visualization Rendering uses a human-readable text language to describe a chart by a composable set of features.
An interval element (which will make the pie slices)
Polar transform (to transform the intervals into slices)
Stacking operation (to place the slices on top of each other)
Color and Labeling aesthetics (to color and label the slices)
Value:
Enables visualization with infinite chart flexibility
In the cloud era, the application platform will be delivered as a service, often described as Platform as a Service (PaaS). PaaS makes it much easier to deploy, run and scale applications. Some PaaS offerings have limited language and framework support, do not deliver key application services, or restrict deployment to a single cloud. Cloud Foundry is the industry’s Open PaaS and provides a choice of clouds, frameworks and application services. As an open source project, there is a broad community both contributing and supporting Cloud Foundry.