Cognitive Systems and the Future of Expertise
Dr. Dario Gil
Vice President, Science and Technology
T.J.Watson Research Center, New York
IBM Research
The History of Computing
Computer “Intelligence”
Learning Paradigm
Programmable Paradigm
Watson
2011
Calculating Paradigm
Calculators
Deep Blue
1997
Abacus
circa
3500 BC
Antikythera
Astronomical
Computer
circa 87 BC
Napier’s Rods
circa 1600
Counting Machine
Circa 1820
Time
ENIAC
circa 1945
System/360
1964
Claim #1
You can not afford to ignore the learning systems trend
Trend #1: Better Machine Learning Algorithms
Tom
Mitchell
(CMU)
“A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to
some class of tasks T and performance measure P, if its performance at
tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E.”
Introduction of large
scale neural
networks
650,000 neurons
Introduction of large
scale neural networks
5,000,000 neurons
Human
Error
Ref: O. Russakovsky et al., arXiv:1409.0575v1 [cs.CV], 1 Sep 2014
Machines can also learn through interaction…
Trend #2: Massive Datasets (for training)
The Web and the Internet of Things are digitizing the world and the human experience
Web Sites
Curated Data Sets
Social Media
Video Sharing Sites
Trend #3: Performance and Cost of Computing
2,400% improvement in performance and 90% smaller
2011
2015
1/2
Trend #4:
Massive Talent
& Investments
Flows
$17 billion in AI investments since 2009*
“The business plans
of the next 10,000
startups are easy to
forecast:
Take X and add AI.
This is a big deal, and
now it's here.”
Kevin Kelly (Wired)
*Source: Quid
IBM Cognitive Computing Research
2/2
Trend #4:
Massive Talent
& Investments
Flows
~550 Researchers
Ireland
17
Almaden
94
Watson
China
Zurich
43
94
50
Haifa
India
39
Tokyo
8
11
Brazil
IBM Watson
Group
39
140
Africa
23
Australia
Claim #2
The future of expertise will be defined
by people and learning systems working collaboratively
Symbiotic Cognitive Systems
Learning systems designed to collaborate with people to enhance and scale human expertise
COGNITIVE ENVIRONMENT
THE COGNITIVE
EXPERIENCE
Learning Systems
People
The Cognitive Experience. Always on, always available.
A trusted computing experience that is coherent through space and time.
Application Example: Cognitive Mergers and Acquisitions
Winnow choices from
~10,000 companies to
~5-10 that will then
enter the due diligence
phase.
Enhancing human capability
Physical limitations
Connectivity limitations
Productivity limitations
Complexity limitations
We need enhanced cognitive abilities