Yes, IBM Watson has a new job in customer service as the “IBM Watson Engagement Advisor” and he can be the size of four pizza boxes. The idea here is that there is just so much unorganized data (90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years) and information available to human CSRs who are usually trained to follow scripts. We’ve all been frustrated with phone support at one time or another. What Watson can do is sift through this mountain of data, utilize its advancing natural language processing capabilities and provide you with a suitable solution to your customer service problem. Companies are motivated to keep you happy and Watson could do a better job at that than an outsourced agent at an overseas call center.

Given the current generation that prefers more self-service and interactive options, Watson accessible as a mobile app could make a lot of sense too. Watson can successfully resolve more issues and do it faster, whether he’s doing it himself or if he is just made available to that human help desk CSR.

“Customer engagement is a natural fit for Watson,” said IBM Watson Solitions GM Manoj Saxena, “which can instantly create a strong bond between who customers are as individuals, and what types of information will help them reach their goals.”

In addition to Royal Bank of Canada, IBM Watson Engagement Advisor is initially being hired by ANZ bank, Celcom of Malaysia, IHS Inc. and Nielsen.

[Source]

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So what’s next for Watson? Does the computer’s alleged superiority over human intelligence mean we should bow down and welcome our new computer overlord? Anyone who fears that Watson is dead set on world domination can relax. Watson wants to help us, not destroy us.

IBM is looking at the possibility of Watson working in hospitals, where the computer would aid in the diagnosis and treatment of patients. Watson has a database that contains millions of documents. When a patient comes in with a mysterious set of symptoms the doctors can’t figure out, Watson would quickly sort through hundreds of medical dictionaries, academic studies, and encyclopedias and come up with a list of diagnosis possibilities.

Watson could come in handy for the police, pharmaceutical labs, hospitals and anywhere else that requires the processing of vast amounts of data. The computer has a long future of serving humans ahead of it, not the other way around.

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Our computers in their simplest form are just a series of tiny electronic circuits containing transistors that switch on and off in certain patterns to execute the functions that we need. At their conception computers were created using only one core processor; this is what reads and performs instructions. Now a computer that has at least two processors is commonplace, and with higher end systems having up to 16 cores.

But Dr. Wim Vanderbauwhede at the University of Glasgow, and his colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Lowell have had a technological breakthrough and successfully developed a processor with more than 1000 cores on a single chip.

They achieved this feat by using a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), which contains transistors just like all other microchips, but they are unique in that rather than having their functions set at the assembly line, the circuits are essentially a blank slate and can be customized by the user. Dr. Vanderbauwhede was able to separate the transistors into small groups and assign them each to perform a different task. This effectively created 1000 small circuits in the chip, and as a result a 1000-core processor with each individual core capable of working solely on its own instructions was born.

Dr. Vanderbauwhede said: “FPGAs are not used within standard computers because they are fairly difficult to program but their processing power is huge while their energy consumption is very small because they are so much quicker – so they are also a greener option.”

They then tested the chip by processing an algorithm that is central to MPEG videos, like those used on YouTube; they came up with a speed of 5 GB/s, which is 20 times faster than current high-end desktops.

Nowadays it is expected that a computer should have a multi-core processor, they all still have to share access to only one memory source, consistently slowing down the computer. Dr. Vanderbauwhede and his team increased efficiency by giving each core is own separate amount memory.

He is planning to present his developments at the International Symposium on Applied Reconfiguable Computing in March.

[UKPA via Daily Mail]

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Intel, the worldwide hardware giant, has added yet another feather to its hat. Now it can brag about the fact that its processors power the world’s fastest super computer. As per the recent announcement by Intel, its Xeon 5600 series processors are the heart and soul of the planet’s most powerful machine, the Tianhe-1A, which is located at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China.

The Tianhe-1A, containing 14,396 Intel processors coupled with accelerators, has so far recorded a monumental performance of 2.57 petaflops (quadrillions of calculations per second). Impressive, isn’t it?

For those wanting to know the finer print, Intel has partnered with Inspur, a Chinese computer manufacturer, in order to work for the National Supercomputing Center. And to further add to the glory, the most recent catalogue of Top 500 supercomputers shows that 80% of them run on Intel processors. Intel-powered machines feature in fields as diverse as scientific research, financial calculations and geophysics. Way to go, Intel!

Source: Digitimes

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