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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At the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York city, IBM’s Watson supercomputer is currently in use as a tool to help train physicians. The long-term goal is to deploy the computer as a way to help make diagnoses and perform other medical tasks. This makes you wonder, could robots and supercomputers someday replace human physicians?

In a recent essay for the Atlantic, Jonathan Cohn took a deeper look at the idea. Cohn writes the following about IBM and other scientists and engineer’s visions for the future of medical computing:

“Specifically, they imagine the application of data as a ‘disruptive’ force, upending health care in the same way it has upended almost every other part of the economy—changing not just how medicine is practiced but who is practicing it,” says Cohn. “In Silicon Valley and other centers of innovation, investors and engineers talk casually about machines’ taking the place of doctors, serving as diagnosticians and even surgeons—doing the same work, with better results, for a lot less money.”

While the idea seems a bit far-fetched, it does seem possible that AI systems could eventually be used as a supplement to human physicians, and perhaps even to nurses. This would mean better healthcare at a cheaper cost since they would need considerably fewer nurses and doctors to staff a hospital then are needed now.

Specifically I could see the idea of robotic machines that can do incisions and surgical operations while using logic skills. Things that require “beside manners” like talking to the patients and breaking bad news should be best left to human beings, though. It is pretty hard to imagine a robot telling you that you have just six months to live, or other news that requires empathy.

What do you think, could the next few decades bring to pass a future hospital setting where the majority of the staff is actually computers and robots or is this near-Jetson-like image of the future of healthcare not as plausible as some would like to think?

[ source ]

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We’ve seen what IBM can do when it comes to computers. IBM’s artificial intelligence computer system, Watson, beat record-holders Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a human-versus-machine match-up on Jeopardy that asserted Watson’s potential as supreme computer overlord. And showed off what IBM can do when it comes to AI.

To take it one step further, IBM is working on a new class of computer chips that are designed to imitate the human brain’s abilities for perception, action and cognition. The chips’ processing power is similar to that of Watson. IBM hopes to use these chips in “cognitive computers.” These computers would learn through experience instead of being programmed. Just like the human brain.

“Imagine traffic lights that can integrate sights, sounds and smells and flag unsafe intersections before disaster happens,” said Dharmendra Modha, the project leader for IBM Research. “Or imagine cognitive co-processors that turn servers, laptops, tablets and phones into machines that can interact better with their environments.”

There are several potential applications for the brain chips, including a sensor that could be placed in a grocery store and could read sights, smells and temperatures and would give an alert when it’s time to replace the wilted lettuce. Even better, the chips could be used in a system that monitors the world’s water supply by measuring things like temperature, pressure, wave height and acoustics, and then could give a warning when the computer thinks a tsunami is likely.

The first two prototype chips contain no biological components. Both chips have 256 artificial neurons, with one core containing 262,144 programmable synapses, and the other containing 65,536 learning synapses. So far, the chips have been able to complete navigation, machine vision, pattern recognition, associative memory and classification. The team hopes to eventually develop a one-square-centimeter chip with the equivalent of 1 million neurons and 10 billion synapses.

The project is called SyNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics), and Phases 0 through 1 have already been completed. DARPA has given the project $21 million in funding for Phase 2.

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“The factory of the future will have two employees: A man and a dog. The man’s job will be to feed the dog. The dog’s job will be to prevent the man from touching any of the automated equipment.”

This famous Warren Bennis prediction has been coming closer and closer to reality with each passing year, but new technologies are suggesting Artificial Intelligence may not be contained to the manufacturing industries forever. In fact, it might not be long before human customer service workers and receptionists are a thing of the past.

Earlier this year, tech enthusiasts and old folks’ homes around the world watched as IBM’s Watson robot destroyed its competition on Jeopardy. As Watson was an AI-focussed creation — a synthetic human-like “mind” encased in a mass of computer equipment — it was the perfect candidate to someday put millions of specialized call-centre staffers around the globe out of work. IBM is also working to develop a Watson system that will be able to help diagnose patients in hospitals to help with tricky symptoms and, hopefully, cut down on hospital wait times.

But with its huge physical size and no in-person interaction or interface, Watson is bound to virtual applications for the time being. So what about the receptionists I mentioned? Don’t worry: Chyi-Yeu Lin and colleagues at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology have built a singing, disembodied animatronic robot head that will someday put every last unskilled desk clerk and Walmart greeter in the unemployment line once and for all.

So far, the anthropomorphic robot can use the cameras built into its eyes to read sheet music — including lyrics in 40 different languages, calculate pitch, tempo, rhythm and even emotion – and sing the song back while making facial expressions to match (see video below). So far, this is a neat parlour trick and, with its remarkably creepy face and jerky jaw movements, it might be a good fit for Chucky Cheese’s animatronic kiddie-concert line-up. But with a bit more development, the implications are huge.

With cameras in the eyes and such advanced optical recognition software, this thing could do away with almost the entire front-end staff at a pub: The bouncer (checking IDs at the door), the bar clerk (taking drink and food orders for the bartender and kitchen staff, keeping track of tabs, charging customers, etc); not to mention the entertainment (songs by request, karaoke duet partner for those with no friends).

That said, trying to interact with this thing in person in its current state — especially while getting smashed — might make it hard to keep your drinks down.

As mentioned by Leslie Katz of Cnet’s Crave blog, humans have a psychological defense mechanism that makes things like Taiwan’s robot head look absolutely repulsive: The “Uncanny Valley” theory, which shows humans are disproportionately disgusted and unempathetic towards things which look almost human but have subtle, noticeable differences. It’s the point at which our minds stop seeing a robot doing a good job of acting human, and start seeing a human who’s either heavily diseased or just doing a terrible job of acting normal.

There are some obvious fixes for this problem. For one, let the robotics specialists do their thing, but source out the “skin and hair” work to the guys who made Mission Impossible 2. Some help with the jaw animatronics wouldn’t hurt, either, especially to overcome that ridiculous, confused-looking gape the robot head has while reading.

But since this Uncanny Valley response seems to be strongest to the things that resemble humans, why not have some fun with this thing? Rather than the Mission Impossible guys, why not hire Tim Burton’s crew? We have the chance here to make our receptionists and greeters look like whatever we want them to look like. They could resemble the mascot of the business where they’re installed. They could look like Predator. This is our chance to make a whole faux-species of customer service workers, and if it’s going to make global unemployment numbers spike, we might as well milk some amusement out of it.

But if this robotic head is being trained to interface with humans for service jobs with very little knowledge after that, and Watson is being trained to become the most helpful database of knowledge for professional applications but lacks any sort of personal human-to-humanoid interface, the real question becomes “how and when will the two be combined?”

Feel free to share your insights and predictions in the comment section below.

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