Watson on BlueMixHuibert Aalbers

Senior Certified Executive IT Architect

IT Insight podcast• This podcast belongs to the IT Insight series

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What is Watson?Huibert Aalbers

Senior Certified Executive IT Architect

A cognitive system• Watson has three main characteristics

that make it really unique

• Can understand natural language

• Hypothesis generation & evaluation

• It is not a deterministic system

• Ability to learn

Characteristics of a cognitive system• Navigate the complexities of human language and

understanding

• Ingest and process vast amounts of structured and unstructured (big) data

• Generate and evaluate countless possibilities

• Weigh and evaluate responses that are based only on relevant evidence

• Provide situation-specific advice, insights, and guidance

• Improve knowledge and learn with each iteration and interaction

• Enable decision making at the point of impact

How is a cognitive system trained and fed?

• Before any information can be fed to Watson, it needs to be

• cleansed

• formatted

• put in context

• The system has to go through a training phase

A cognitive system is not static

• The system needs to be kept up to date with new information

• The quality of the answers produced by the cognitive system needs to be reviewed regularly

• The training process never ends, the system needs to be tuned continuously

Which industries can benefit from cognitive systems?

• Right now, cognitive systems are a tool designed to help experts cope with an explosion of available information

• Lawyers

• Healthcare

• Call centers

Watson in healthcare• 70,000 articles written about

the P53 protein, described as a “tumor suppressor”

• 420,000 articles written about kinases that can activate the P53 protein

• By analyzing all the information available in 2004, Watson was able to discover 7 new kinases unknown at that time, (which were discovered later) shown in orange

• 2 completely new kinases were also uncovered (pictured in red)

• 6 other possible kinases need to be confirmed (in yellow)

What is BlueMix?

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Developers Operations / infrastructure

Line of business / Analysts

Software as a Service

Infrastructure as a Service

Platform as a Service

Why PaaS?SaaS application developers prefer to write their applications on a PaaS platform for the following reasons:

• Low initial investment (no CAPEX)

• Scalability

• Pay-as-you-go

• Ease of application management

• Complete solution to develop all kind of modern applications

The PaaS marketDevelopers have always been interested in ways that would allow their applications to scale easily. However, initial commercial offerings that addressed this need were all based on proprietary technologies

• Windows Azure (when used as PaaS)

• Google App Engine

• salesforce.com

The problem is that applications written for any of these platforms cannot be migrated to a competing PaaS provider without rewriting the application completely. Therefore, the developer is completely tied up to a single company, with all the problems that situation causes.

The PaaS marketThe open source community has responded recently by developing an open PaaS alternative, based on free software projects

• OpenStack

• CloudFoundry

These are great news for developers because:

• They can choose between multiple PaaS providers without having to rewrite their apps

• Their apps can now also run on-premises if their clients choose to build an open standards based private cloud

OpenStackOpenStack is a kind of OS for the Cloud. With this open source project, any organization with a server farm can easily become an IaaS provider.

OpenStack• IBM spearheaded the creation of the OpenStack

Foundation and leads the march to open governance for Cloud Foundry and Docker.

• IBM is a leading contributor to these and other open cloud communities, dedicating hundreds of developers to these initiatives.

• The open source community was waiting for IBM to support these projects because it knew that with its backing it would reach the same kind of success achieved back when IBM threw all its weight behind Linux, Java, Apache or Eclipse

• IBM was a leading contributor to the most recent OpenStack release (Icehouse)

• 10% of all commits (2nd position)

• 204K lines of new code, in 61 projects

CloudFoundryCloudFoundry is an open PaaS platform that generally lays on OpenStack (although other options are available such as AWS or vSphere).

CloudFoundry supports application development in several programming languages (Java, Ruby, Node.js, Scala, Python and PHP)

It also supports several open-source data stores (MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, etc.) and message queues (RabbitMQ).

IBM is a platinum member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation

Apache 2 licence

BlueMix• BlueMix is IBM’s PaaS platform, which is built on the

open source CloudFoundry and OpenStack projects

• However, BlueMix is much more than just CloudFoundry on OpenStack

• IBM’s strategy is “Embrace & Extend”, just the way it was with WebSphere or Eclipse

• IBM will provide a faster, more secure and more robust platform on which to develop enterprise applications

• IBM will provide exciting additional services such as Watson to provide more value to developers

• BlueMix is also be available as a dedicated system (in addition to the traditional shared resources model)

Embrace & Extend

Additional Services

BlueMixBlueMix has been designed to develop modern born-on-cloud applications:

• Web

• Mobile

• Big Data / Analytics / Cognitive

BlueMix is available now and you can start using it for free

https://www.bluemix.net

Watson services for BlueMix

Available Watson services on BlueMix

Improve your apps with human intelligence by just integrating Watson REST Services

invocations into your code

Question & Answer API• This is the service that enables

developers to create cognitive apps without having to purchase a dedicated Watson system

• Learn from the examples and tutorials available on the Internet, in particular on IBM’s developerWorks site

• Google the “Watson Films” tutorial

• http://www.ibm.com/developerworks

Work with different languages• Language detection

• Machine translation

• English

• French

• Spanish

• Arabic

• Brazilian Portuguese

User modeling• This API, developed by IBM Research, uses linguistic

analytics to extract a set of personality and social traits from the way a person communicates.

• Introvert / Extrovert

• Emotionality

• Activity level

• Etc.

• The service can analyze any communication the user makes available such as their text messages, tweets, posts, email, and more.

• Users of the service can understand, connect, and communicate with people on a more personally tailored level by analyzing personality and social traits.

Next steps to start working with Watson

Give us your feedback

Start coding

Register (https://www.bluemix.net)1

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Contact informationOn Twitter: @huibert (English), @huibert2 (Spanish)

Web site: http://www.huibert-aalbers.com

Blog: http://www.huibert-aalbers.com/blog