IBM THINK 2019 Day 1 Recap: The Great Debate

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IBM THINK 2019 Day 1 Recap The Great Debate

In this video, catch a recap of IBM THINK 2019 day 1, including a blockchain digital twin example and a review of the #ProjectDebater results and its implications for businesses.

I also spoke on Day 1 at IBM Champion Day on the 8C Framework for building digital communities. If you haven’t seen it, grab a copy here.

FTC disclosure: My company, Trust Insights, is an IBM Registered Business Partner. Any transactions you make with IBM through Trust Insights will indirectly benefit me financially.

IBM THINK 2019 Day 1 Recap

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Today we’re recapping the first day of IBM think 2019 conference. It was a super busy packed day. So the pre conference day is all the workshops for folks who are either business partners or champions are members of the developer community or what IBM calls inner circle which is essentially beta testers and Dora a few

interesting pieces here and there during the day. A lot of just getting to know the community and some what they’re working on. One i thought was super interesting was a company called ever gauge that is building digital twins.

blockchain applications for diamonds, which sounds like a lot of buzzwords crammed into one. But it’s a really good use case for both technologies blockchain, if you if you want to oversimplify it really is nothing more than an encrypted public spreadsheet that once you write data to a page or a tab and the spreadsheet cannot be unwritten cannot be changed you it’s a ledger. It’s a way to keep track of things. When

when you push things to a blockchain and push data to a blockchain. It encrypts it, but it’s also pump, the encrypted version is publicly visible. So lots of people can see that there’s data in there and that it cannot be changed. And so this company is idea behind what they’re doing is they are writing data to the blockchain of every part of the supply chain for a diamond saying, you know, here’s verifying it it’s conflict free verifying that was properly obtained and so on and so forth. Really good application.

Know that

but the big highlight of the day was project debater which is an IBM instance you’ve seen videos of Watson winning jeopardy. For example, a project debater is an AI that attempts to debate humans in a free form relatively free from natural language setting so

this was a human debater on stage this was a an interface to the project debater system. And

they both contestants were given 15 minutes beforehand to learn about the topic. And the topic of debate was should preschools be subsidized and so both had to craft arguments do a rebuttal and then do an argument summary on stage and debated did okay. It missed some of the nuances in the language of the

It’s human opponent at one point the human opponent was saying

that not all preschools are high quality and that therefore

it would be difficult to

do uniformly ensure an outcome and there was a few other arguments and as well and project debater interpreted that is that subsidies would lower the quality of preschool which

wasn’t quite the point but nonetheless it was an incredible demonstration because I timed it on my stopwatch how long each contestant had between periods to you know think come up with new arguments and then proceed to the next phase and it was about four minutes give or take between phases so 15 minutes up front four minutes and you know, in that time period what project debater had to do, what the system had to do was use speech to text to ingest the contents of what they

other person that said

do the transcription, identify key concepts. So do some topic modeling

vector eyes the speech, do some research, pull some data sets about that particular topic. And then use that to identify key pieces that would be relevant

identify words, phrases and sentences that it could use as part of its response. And they use natural language generation to spit back a response

as someone who writes a lot of code and does things like topic modeling and text mining,

the fact that the system did all of that in about four minutes is incredible

if you’re training on the middle of doing today’s network map, which also includes a summary of

All the tweets from yesterday is only 27,000 tweets to process. And yet it’s going to take my machine for more much more than four minutes to do that. Now,

clearly, IBM has a lot more resources and, and power and systems and stuff to throw at the problem, then a person with their laptop, but just even thinking about trying to architect the system for to solve the problem of can you a machine respond intelligibly to English two questions and and for the human audience to listen to and go okay I get what they’re saying

is incredible feat.

If you want to catch some videos, though they’re on my Twitter timeline.

It was amazing in that it did a credible job. At no point was I listening to project debate going on sound like Ward and salad, what the heck happened there, which is a very real possibility. When you’re doing natural language processing, you may get a piece of it.

What happened there? That’s clearly not right.

And so the fact that

I only heard one clear error and it was more of a parsing error than anything else was was amazing. And the other thing was that it was very creative and it speech it opened it to a bottle with what was fairly close to an ad hominem attack which again is not something that you would expect a machine to do

so it really does open your eyes to what is possible with the technology now if IBM has been several years and a lot of money and a lot of system time on this that clearly this is not a technology that is going to be commercially available tomorrow

nor is it something that you know you will not expect your project debater monolith to appear in your office to argue with you but it definitely has potential to eventually be that the type of interface that you would want as a frontline it.

We talked a lot about in market like things like chat bots and stuff. And they were very primitive compared to what a true natural language generation system does. But seeing this on stage, and being able to debate effectively with a human

means that eventually we will see this technology appear

in the workplace and having it you imagine having a system that can intelligently understand quickly craft responses, especially if it’s trained them to a very specific domain, like your customer service, and then reply intelligently

would be a massive

benefit to company’s marketing, customer service and even sales. I mean, if if the machine can understand a parse language on a sales call and be able to intelligently respond with maybe its features, maybe its benefits, but maybe it’s just Hey, this is an option for you. That’s huge. That’s incredibly huge for the

able to improve,

improve against the performance of the worst performing humans. There will always be room at the table. I believe for the top people, the top person, the best salesperson, the best marketer, the best customer service person, they will, they will always be at the table for the best, they will not be at the table for the bottom 20%

a machine can do that job. A machine can give you a

pretty good experience. And if you’re terrible and the machine is pretty good

companies will use the machine. So it is a call to action for the humans to level up their skills and whatever your profession is, level up your skills and as a call to action for folks who are looking to deploy systems to solve bombs and to improve that bottom 20% of your performance and whatever your discipline is to

to embrace this stuff and and start

aren’t using it as start experimenting and building the system is going to take time to build a system that’s tuned well for your company but the rewards will be worth it. So on tap today I’m speaking on cognitive marketing and a bunch of other things so I hope you a chance to follow along follow my handle on the trust insights handle both on Twitter and Instagram was sharing some content there and look forward to to what today brings what what we can learn today. Thanks for watching. As always, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter and I’ll talk to you soon What help solving your company’s data analytics and digital marketing problems. This is trust insights.ai today and let us know how we can help you

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