Tag Archives: ibm

My Dear Watson

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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Watson was, in fact, a medical doctor. IBM’s Watson is not a doctor, but tried to play one in real life, and apparently failed. The idea was to use machine learning to crunch huge amounts of medical records and treatment data, and provide recommendations to real doctors treating real patients. And according to this article in Slate, it just didn’t work and the division is being “sold for parts”. I assume this means part of the IBM company legal entity and/or its “intellectual property” being sold, not the actual computer hardware which must be obsolete by now?

Along with the recent Zillow house flipping failure, this seems like another high profile failure for machine learning/AI-based business plans. It might be that the business plans are ahead of the technology, or the technology is ahead of the data (one gets tired of the phrase “garbage in, garbage out”, but it is a real thing – a lot of what is in my medical records is garbage, anyway), or both.

IBM’s Smarter Cities

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What exactly has IBM been up to all this time with its Smarter Cities program? It’s been hard to figure out. The marketing hype and media coverage have seemed to die down a bit. But here is an article in Cities with some research on it.

An investigation of IBM’s Smarter Cites Challenge: What do participating cities want?

In 2010, IBM created the Smarter Cites Challenge to address critical issues of the 21st century through its digital expertise, in collaboration with city governments. Despite questions about the origin and intentions of IBM’s involvement, 130 cities from all around the world took up the challenge in the first five years. There is limited case study research available on a number of participating cities which has not been able to unpack cities’ rationale for working with IBM. This paper provides an index of all participating cities in the Smarter Cities Challenge, to understand the areas of interest in which urban governments have been seeking IBM’s consulting service. Findings present the state of smart city thinking in urban governments, and raise questions about the multidimensional integration, if any, across the areas of focus in which digital technologies are shaping contemporary cities.