IBM's Jon Iwata on the Intelligence of Watson | Big Think

IBM's Jon Iwata on the Intelligence of Watson

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Jon Iwata, Senior VP of Marketing and Communications at IBM, shares the origins and purpose of IBM's supercomputer Watson.

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JON IWATA:

Jon Iwata leads IBM’s marketing, communications and citizenship organization. His global team is responsible for the marketing of IBM’s product and services portfolio in more than 170 countries, market intelligence, communications, and stewardship of the IBM brand, recognized as one of the most valuable in the world.

Jon and his team lead the marketing of Watson, the breakthrough technology that is bringing cognition and artificial intelligence to healthcare, retail, financial services, education and all industries being transformed by the phenomenon of data.

Jon reports to IBM Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty. He is a member of IBM’s Operating Team, responsible for day-to-day marketplace execution, and IBM’s Client Experience Team, which focuses on making distinctive client experience systemic across IBM. He is vice chairman of the IBM International Foundation.

Jon joined IBM in 1984 at the company’s Almaden Research Center in Silicon Valley. He was appointed vice president of Corporate Communications in 1995 and senior vice president, Communications, in 2002. He assumed his current role on July 1, 2008.

Jon is a trustee of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. He is a director of the Japan Society and a director of the Association of National Advertisers. He is past chairman of the Arthur W. Page Society, a professional group of Chief Communications Officers.

In 2015, Jon was inducted into the CMO Club Hall of Fame. That same year he received the Distinguished Service Award from The Seminar, an organization consisting of Chief Communications Officers. He holds a B.A. from the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at San Jose State University.

Jon is co-inventor of a U.S. patent for advanced semiconductor lithography technology.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Jon Iwata: Some years ago the grand challenge in computer science, one of them, was to build a machine that could beat a chess grandmaster. Some may remember this. And we built machines that got better and better at it. But finally built a machine back in the 90s called Deep Blue and it played against Gary Kasparov and it beat Gary Kasparov and I think he’s still quite upset about it. Why did we build that machine? Well it really wasn’t to play chess. It was to take a real challenge, chess, and it would force advances in computer science. And it worked quite well.

Well, that was chess and that was the nature of the grand challenge back then. But today this explosion of data, most of it unstructured data, natural language, Tweets, blog posts, medical images, things like that. Very difficult for traditional computers to understand. It could store it. It could process this data but it doesn’t know what the data really tells you because it’s unstructured. The research team some years ago said what’s a way for us to create a system that is ideal for the coming world of unstructured big data. Natural language. Making sense of a mountain of data. What could we do to force ourselves to solve those problems. And they hit upon the game show Jeopardy. Now I’ve got to tell you that when they came by to see me at IBM corporate headquarters, I don’t know, six years ago, seven years ago, maybe longer and they said we’ve identified the next big challenge similar to the chess machine that beat Kasparov.

I was thinking, you know, wow they’re going to go after some really sophisticated high minded, you know, game theory thing. And they came in and said it was going to be Jeopardy. Now I wasn’t really a Jeopardy watcher back then. I said you mean the TV quiz show? And they said yes. And I said well that seems to be – they remind me of this now – that doesn’t seem to be, you know, very sophisticated or challenging. And they went on to explain to me – and I, of course, had to acknowledge many times to them since then it’s really hard. It’s really hard to win on Jeopardy. And it’s hard for a human and it’s almost impossible for a machine. Because if you play Jeopardy or if you’re just kind of familiar with it, you have to understand puns and allegories, popular culture, rhymes, allusions, double entendres. These are things that computers are baffled by, even some humans.

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