Call for Code Project

As you may have heard, Ginni Rommety the CEO of IBM recently launched a Call-for-Code challenge to build a solution using IBM technology which will help solve problems with responding to natural disasters

We had a one day hackday in the Dublin lab to help form teams and kick-off projects. During this day I became part of a team named "Watson Dispatch Manager" which aimed to build a call screening agent for emergency services. This aims to solve the problem that when a major incident happens the emergency services get overwhelmed by multiple callers reporting the same incident, while callers trying to report a different (equally urgent problem) can't get through.

After the hackday, the team continued working and build and actual working prototype.

Here is a presentation about the project

Watson Dispatch Manager from Brian O'Donovan

Here is a video about the project for people who prefer that format
And here is an actual video of the prototype in operation.

Moving to the Watson Lab Services team

I have recently changed jobs. I still work for IBM, but now I am part of the lab services team for the Watson family of products.

The Watson offerings are essentially a productised version of all of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) abilities which were developed as part of the initiative to teach a computer to play the Jeopardy game show. This game show is not popular on this side of the Atlantic, but fans of the program assure me that it is an amazing achievement and so I am very excited to be working with such leading edge technology.

As you would expect, customers sometimes have trouble understanding how to best use these advanced technologies. My team's mission is to help customers get over any initial hurdles and get maximum benefit from these amazing new services.

As part of this role, I will be posting a few articles on this newly established Blog with technical tips and tricks. I hope they prove useful!

What kind of person does Watson think I am?

I just heard about a new demo site for showing the capabilities of IBM Watson running on BlueMix. The demo at https://watson-pi-demo.mybluemix.net/ claims to be able to tell your personality from a sample of what you have written. I was initially very skeptical about the chance of this working well, but I decided to give it a try anyway, using some text from this blog.

What it said was:

You are skeptical and shrewd.
You are independent: you have a strong desire to have time to yourself. You are authority-challenging: you prefer to challenge authority and traditional values to help bring about positive changes. And you are unconcerned with art: you are less concerned with artistic or creative activities than most people who participated in our surveys.
You are motivated to seek out experiences that provide a strong feeling of prestige.
You consider achieving success to guide a large part of what you do: you seek out opportunities to improve yourself and demonstrate that you are a capable person. You are relatively unconcerned with tradition: you care more about making your own path than following what others have done.

Amazingly this is a very good summary of how I see myself (which of course could be very different from how other people see me). I was especially impressed with the part where they say that I have very little time for art. This is actually true, but there was no mention of anything to do with art or what I thought about it in the sample text I gave it.

Why not try it to see what your personality is really like. It only takes a few seconds. If you really want to know what is happening under the covers you can read this article which describes the internals, but it is quite complicated.

Getting ready for BTYSTE 2012

The highlight of the holiday season for me is the annual BT Young Scientist exhibition. Irish people will all be very familiar with this long running event which happens at the start of each year, but foreigners are sometimes surprised to hear that a science competition for school children generates such interest and excitement that event receives over 40 thousand visitors and the announcement of the winner is normally the lead item on that night's national TV news.

For the last few years I have had the privilege of helping run the IBM stand at this exhibition. It is always invigorating to meet young people with such obvious passion for learning about science. I always go away from the event with renewed confidence that Ireland will have a bright future with youngsters like this joining our workforce in the future.

IBM will have a significantly larger stand this year and very exciting plans for what we will be demonstrating. The dedicated  blog has just re-opened for business and will carry all of the details.

My personal role on the stand will be in helping demonstrate the capabilities of IBM's Watson technology  which recently made headlines by winning the Jeapordy TV game show against the best human competitors. The video explains a little why IBM believes that the technology developed for a simple game can be adapted to solve real world challenges.