IBM supercomputer defeats human champs in quiz show

In a major achievement for artificial intelligence, an IBM supercomputer beat two human champions of the popular U.S. quiz show Jeopardy, IBM said.

Thursday’s victory is significant because it came in a contest of non-linear thinking and natural language questions at which computers have generally lagged far behind their human inventors.

The contest took place at a computer lab at IBM’s research headquarters, which was decorated to appear as the set of the long-running U.S. game show, in which the host gives contestants an answer to which they must formulate the question.

The event was a practice for a real live TV contest between two human contestants and the supercomputer named Watson, which is due to air in February with the first placed contestant winning $1 million.

The room-sized computer was represented on the blue set in between the two contestants by a black screen with a glowing globe. The computer correctly answered about half the 15 questions quicker than either of its competitors to claim victory.

The competitors were no duds. One had previously won 74 consecutive matches, while the other had won a record $3.3 million as a contestant on the show.

The milestone is considered analogous to the famous victory of IBM’s Deep Blue Computer’s victory over World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov in 1996.

IBM said that Watson’s victory showed its ability to parse complex questions and sort through tons of data in order to find the relevant answers.

The computer, which is built from 10 racks of IBM servers, has 15 terabytes of RAM and has access to over 200 million pages of content. It did not have the advantage of internet access.

“After four years, our scientific team believes that Watson is ready for this challenge based on its ability to rapidly comprehend what the Jeopardy clue is asking, analyze the information it has access to, come up with precise answers, and develop an accurate confidence in its response,” said David Ferrucci, a scientist who leads the IBM Research team that built Watson.

An open platform for innovation

Over the years ‘Open Source' development has become a very powerful philosophy and an engineering paradigm. At the very core, it represents access to the source code for everyone in the developer, as well as the users, community. This underlying philosophy encourages concurrent development, peer reviews and collaboration. These core characteristics of open source movement can be leveraged to nurture collaboration and collaborative innovation within an enterprise.

Today, most IT services companies have a technology group that is primarily responsible for innovation. But with a limited number of geeks and architects, how does a company keep pace with the rapid changes and advances taking place in the technology landscape? One way to address this is to create an internal open source platform that addresses multiple issues that plague the much commoditised IT industry today.

How does a company create an environment that forces innovation and intellectual property creation? How do you create an environment that provides opportunities for continuous learning? How do you ensure that your employees' time is used optimally?

These are some of the issues that we have tried to tackle through this initiative. Every project and every individual should try and create (and consume) assets that can be used and reused multiple times. This is the only way productivity and quality can be improved while maintaining competitive advantage.

Seamless

Open source initiative is a platform that makes creation and consumption of assets quite seamless and integrated with the project lifecycle. Regardless of what project someone is on, what kind of technology he/she is working on, everyone will want to make sure that they are constantly learning and keeping up with the technology trends.

By participating in projects in this platform, it is quite possible that someone working on a Java maintenance project is able to participate and learn something quite different, say cloud computing using Amazon EC2! Employees who are in between projects get to spend their time more productively by participating in any of the open source projects.

Key steps

The process revolves around three primary ‘actors' and four key steps for each of the hosted projects. The ‘Project Owner' manages a specific project and sets up the required environment and repositories for that project. He/she is also responsible for ensuring that various steps in the open source development lifecycle are adhered to. The ‘Contributor' could be anyone in the company and could play the role of a developer, reviewer, or tester. He/she works collaboratively with the rest of the contributors and the project owner.

The ‘Consumer' could be anyone who wants to use assets from a particular project in his/her own area. The ‘Consumer' also raises issues and possible enhancements for the assets, and creates the feedback mechanism that is essential for the continuous improvement of all assets.

‘Idea Space' is where all ideas are born. This is a discussion forum where anyone can create/share an idea for taking up as an open source project. Everyone chips in and after pros and cons are discussed and debated, some of these ideas will get into the open source platform as projects. This is the ‘Ideation and Initiation' phase. At this point a project owner is identified. During the next phase of collaborative development and review, contributors can start collaborating on this project as developers, reviewers, or testers. During the review phase, apart from ensuring code quality, extra focus is given to make sure that there are no IP infringements.

Integration

During the ‘Integration' phase, source code and assets from various contributors are integrated into a deployable build which is then tested as a single unit. Issues are logged, fixed, and retested, all in the open source platform. The ‘Implementation and Improvement' phase closes the loop and provides feedback to the entire lifecycle.

It is very easy for such initiatives to fail, unless awareness and a culture is cultivated amongst the community.

Therefore it is important to have a pilot phase for such an initiative, where adequate branding and internal evangelisation is done to popularize the concept and to get people familiarised with the process, platform and its benefits.

A platform of this sort that enables collaborative innovation can bring tremendous value to the company and its employees. From a relatively small dedicated innovation group, a platform such as this taps into a resource pool of the entire developer community of the company for ideas, assets, and components that can add to the collective IP and improve productivity quite dramatically.
    
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IT will hire one crore people: Nasscom

If figures tell a story, the technology services' tale has been spectacular: less than $4 billion in 2000 to $62 billion today; an average of 22% yearly growth; from less than 100,000 to over two million employees; an almost non-existent domestic market has grown to $10 billion-a-year opportunity.

Technology bellwether Infosys was 3,000 people in 2000. At the close of the decade, it has grown manpower 40 times to more than 1,25,000. Next 10 years will strengthen India's position as global technology services hub, with Nasscom projecting the industry size at $225 billion by 2020.

"IT will employ one crore people," says Nasscom president Som Mittal. Global tech giants such as IBM, Cisco, Dell, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, HP and Google have their largest employee base outside the US, in India -- tweaking code, developing software products, filing patents and now eying the local market.

Homegrown companies such as Infosys, Wipro, TCS and HCL, which never found a mention in global technology and business reports, are now on 'top quadrant' of Gartner, Forrester, Everest, BCG and others.

"We started with a narrow set of applications, development and maintenance services, and now do pretty much everything," says Infosys Technologies' co-founder & CEO, S Gopalakrishnan. And 'everything' includes aerospace design, re-doing global retail and pharma, maintaining and improving banking systems and systems integration for the manufacturing sector.

TCS signed a $250-million contract with ABN Amro in 2005 and followed it up with Pearl Assurance deal worth $847 million. In a $250-million deal, Infosys acquired captive centres of Philips in 2007. The same year saw 66 PE deals in the technology space.

In 2008, HCL bought out UK-based SAP consultant Axon for $658 million. Growth has been "unstoppable," says Gopalakrishnan, despite the dotcom bust and economic slowdown. The business case was compelling and the sector weathered all anti-offshoring noises as well.

"Over the decade, there has been a greater acceptance of the global model of working at a distance," says Mittal. However, the only bad patch was the Satyam episode. "That was an aberration,' says Mittal.

With the industry set for a more than four-fold growth in the next decade, it will have to gear up with new business models. "80% of the opportunity will be in new areas -- new markets, new technologies and from smaller companies as well," says Mittal. 

Read more: The Times of India