This episode of Fast Forward was recorded in the IBM Watson Experience Center here in New York City. My guest was Rob High, the Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of IBM Watson. High works across multiple teams within IBM, including engineering, development, and strategy. He is one of the most lucid thinkers in the space of artificial intelligence, and our conversation covered many of the way that technology is reshaping our jobs, our society and our lives. Read and watch our conversation below. Dan Costa: What is the dominant misconception that people have about artificial intelligence? Rob High: I think the most common problem that we're running into with people talking about AI is they still live in the world where I think Hollywood has amplified this idea that cognitive computing, AI, is about replicating the human mind, and it's really not. Things like the Turing test tend to reinforce that what we're measuring is the idea of AI being able to compete with fooling people into believing that what you're dealing with is another human being, but that's really not been where we have found the greatest utility. This even goes back to, if you look at almost every other tool that has ever been created, our tools tend to be most valuable when they're amplifying us, when they're extending our reach, when they're increasing our strength, when they're allowing us to do things that we can't do by ourselves as human beings. That's really the way that we need to be thinking about AI as well, and to the extent that we actually call it augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence.

When people in an emergency situation call into their local 911 operations center, there might be another "brain" listening in on the call. The Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) International, which has more than 29,000 members, tapped IBM to bring Watson into their software. APCO recently announced that APCO International's new guide card software called APCO IntelliCommä will use IBM Watson Speech-to-Text and Watson Analytics to improve the scripts used by 911 operators. The guide card system provides guidance to 911 operators on what to ask and say to gather needed information to access specific emergency call types. Essentially, the software helps operators "provide rapid and customized instructions so callers get the fast, consistent, and appropriate information they need and expect in an emergency," according to a press release.

The Aim of the Conference The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers from all over the world who deal with machine learning and data mining in order to discuss the recent status of the research and to direct further developments. Basic research papers as well as application papers are welcome. Paper submissions should be related but not limited to any of the following topics: association rules case-based reasoning and learning classification and interpretation of images, text, video conceptional learning and clustering Goodness measures and evaluaion (e.g. Long Paper The paper must be formatted in the Springer LNCS format. They should have at most 15 pages.

July 11, 2017 Written by: Chris O'Connor An IoT platform must connect devices, must collect data, must handle thousands of vendors, dozens of standards and must be able to scale to millions of devices sending billions of messages. To deliver true value beyond the basics, it must add cognitive, security, privacy, insight generation and close loop automation. With these capabilities and the supporting technology advancements, the IoT platform becomes an agent of transformation for a business. Organizations in the midst of, or planning for, an IoT deployment understand the complexity of finding a solution that is holistic yet customizable to their own unique requirements. A solid platform is the linchpin in connecting endpoints, capturing meaningful data, and pulling all together into a central dashboard that allows you to glean actionable insights.

In treating brain cancer, time is of the essence. A new study, in which IBM Watson took just 10 minutes to analyze a brain cancer patient's genome and suggest a treatment plan, demonstrates the potential of artificially intelligent medicine to improve patient care. But although human experts took 160 hours to make a comparable plan, the study's results weren't a total victory of machine over humans. The patient in question was a 76-year-old man who went to his doctor complaining of a headache and difficulty walking. A brain scan revealed a nasty glioblastoma tumor, which surgeons quickly operated on; the man then got three weeks of radiation therapy and started on a long course of chemotherapy.

'How do I control the lights?' is my first, rage-infused question when staying in almost any hotel room. Closely followed by'how do I shut off the air conditioning?' As yet, both questions have gone unanswered. Walls, alas, cannot talk, so I am left to fiddle with the plastic key thing that for some reason also operates the room's electricity, put on an extra layer or six, and grope around in the dark. My ineptitude in the realm of all things practical isn't confined to hotel rooms. I'd also like to be able to schedule car maintenance as and when the bleeping thing on the dashboard lets me know something's up.

You've probably seen the Watson commercials, where what looks like a sentient box interacts with celebrities like Bob Dylan, Carrie Fisher, and Serena Williams; or doctors; or a young cancer survivor. Maybe you caught the IBM artificial intelligence technology's appearance in H&R Block's Super Bowl commercial starring Jon Hamm. "It is one of the most powerful tools our species has created. It helps doctors fight disease," Hamm says. "It can predict global weather patterns. It improves education for children everywhere. And now we unleash it on your taxes."

Deliver lightening fast customer support at scale requires a lot of resources and this is why you want your end users or employee to be able to self serve as much as possible. Bots have been around for a long time, but recent advances in natural language processing drove huge adoption over the last year. They are now being used to enhance a broad set of experiences with customer service being one of the most relevant. In this article we're going to learn what does it take to save time to our customer support team. To do this we'll build a chatbot to automate answers to frequently asked questions, eventually saving precious time to your customer support operators so they can focus on more complex requests.

Machine learning is everywhere these days. Whether it's recommending your next movie on Netflix or beating Ken Jennings at Jeopardy, ML is here to stay. But how do you get in on this wave? IBM has just made their new Watson Machine Learning (WML) service generally available this week. I do have to point out that you will need to create an account with Bluemix to start playing around with the service, but there's a 30 day free trial and it's pretty fun.

Over the last couple of days, I have seen a bunch of articles on my social media feed that are based on a research report from Jefferies' James Kisner criticizing IBM Watson. I am a big fan of criticism of technology – and as folks who have known me over time can vouch, I seldom hold back what is in my mind on any topic. I strongly believe that criticism is healthy for all of us – including businesses, and without it we cannot grow. If you go through my previous blogs, you can see first hand how I throw cold water on hype. Unlike my usual posts, I cannot claim to be an impartial observer in this case.