

The coach never launched, and Under Armour is no longer working with IBM Watson. Under Armour teamed up with Watson Health to create a “personal health trainer and tness consultant." Using data from Under Armour's activity-tracker app, the Cognitive Coach was intended to provide customized training programs based on a user's habits, as well as advice based on analysis of outcomes achieved by similar people. It used this skill to make sense of both the Jeopardy! clue and the millions of text sources it mined. Instead it employed hundreds of algorithms to map the “entities" in a sentence and understand the relationships among them. Watson wasn't a glorified search engine it didn't just return documents based on keywords.

#News explorer watson full#
To play the game, it had to parse complicated clues full of wordplay, search massive textual databases to find possible answers, and determine the best one. The Jeo par dy! victory in 2011 showed Watson's remarkable skill with natural-language processing (NLP). While the company isn't giving up on its moon shot, its launch failures have shown technologists and physicians alike just how difficult it is to build an AI doctor. IBM has learned these painful lessons in the marketplace, as the world watched.
#News explorer watson software#
And encoding a human doctor's expertise in software turns out to be a very tricky proposition. Looking beyond images, however, even today's best AI struggles to make sense of complex medical information. This is an incredibly hard set of problems, and IBM, by being first out, has demonstrated that for everyone else." “They came in with marketing first, product second, and got everybody excited," he says. But it also earned ill will and skepticism by boasting of Watson's abilities. In part, he says, IBM is suffering from its ambition: It was the first company to make a major push to bring AI to the clinic. Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and author of the 2015 book The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer Age (McGraw-Hill). “Reputationally, I think they're in some trouble," says And the products that have emerged from IBM's Watson Health division are nothing like the brilliant AI doctor that was once envisioned: They're more like AI assistants that can perform certain routine tasks. The company spent billions on acquisitions to bolster its internal efforts, but insiders say the acquired companies In the eight years since, IBM has trumpeted many more high-profile efforts to develop AI-powered medical technology-many of which have fizzled, and a few of which have failed spectacularly. In fact, the projects that IBM announced that first day did not yield commercial products. Watson's first commercial offerings for health care would be available in 18 to 24 months, the company promised. IBM would take the breakthrough technology it showed off on television-mainly, the ability to understand natural language-and apply it to medicine.

Jeopardy!, IBM announced a new career path for its AI quiz-show winner: It would become an AI doctor. The day after Watson thoroughly defeated two human champions in the game of IBM's bold attempt to revolutionize health care began in 2011. And in trying to apply Watson to cancer treatment, one of medicine's biggest challenges, IBM encountered a fundamental mismatch between the way machines learn and the way doctors work. Outside of corporate headquarters, however, IBM has discovered that its powerful technology is no match for the messy reality of today's health care system.
