Results for “Watson” 84 found
Your TA Will Be Jill Watson
WSJ: One day in January, Eric Wilson dashed off a message to the teaching assistants for an online course at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
“I really feel like I missed the mark in giving the correct amount of feedback,” he wrote, pleading to revise an assignment.
Thirteen minutes later, the TA responded. “Unfortunately, there is not a way to edit submitted feedback,” wrote Jill Watson, one of nine assistants for the 300-plus students.
Last week, Mr. Wilson found out he had been seeking guidance from a computer.
…Last year, a team of Georgia Tech researchers began creating Ms. Watson by poring through nearly 40,000 postings on a discussion forum known as “Piazza” and training her to answer related questions based on prior responses. By late March, she began posting responses live.
Don’t confuse Ms. Watson with the customer-service chatbots used online by airlines and other industries. Mr. Goel boasts that she answers only if she has a confidence rate of at least 97%.
“Most chatbots operate at the level of a novice,” Mr. Goel said. “Jill operates at the level of an expert.”
In our paper on online education Tyler and I wrote about AI Tutors:
Feedback from interactive systems will be more immediate and more informative (Skinner 1958). Adaptive tutoring systems are already nearly as effective as human tutors in many circumstances and much cheaper to scale (VanLehn 2011).
How is IBM deploying Watson these days?
IBM on Tuesday revealed details of how several customers are putting Watson to work, showing that cognitive computing has garnered at least an initial interest among different sorts of businesses. Naming customers also helps other businesses feel more at ease about trying the new technology.
In Australia, the ANZ bank will allow its financial planners to use the Watson Engagement Advisor to help answer customer questions. The idea is that the bank can then better understand what questions are being asked, so they can be answered more quickly.
Also in Australia, Deakin University will use Watson to answer questions from the school’s 50,000 students, by way of Web and mobile interfaces. The questions might include queries about campus activities or where a particular building is located. The service will be drawn from a vast repository of school materials, such as presentations, brochures and online materials.
In Thailand, the Bumrungrad International Hospital will use a Watson service to let its doctors plan the most effective treatments for each cancer patient, based on the patient’s profile as well as on published research. The hospital will leverage research work IBM did with the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to customize Watson for oncology research.
In Cape Town, South Africa, Metropolitan Health medical insurance company will be using Watson to help provide medical advice for the company’s 3 million customers.
Watson is also being used by IBM partners and startups as the basis for new services.
Using Watson, Travelocity co-founder Terry Jones has launched a new service called WayBlazer, which can offer travel advice via a natural language interface. The Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau is testing the WayBlazer app to see if it can increase convention and hotel bookings.
Veterinarian service provider LifeLearn of Guelph, Canada, is using Watson as the basis of a new mobile app called LifeLearn Sofie, which provides a way for animal doctors to research different treatment options. The Animal Medical Center in New York is currently testing that app.
Watson is also being incorporated into other third-party apps serving retailers, IT security and help desk managers, nonprofit fund-raisers, and the health care industry.
There is more information here.
My visit to IBM Watson
I very much enjoyed my visit to their excellent Saarinen-designed building, up in Westchester County somewhere. No office has a window but every path you might take from one part of the building to another gives you beautiful full-window views of the surrounding countryside.
I wish to thank all the people who took the time to show me and explain to me what they are up to. Their program suggested that more dairy (milk, not coconut milk) can be blended into Thai recipes with greater gain than you otherwise might think.
I had as a personal guide the man who is the voice of Watson and I told him to go see In a World…
Their cafeteria is excellent and the people in charge understand which recipes transfer well to institutional settings and which do not. Their vegetarian food is delicious and looks delicious, rendering the “nudge” unnecessary. From the rest of the menu, the turkey chili is of special commendation. Google take note, you are falling behind in the culinary department…
IBM’s Watson will be made available in a more powerful form on the internet
Companies, academics and individual software developers will be able to use it at a small fraction of the previous cost, drawing on IBM’s specialists in fields like computational linguistics to build machines that can interpret complex data and better interact with humans.
That is a big deal, obviously. The story is here.
Watson the Spanish chef
In San Jose, I.B.M. plans to serve the assembled analysts a breakfast pastry devised by Watson, called a “Spanish crescent.” It is a collaboration of Watson’s software and James Briscione, a chef instructor at the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan.
I.B.M. researchers have watched and talked to Mr. Briscione as he works, selecting ingredients and building out dishes. Watson has read those notes, 20,000 recipes, data on the chemistry of food ingredients, and measured ratings of flavors people like in categories like “olfactory pleasantness.”
Watson’s assignment has been to come up with recipes that are both novel and taste good. In the case of the breakfast pastry, Watson was told to come up with something inspired by Spanish cuisine, but unusual and healthy. The computer-ordered ingredients include cocoa, saffron, black pepper, almonds and honey — but no butter, Watson’s apparent nod to healthier eating.
Then, Mr. Briscione, working with those ingredients, had to adjust portions and make the pastry.
“If I could have used butter, it would have been a lot easier,” said the chef, who used vegetable oil instead.
Michael Karasick, director of I.B.M.’s Almaden lab, had one of the Spanish crescents for breakfast recently. “Pretty good” was his scientific judgment.
There is more here, including Watson on drug discovery (not just diagnosis) and Watson on complex data analytics. Fascinating throughout.
James Stock and Mark Watson on the Great Recession
Binyamin Applebaum summarizes their new paper:
The paper, entitled “Disentangling the Channels of the 2007-2009 Recession,” will be posted on the general conference Web site Thursday afternoon.
The authors argue that the slow pace of recovery reflects a long-term deterioration in economic prospects. Specifically, they estimate that the trend growth rate of gross domestic product fell by 1.2 percentage points between 1965 and 2005.
…the key reason for the faltering pace of growth is that the work force is expanding more slowly. Population growth has slowed, and so has the pace at which women are entering the labor market.
“These demographic changes imply continued low or even declining trend growth rates in employment, which in turn imply that future recessions will be deeper, and will have slower recoveries, than historically has been the case.”
Indeed, recent growth has actually outpaced their expectations.
“The current recovery in employment is actually faster than predicted,” they write. “The puzzle, if there is one, is why the recovery was as strong as it has been.”
This general theory about the power of women has been propounded before, notably by the economist Tyler Cowen in his recent book “The Great Stagnation.”
The paper itself can be found here (pdf). By the way, for market monetarists, equity markets seem to agree. Stock and Watson, of course, are two of the most technically accomplished macroeconometricians. This is further evidence — perhaps the most thorough empirical paper on the topic to date — that the Great Recession has been about the interaction of cyclical and structural forces.
Other interesting papers from that symposium are here, including a DeLong-Summers defense of stimulus as possibly self-financing.
Unintended Geoengineering
In my post SuperFreakonomics on Geoengineering, Revisited I noted that regulations requiring ships to reduce sulfur have increased global warming. Science has a new piece on the phenomena and the implications for intended geoengineering:
Regulations imposed in 2020 by the United Nations’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) have cut ships’ sulfur pollution by more than 80% and improved air quality worldwide. The reduction has also lessened the effect of sulfate particles in seeding and brightening the distinctive low-lying, reflective clouds that follow in the wake of ships and help cool the planet. The 2020 IMO rule “is a big natural experiment,” says Duncan Watson-Parris, an atmospheric physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “We’re changing the clouds.”
By dramatically reducing the number of ship tracks, the planet has warmed up faster, several new studies have found. That trend is magnified in the Atlantic, where maritime traffic is particularly dense. In the shipping corridors, the increased light represents a 50% boost to the warming effect of human carbon emissions. It’s as if the world suddenly lost the cooling effect from a fairly large volcanic eruption each year, says Michael Diamond, an atmospheric scientist at Florida State University.
The natural experiment created by the IMO rules is providing a rare opportunity for climate scientists to study a geoengineering scheme in action—although it is one that is working in the wrong direction. Indeed, one such strategy to slow global warming, called marine cloud brightening, would see ships inject salt particles back into the air, to make clouds more reflective. In Diamond’s view, the dramatic decline in ship tracks is clear evidence that humanity could cool off the planet significantly by brightening the clouds. “It suggests pretty strongly that if you wanted to do it on purpose, you could,” he says.
Chat Law Goes Global
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), the global business services firm, has signed a deal with OpenAI for access to “Harvey”, OpenAI’s Chatbot for legal services.
Reuters: PricewaterhouseCoopers said Wednesday that it will give 4,000 of its legal professionals access to an artificial intelligence platform, becoming the latest firm to introduce generative AI technology for legal work.
PwC said it partnered with AI startup Harvey for an initial 12-month contract, which the accounting and consulting firm said will help lawyers with contract analysis, regulatory compliance work, due diligence and other legal advisory and consulting services.
PwC said it will also determine ways for tax professionals to use the technology.
IBM’s Watson was a failure so we will see but, yeah I will say it, this time feels different. For one, lawyers deal with text where GPTs excel. Second, GPTs have already revolutionized software coding and unlike Watson I am using GPTs every day for writing and researching and it works. The entire world of white collar work is going to be transformed over the next year. See also my paper with Tyler, How to Learn and Teach Economics with Large Language Models, Including GPT.
Patrick Collison’s books of the year picks
The best book I read this year was “The World of Yesterday” by Stefan Zweig. A vivid account of Austria and its pre-WWI cultural vibrancy, it left me sharing his sorrow for what was destroyed. (And his description of Insel Verlag, his publisher, provides good aspirational material for Stripe Press.) Relatedly, Peter Watson’s “The German Genius” provides the first comprehensive account I’ve read of what exactly happened in the 17th and 18th centuries that gave rise to Goethe, Bach, Euler, Kant, von Humboldt, etc. In Ireland, we don’t tend to appreciate Edmund Burke very much, but I found Richard Bourke’s “Empire and Revolution” to be a terrific account of Burke’s thinking. His contributions to the debates around the American and French Revolutions are well known, but he thought his opposition to the colonial abuses in India was more important. We recently started Arc, a new biomedical research organization, and I’ve been digging into the early days of other institutions. Thomas Lee’s “Eugene Braunwald and the Rise of Modern Medicine” stood out. So did “Upstart” by Ed Walsh, the founding president of the University of Limerick.
Here is the link, you will find other people’s picks too.
Emergent Ventures winners, eighteenth cohort
Zvi Mowshowitz, TheZvi, New York City, to develop his career as idea generator and public intellectual.
Nadia Eghbal, Miami, to study and write on philanthropy for tech and crypto wealth.
Henry Oliver, London, to write a book on talent and late bloomers. Substack here.
Geffen Avrahan, Bay Area, founder at Skyline Celestial, an earlier winner, omitted from an early list by mistake, apologies Geffen!
Subaita Rahman of Scarborough, Ontario, to enable a one-year visiting student appointment at Church Labs at Harvard University.
Gareth Black, Dublin, to start YIMBY Dublin.
Pradyumna Shyama Prasad, blog and podcast, Singapore. Here is his substack newsletter, here is his podcast about both economics and history.
Ulkar Aghayeva, New York City, Azerbaijani music and bioscience.
Steven Lu, Seattle, to create GenesisFund, a new project for nurturing talent, and general career development.
Ashley Lin, University of Pennsylvania gap year, Center for Effective Altruism, for general career development and to learn talent search in China, India, Russia.
James Lin, McMaster University gap year, from Toronto area, general career development and to support his interests in effective altruism and also biosecurity.
Santiago Tobar Potes, Oxford, from Colombia and DACA in the United States, general career development, interest in public service, law, and foreign policy.
Martin Borch Jensen of Longevity Impetus Grants (a kind of Fast Grants for longevity research), Bay Area and from Denmark, for a new project Talent Bridge, to help talented foreigners reach the US and contribute to longevity R&D.
Jessica Watson Miller, from Sydney now in the Bay Area, to start a non-profit to improve the treatment of mental illness.
Congratulations to you all! We are honored to have you as Emergent Ventures winners.
The best guitar music from 2021
Two new boxed sets are not only among the best releases of the year, they are some of the best guitar recordings of all time. The first is Doc Watson: Life’s Work A Retrospective, four CDs of wonder and much better than any other Watson collection.
The second is Bola Sete, Samba in Seattle: Live at the Penthouse 1966-1968. Sete has remained a largely obscure figure, with his reputation kept alive by a few cryptic John Fahey comments over the years. His LPs have been hard to find, and they did not always reflect the full quality of his playing. His best YouTube clips would come and go. This boxed set shows Sete to be one of the best acoustic guitarists of the 20th century. He is rooted in Brazilian bossa nova, but can play everything including Duke Ellington and Villa-Lobos. Here is Ted Gioia’s appreciation of Sete.
In terms of original contribution and historical import, this has to be the release of the year in any field of music.
I’ll be getting you some classical music recommendations soon.
Immigrants keep us out of nursing homes
We examine whether immigration causally affects the likelihood that the U.S.-born elderly live in institutional settings. Using a shift-share instrument to identify exogenous variation in immigration, we find that a 10 percentage point increase in the less-educated foreign-born labor force share in a local area reduces institutionalization among the elderly by 1.5 and 3.8 percentage points for those aged 65+ and 80+, a 26-29 percent effect relative to the mean. The estimates imply that a typical U.S-born individual over age 65 in the year 2000 was 0.5 percentage points (10 percent) less likely to be living in an institution than would have been the case if immigration had remained at 1980 levels. We show that immigration affects the availability and cost of home services, including those provided by home health aides, gardeners and housekeepers, and other less-educated workers, reducing the cost of aging in the community.
Here is more from Kristin F. Butcher, Kelsey Moran, and Tara Watson.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Can a submerged Tuvalu still be a state?
2. Your periodic reminder to read Matt Levine.
3. Ross Douthat on why we need new universities (NYT).
4. Ten podcast episodes of Agnes Callard and Robin Hanson. With transcripts, and here is Robin’s overview of the series, which is also a very good post on differing mental models. Self-recommending!
5. New Doc Watson box set, and WSJ review here. In fact, in today’s links, 4 out of the 5 are self-recommending.
What should I ask Patricia Fara?
I will be doing a Conversation with her, here is part of her Wikipedia page:
Patricia Fara is a historian of science at the University of Cambridge. She is a graduate of the University of Oxford and did her PhD at the University of London…
Her areas of particular academic interest include the role of portraiture and art in the history of science, science in the 18th century England during the Enlightenment and the role of women in science. She has written about numerous women in science, mathematics, engineering, and medicine including: Hertha Ayrton, Lady Helen Gleichen, Mona Chalmers Watson, Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, Isabel Emslie Hutton, Flora Murray, Ida Maclean, Marie Stopes, and Martha Annie Whiteley. She has argued for expanded access to childcare as a means of increasing the retention of women in science. She has written and co-authored a number of books for children on science. Fara is also a reviewer of books on history of science. She has written the award-winning Science: A Four Thousand Year History (2009) [and Erasmus Darwin: Sex, Science, and Serendipity (2012). Her most recent book is A Lab of One’s Own: Science and Suffrage in the First World War” (2017). In 2013, Fara published an article in Nature (journal), stressing the fact that biographies of female scientists perpetuate stereotypes.
And she has a new book coming out on Isaac Newton. So what should I ask her?
Monday assorted links
2. Kotlikoff argues for group testing.
4. Why America took so long to test, and yes the FDA is largely to blame (NYT).
5. “Those shown to have developed immunity could be given a “kind of vaccination passport that allows them, for example, to be exempted from curbs on their activities”, Gérard Krause, a leading immunologist co-ordinating the study, told Der Spiegel magazine.” (The Times)
6. Why Singaporean health care workers have remained relatively safe.
7. This Week in Virology podcast. I have not heard it, but it comes recommended.
8. The Gottlieb/Rivers/McClellan/Silvis/Watson AEI policy paper.
9. Audrey Moore RIP, Fairfax County environmentalist, she influenced my life a great deal, both good and bad. Fairfax County now has 427 parks, in part because of her.
10. Robin Hanson argues for variolation.
11. The gender gap in housing returns. (Do women care more about the non-pecuniary factors?)
12. The Ebola scare helped Republicans.
13. New SEIR infectious disease model from NBER. And a new James Stock paper with a model.
14. Summary of where John Cochrane is at.
15. MIT The Elevate Prizes, up to $5 million.
16. Viral load as a source of heterogeneity?
17. James Altucher interviews me about the coronavirus economy, podcast.