Day: 4 September 2023

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David Ferrucci, the scientist behind IBM Watson raises substantial funds for his AI project

AI Mainframe Supercomputer Computer

David Ferrucci, a prominent artificial intelligence researcher who led the team that created IBM Watson, has reportedly raised nearly $60 million for his AI company called Elemental Cognition.

Headquartered in New York, Elemental says on its website that the company seeks to develop AI that ‘thinks before it talks‘. It offers two enterprise products, Cogent and Cora, which are essentially chatbots designed for different scenarios. They can be used in financial services, interactive travel planning and for automating research discovery in life sciences.

Elemental Cognition

  • The new startup company is called Elemental Cognition, and it was founded in 2015 by David Ferrucci, who led the team that created IBM Watson.
  • Elemental Cognition aims to develop AI that ‘thinks before it talks‘ and can understand the meaning and context of human language. It offers two enterprise products, Cogent and Cora, which are chatbots for different scenarios.
  • Elemental Cognition has raised $60 million in funding from 17 investors, including Jim Breyer, former IBM CEO Sam Palmisano, and Geoff Yang of Redpoint Ventures.

What is IBM Watson?

IBM Watson is used in various areas of AI, such as natural language processing, machine learning, computer vision, speech recognition, and knowledge representation. IBM Watson is a cognitive computing system that can process natural language, analyze large amounts of data, and learn from its interactions with humans and machines.

IBM Watson is a question-answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM’s DeepQA project by a research team led by principal David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM’s founder and first CEO, industrialist Thomas J. Watson.

Watson Assistant: A chatbot platform that allows businesses to create conversational agents that can interact with customers and employees through text or voice. Watson Assistant can understand natural language, provide personalized responses, and integrate with other services and data sources.

A watercolour image of an AI microchip powering a mainframe supercomputer computer

Watson Discovery: A data analysis tool that can extract insights from structured and unstructured data, such as documents, web pages, social media posts, and images. Watson Discovery can perform natural language understanding, sentiment analysis, entity extraction, and document classification.

Watson Studio: A cloud-based platform that enables data scientists and developers to build, train, and deploy AI and machine learning models. Watson Studio supports various frameworks and languages, such as Python, TensorFlow, PyTorch and R. Watson Studio also provides tools for data visualization, collaboration, and automation.

Watson Visual Recognition: A computer vision service that can analyze images and videos for content, objects, faces, scenes, and emotions. 

Power

The IBM Watson computer consists of a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers, each of which uses a 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight-core processor, with four threads per core. The system has 2,880 POWER7 processor threads and 16 terabytes of RAM. It can process 500 gigabytes (the equivalent of a million books) per second.

Supercomputer now with AI power

The IBM Watson computer has an avatar that is inspired by the IBM ‘Smarter Planet’ logo. The avatar is a globe with a grid pattern and four glowing stripes that represent the four main aspects of Watson: natural language processing, hypothesis generation and evaluation, dynamic adaptation, and evidence-based learning. The avatar also changes color and brightness depending on Watson’s mood and confidence level.

International Business Machines (IBM)

IBM was founded in 1911 in Endicott, New York, as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) by Charles Ranlett Flint. The company changed its name to International Business Machines (IBM) in 1924 under the leadership of Thomas J. Watson, Sr.  IBM is one of the oldest and most influential technology companies in the world, with a history of innovation and research in various fields of computing.

The International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), nicknamed ‘Big Blue’, is an American multinational technology corporation headquartered in New York and is present in over 175 countries. It specializes in computer hardware, middleware, and software, and provides hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. IBM is the largest industrial research organization in the world.

IBM holds the record for most annual U.S. patents generated by a business for 29 consecutive years from 1993 to 2021? 

Big Blue quietly works on…

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Happy Birthday Google, 25 years today

Google search engine

Happy birthday to Google, the world’s most popular search engine!

Google was founded 25 years ago today (4th September 2023) – by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford University students who wanted to organise the web in a better way. They named their project after the mathematical term ‘googol’, which means 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Since then, Google has grown into a global tech’ giant that offers not only search, but also email, maps, cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and many other products and services. 

Google has also acquired several companies, such as YouTube, Android, and Waze.

Some of the key moments in Google’s history

  • Launching AdWords in 2000, which allowed advertisers to buy keywords and display ads on the search results page.
  • Introducing Gmail in 2004, which offered users 1 GB of free storage and a fast and simple interface.
  • Releasing Google Maps in 2005, which revolutionised the way people navigate and explore the world.
  • Buying YouTube in 2006, which made Google the owner of the largest video-sharing platform on the web.
  • Developing Chrome in 2008, which became the most widely used web browser in the world.
Happy Birthday Google – 25 years today
  • Creating Android in 2010, which became the most popular operating system for smartphones and tablets.
  • Launching Google+ in 2011, which was an attempt to compete with Facebook in the social networking space.
  • Reorganising into Alphabet in 2015, which made Google a subsidiary of a larger holding company that oversees other ventures such as Waymo, Verily, and Calico.
  • Unveiling ChatGPT in 2022, which is a conversational AI system that can generate natural and coherent responses to any text input.

Influential

Google remains one of the most influential and innovative companies in the world. It has changed the way we access information, communicate, entertain ourselves, and solve problems. It has also inspired many people to pursue their dreams and passions.

Google CEO says

As Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in his public memo on Google at 25: ‘We started with a simple mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. That mission still guides us today. But we’ve also learned that our responsibility goes beyond that. We have a duty to create products that improve the lives of billions of people — not just today or tomorrow but for generations to come’.

Go google!

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AI – music to my ears… or not?

Ha Jiang

Ha Jiang, is a virtual online idol, and only exists online.

Ha Jiang signed a record deal with Whet Records, Warner Music Group’s pan-Asian dance label in China, in 2021. Ha Jiang is the first virtual idol to conduct a record deal with a major label. The virtual idol uses AI technology to create music and has become an online sensation in Asia.

Ha Jiang online music avatar. She is a virtual artist who uses artificial intelligence to create music

Virtual AI artist

Ha Jiang is a virtual artist who uses artificial intelligence to create music. She is the first virtual idol to sign a record deal with a major label, Whet Records, which is Warner Music Group’s pan-Asian dance label in China. My understanding is that the music was composed by humans, so not entirely AI generated then.

Would this also work in west – is it time to be concerned?

She already has more than 100,000 followers in China and is known for her sense of style and fashion. She is also a social influencer who has been hired by the city of Shanghai to promote safe driving. Ha Jiang is not a real person, but a computer-generated avatar who only exists online. She is part of a growing phenomenon of virtual idols in Asia, especially among Gen-Z fans.

Endel, is a sound startup company that uses artificial intelligence to create personalized audio tracks. Endel was the first to sign a record deal with Warner Music Group in 2019 to release 20 albums of ambient music.

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Digital £ Pound Sterling

Digital £ pound

The digital pound is a proposed new form of money that would be issued by the Bank of England and backed by the government. It would be similar to a digital banknote, enabling you to use it in-store or online to make payments.

It would not be intended to replace cash, but complement it. The digital pound is also known as digital sterling or Britcoin.

Bank of England and UK Government

The Bank of England and HM Treasury are looking at the idea of a digital pound because they think it might offer a new way to pay, help businesses, build trust in money, and better protect the UK’s financial system. They have published a Consultation Paper, which explores the need for the digital pound and proposes a set of design choices for it. They are also engaging with businesses and communities to get their views on the digital pound.

The digital pound is not a cryptocurrency or cryptoasset. Unlike cryptocurrencies, which have volatile values, the digital pound would be issued by the Bank of England and have a stable value, just like banknotes.

I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of £10.00

The digital £ is coming to a bank near you or more likely, an app near you

£10 in digital pounds would always have the same value as a £10 banknote.