Impressed By The Watson Victory?

Not I. For sure there is some amazing technology behind Watson but I knew it (not he) was going win. IBM have chosen a winnable challenge that can be rehearsed back stage and easily modeled against a perfect game. I mean that you can test for a perfect Jeopardy match in the lab and IBM new this (I suspect) when they laid down the challenge. It is not really a true case of machine Vs Man but a demonstration of a machines ability to scales it access to data well beyond the capability of humans (albeit with a clever front end). The chess game between Kasparov & Bluegene was a much more dramatic in that it wasn’t so easy (in fact at the time feasible) to test in advance and therefore predict the outcome. After all the 1^st time Bluegene truly meet Kasparov was for the actual match. Chess may be perfect in the finite number of games playable but hugely difficult to test for the game that on a day a human grandmaster may unleash. This was a true milestone in computer science. In my opinion the human opponents weren’t actually needed in the Jeopardy/Watson game except to provide entertainment. Really all that was needed was a goal of getting as close to 100% correct answers and us nerds would have been equally as satisfied.

All credit given to the contextual language processing team from IBM that truly have done some great work here. We’ll keep that thanks – medical diagnosis and the front end for search and other expert systems are all lucky beneficiaries etc etc.

In my opinion the Watson victory is ranked in impressiveness as follows:

1. Bluegene Vs Kasparov

2. The 'Stanley' victory in the Mojave Desert race.

3. Watson on Jeopardy

Hopefully now the team will move on a pick a less constrained challenge that involves elements of creativity, deep mathematical sorting with high degrees of freedom and the Watson language front end. Creativity being the operative.

The Token

A gimmicky smart phone app that creates a chain of human interaction that is logged, tracked and made public on ‘The Token’ website. The idea is that you hold the token on your phone and you pass it to the next passing by bumping the phones together. The bumping process is similar/identical to other bumping type apps that use location & time to create a transaction. Each person who has the token has (for example) 48 hours to pass it on or it automatically gets transferred back to the previous holder. Each time the token is successfully passed a photo, a profile of the person who passed it on, and some interesting info is registered at that location an updated on ‘The Token’ website. The end result is a travel log of the token.

The technology for this is simple (relatively i.e. there is no real invention). The real challenge as I see it is to create the momentum and hype required behind the idea to a) make people want to pass it and on it and be part of it; b) to be interested enough in where it is to log on and look at the website.

The Tablet Glove

By simply sticking some old electromechanical keys to the to the finger tips of some thin gloves you can recreate the comforting feel of a proper keyboard on your tablet. I hope that some enterprising young person read this, builds a prototype and makes a rip-roaring success of this can’t-fail idea. This one is a freebie.

Shell-Phone

Abstracts all of the phones IO & sensors to farms of mobile (or other) OS’s running on Amazon ECC. Creates the ability to run massively powerful apps power efficiently in the cloud. The product is basically the API and infrastructure to allow others to write the apps. This is highly dependent on the low latency and high B/W properties of 3GLTE networks. I like this one a lot now that I have written it down…

Social Network 3.0

Mee2. HooBoo. BeHere, 2Square. FaceShoe. MyBike. OhNo. NoMore. Johngle. jBay. CloudBox. FuZZy. WuZZy. Keith & Linda. sLINKy, FlingPoo. eWay. nScape. iThink. gWhiz. iAm. Etc…This is a privacy aware social network that promotes collaboration and cloud based something or other. You can upload downloaded photos and download uploaded video and update your friends instantaneously with your ‘up/download-yoyo’ (an RSS/Tweet based micro-blog distributed in semi-real-time to mobile clients). This network will stand out from the crowd because instead of a skinable interface you allow others to decorate your ‘fence’ by ‘flinging’ photos, media and updates from their smart phone. A ‘fling’ is the action of pretending to throw your phone and instigating an update. The harder the fling the more the media will ‘stick’ to the ‘fence’. Ultimately angry crowds will form to symbolically hurl their views at ‘city hall’ thus creating the 1^st truly democratic social network that encourages free speach. There will rapidly develop a secondary market for smart phone wrist straps. Uniquely the network will transcend net-neutrality issues by utilizing the ‘give-us-a-call-when-you-got-it’ feature. More fundamentally than this though, and to guarantee high ‘quality-of-service’, all traffic that is determined to travel no further than the Starbuck‘s (in which it was obviously sourced) will be simultaneous broadcast by the bluetooth air interface and played audibly (via text-to-speech and at full volume) on the netbook/tablet/laptop’s speaker.….