IBM

Grady Booch: Enjoy the beauty of what you’re doing but also take responsibility!

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Grady Booch is an IBM fellow, best-selling author, software engineer, geek, philosopher, storyteller, entrepreneur, and former US air-force serviceman who used to work on the secret space shuttle military program. If his bio is not enough to make you watch the interview on its own, let me just add that this was one of the frankest and most fun conversations that I have had so far on Singularity 1 on 1. So don’t waste any more time reading, but hit the play button and watch the interview!

During our 50 min conversation with Grady Booch we cover a variety of interesting topics such as the moral and social implications of software engineering; his upcoming documentary on Computing the Human Experience; the 4 intellectuals who had the most significant impact on him; whether IBM is trying to create an AI or not; the coolest future apps for Watson and whether the NSA is interested; if intelligence is computable or not; the Penrose-Hameroff Orch OR theory of consciousness; determinism, free will, and computability; Marvin Minsky and Noam Chomsky’s claim that we are not making any progress in general artificial intelligence; Grady’s take on the technological singularity and the Turing Test…

My favorite quotes that I will take away from this fun interview with Grady Booch are:

Enjoy the beauty in what you are doing but also take and own responsibility!

and

There is a magical world behind that curtain. Open it up! You will be amazed by the things you’ll see. […] Join us on that journey!

As always, you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down to watch the video interview in full. To show your support, you can write a review on iTunes, make a direct donation, or become a patron on Patreon.

 

Who is Grady Booch?

Grady Booch 2Grady is currently developing a major transmedia project on computing; for more information, visit Computing: The Human Experience.

Grady is recognized internationally for his innovative work in software architecture, software engineering, and collaborative development environments. He has devoted his life’s work to improving the art and the science of software development. Grady served as Chief Scientist of Rational Software Corporation since its founding in 1981 and through its acquisition by IBM in 2003. He now is part of the IBM Almaden Research Laboratory serving as Chief Scientist for Software Engineering, where he continues his work on the Handbook of Software Architecture and also leads several projects in software engineering that are beyond the constraints of immediate product horizons. Grady continues to engage with customers working on real problems and maintains deep relationships with academia and other research organizations around the world. Grady is one of the original authors of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and was also one of the original developers of several of Rational’s products. Grady has served as an architect and architectural mentor for numerous complex software-intensive systems around the world in just about every domain imaginable.

Grady is the author of six best-selling books, including the UML Users Guide and the seminal Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications. He writes a regular column on architecture for IEEE Software. Grady has published several hundred articles on software engineering, including papers published in the early ’80s that originated the term and practice of object-oriented design (OOD), plus papers published in the early 2000s that originated the term and practice of collaborative development environments (CDE). You’ll find some of those articles available for download at his ACM author profile.

Grady is an IBM Fellow, an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, a World Technology Network Fellow, a Software Development Forum Visionary, and a recipient of Dr. Dobb’s Excellence in Programming award plus three Jolt Awards. Grady was a founding board member of the Agile Alliance, the Hillside Group, and the Worldwide Institute of Software Architects, and now also serves on the advisory board of the International Association of Software Architects. He is also a member of the IEEE Software editorial board. Additionally, Grady serves on the board of the Computer History Museum, where he helped establish work for the preservation of classic software and therein has conducted several oral histories for luminaries such as John Backus, Fred Brooks, and Linus Torvalds. He previously served on the board of the Iliff School of Theology.

Grady received his bachelor of science from the United States Air Force Academy in 1977 and his master of science in electrical engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1979.

When not traveling, Grady lives in Maui and in Colorado, but he also lives virtually – as the avatar Alem Theas – in Thornbridge. Grady’s interests include reading, traveling, singing, playing the Celtic harp, and kayaking.

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IBM Marks 15 Years Since Deep Blue Defeated Garry Kasparov

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May 11, 2012 marks the 15-year anniversary since IBM’s chess-playing supercomputer Deep Blue defeated the reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov. In the video below IBM Research scientist Dr. Murray Campbell, one of the original developers, talks about the challenges and breakthroughs of building Deep Blue.

Designed as a “brute force” high-power parallel processing super-computer, Deep Blue could analyze 200 million chess positions per second. It defeated Kasparov 3.5-2.5 after losing 4-2 the previous year. After the game Deep Blue was used to develop drug treatments, analyze risk and conduct data mining. It also paved the way for the next generation of its replacements –  Blue Gene and Watson.

 

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David Ferrucci on Creating IBM’s Watson: Pursue the Big Challenges

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This Monday I interviewed Dr. David Ferrucci on Singularity 1 on 1.

David is the IBM team leader behind Watson – the computer that succeeded in dethroning humanity’s greatest ever Jeopardy champion – Ken Jennings.

I met both Dr. Ferrucci and Ken Jennings during last year’s Singularity Summit where both of them spoke about Watson and the opportunities and challenges associated with it. It was then and there that I hatched my plan to get David (and Ken) on Singularity 1 on 1.

I have to say that I learned a lot from and enjoyed talking to David very much. My favorite quote that I will take away from him is this:

“Pursue the big challenges and do the big things that inspire people and make them scratch their heads.”

During our conversation with Dr. Ferrucci we also discuss topics such as his original interest in biology and medicine and the story of how he got (accidentally) involved in computer science and programming; why Watson is not mere speech recognition software (or statistical database) but natural language processing and (a lot) more; the inside story behind the idea of creating Watson; the motivation and challenges behind the project; overcoming resistance and the danger and fear of failure; the definition of AI; the importance of Watson in the general scheme of things; Watson’s future and David Ferrucci’s plans; the technological singularity; whole-brain simulation and/or emulation; the importance of pursuing the big challenges.

As always you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full. To show your support you can write a review on iTunes, make a direct donation, or become a patron on Patreon.

 

Who is David Ferrucci?

Dr. David Ferrucci is an IBM Fellow and the Principal Investigator (PI) for the Watson/Jeopardy! project. He has been at IBM’s T.J. Watson’s Research Center since 1995 where he heads up the Semantic Analysis and Integration department. Dr. Ferrucci focuses on technologies for automatically discovering valuable knowledge in natural language content and using it to enable better decision making.

As part of his research he led the team that developed UIMA. UIMA is a software framework and open standard widely used by industry and academia for collaboratively integrating, deploying and scaling advanced text and multi-modal (e.g., speech, video) analytics. As chief software architect for UIMA, Dr. Ferrucci led its design and chaired the UIMA standards committee at OASIS. The UIMA software framework is deployed in IBM products and has been contributed to Apache open-source to facilitate broader adoption and development.

In 2007, Dr. Ferrucci took on the Jeopardy! Challenge – tasked to create a computer system that can rival human champions at the game of Jeopardy!. As the PI for the exploratory research project dubbed DeepQA, he focused on advancing automatic, open-domain question answering using massively parallel evidence based hypothesis generation and evaluation. By building on UIMA, on key university collaborations and by taking bold research, engineering and management steps, he led his team to integrate and advance many search, NLP and semantic technologies to deliver results that have out-performed all expectations and have demonstrated world-class performance at a task previously thought insurmountable with the current state-of-the-art. Watson, the computer system built by Ferrucci and his team beat the highest ranked Jeopardy! champions of all time on national television on February 14th 2011. He is now leading his team to demonstrate how DeepQA can make dramatic advances for intelligent decision support in areas including medicine and health care.

Dr. Ferrucci has been the Principal Investigator (PI) on several government-funded research programs on automatic question answering, intelligent systems and saleable text analytics. His team at IBM consists of 32 researchers and software engineers specializing in the areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Software Architecture, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning and Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR&R).

Dr. Ferrucci graduated from Manhattan College with a BS in Biology and from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1994 with a PhD in Computer Science specializing in knowledge representation and reasoning. He is published in the areas of AI, KR&R, NLP and automatic question-answering.

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Elementary, my dear, Watson: Who is Smarter than Human?

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In the 1940s Alan Turing famously predicted that one day computers will defeat humans in chess.

In 1997 IBM’s Deep Blue defeated the reigning world chess champion Gary Kasparov.

Currently, IBM is building a natural language processing computer named Watson, designed to compete in the game show Jeopardy and, ultimately, defeat any human opponent.

(You can test yourself against Watson by playing the NY Times Trivia Challenge Game here.)

As you can see in the videos Watson is still very much a work in progress. However, is there anyone who honestly doubts the inevitable? Do you need to be a Sherlock Holmes to see what’s coming? I think it’s elementary.

Big deal. Someone will say.

I remember reading once that famous linguist Noam Chomsky commented that Deep Blue defeating Kasparov in chess was as interesting as a bulldozer winning the Olympics in weight-lifting. Well, I wonder if, as a linguist, Chomsky perceives Watson to be a little more interesting than Deep Blue.

I admit — I am no world famous linguist. But it seems to me that in a way, Jeopardy is very different from chess. In fact, I will argue that Jeopardy is much, much harder (at least for computers) than chess.

For the record: I love chess. I think it takes a uniquely rare genius to become a world chess champion like Kasparov. But language is so much more complex and has, it seems to me, a near infinite number of combinations, idioms, subtle, ironic and humorous meanings.

Chess, on the other hand, has a very large but still limited number of moves. Therefore, if a computer beats the best of us in Jeopardy, I would dare to say: It is, indeed, a big deal.

And then, again: Is Jeopardy really that different from chess?

Maybe as much as chess is different from wool weaving. But the fact remains that a few hundred years after weaving machines became better than weaving humans, the Mechanical Turk turned from a hoax into reality.

So, is anything really that different from chess? And from weaving? And calculating? And machining? And lifting? And welding? And…

Will there be anything that we can claim and hold as exclusively human and therefore untouchable for the machine intelligence?

I am not sure there is.

But even if there is (let’s call it love or emotional intelligence for example) once we are the smart, but really not that smart, formerly smartest species on the block, the question still remains unchanged:

What happens when Kasparov’s “uniquely rare genius” is mass produced in every personal computer? (As it already is.) Or, since today we are putting chips in everything, what happens when eventually any smart machine is able to outdo any human at any one thing?

What then? Where do we go from there? Where do we find work? How do we make a living? How do we even survive as a species?

Will technology replace biology?

Video Updates:

IBM’s Watson supercomputer destroys all humans in Jeopardy

How Watson wins at Jeopardy, with Dave Gondek