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INTERVIEW
Guruduth Banavar
Vice President of IBM, USA
Every professional will have
an artificial intelligence-based
cognitive assistant
Mr. Banavar, you work for the IBM Last year you spoke at the Nobel Week
as a leader of the global team of scien- Dialogue series in Sweden, dedicated to
tists responsible for Watson – one of the future of Artificial Intelligence. You
the world famous artificial intelligence posed the question “What is the price of
(AI) systems. You work on cognitive sys- not knowing”. What is your answer to
tems. This is not an area majority of the that question?
people are familiar with. So, let us start
with some initial explanations. How do G. Banavar: The world today is awash
you define artificial intelligence and cog- with data from everywhere – from health
nitive computing, what is the difference records, genomics, social media, cars,
between the two? sensors, and even scientific articles in
various journals. In fact, we’re adding
G. Banavar: Historically, AI systems multiple exabytes of data per day, and
have attempted to replicate human in- 90% of the data available today was cre-
telligence within machines. Cognitive ated in the last 2 years.We are so over-
systems, on the other hand,augment hu- whelmed by this data and we are not
man intelligence – they create a partner- able to find the insights needed to solve
ship between machines and people that the important problems. For example,
achieves more than what each of them we do not know why a patient is sick, or
can achieve individually.We have built how to educate our children, or how to
practical cognitive systems in many in- improve the environment. We’re paying
dustries like healthcare, financial servic- a huge price for not knowing the answers
es, and education our goal is for everyone to these questions. We believe cognitive
to have a cognitive system to help them systems can find the answers.
live a fuller and more productive life. Fi-
nally, cognitive systems use technologies What is actually IBM’s Watson? What
from multiple fields like AI& machine is its task?
learning, brain science, human-comput-
er interaction, and high-performance G. Banavar: IBM’s Watson is a pow-
computing. erful machine built originally in 2011 to
October 2016 39
