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IBM announced the launch of IBM Watson Data Kits, which are designed to accelerate the development of AI applications to help support faster, more informed decision making for business leaders. Watson Data Kits will provide companies across industries with pre-enriched, machine readable, industry-specific data that can enable them to scale AI across their business. With expected availability in 2Q 2018, the kits will initially serve the travel and transportation and food industries with Watson Data Kits for travel points of interest and food menus, respectively.
Data scientists currently spend roughly 79 percent of their time collecting, organizing and mining data to glean actionable insights (Source: Forbes, 2016), making it challenging for business leaders to implement must-have AI technology at scale. By helping to streamline and accelerate the development process for data scientists and AI engineers, companies can now quickly extract rich insights, create more engaging consumer experiences and ultimately drive greater business value.
Developed with Triposo, an IBM data provider, the Watson Data Kit for travel points of interest (POI) will provide airlines, hotel brands, online travel agencies and others with point-of-interest data to help them create more engaging experiences for travelers. It will contain more than 300,000 points of interest in 100 categories. Companies within the travel and transportation industry can use the kits to more easily build AI-powered web and mobile experiences to help consumers find fun and interesting things to do in their destination city. For example, a hospitality company could use the Watson Data Kit for travel points of interest to train the AI powering the chatbot within its mobile application, recommending personalized destinations and attractions based on a customer's preferences.
The Watson Data Kit for food menus contains 700,000 menus in 21,000 U.S. cities, providing AI developers with content for apps that can help users find the menu item, type of cuisine, location and price they want near them. The kit is designed to take a user deeper than the restaurant level, enabling menu choices and prices to be compared side-by-side for particular interests, such as organic, soul food, and gluten-free.
BM Helps Accelerate AI with Fast New Data Platform, Elite Team
IBM also unveiled a new data science and machine learning platform and an elite consulting team to help them accelerate their AI journeys.
Powered by a fast in-memory database that can ingest and analyze massive amounts of data –one million events per second – IBM's new Cloud Private for Data is an integrated data science, data engineering and app building platform. Designed to help companies uncover previously unobtainable insights from their data, the platform is also designed to enable users to build and exploit event-driven applications capable of analyzing the torrents of data from things like IoT sensors, online commerce, mobile devices, and more.
Launching on the IBM Cloud Private platform, Cloud Private for Data is an application layer deployed on the Kubernetes open-source container software and can be deployed in minutes. Using microservices, it forms a truly integrated environment for data science and application development. In the future, the Cloud Private for Data will run on all clouds, as well as be available in industry-specific solutions, for financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and more.
The Cloud Private Data solution also includes key capabilities from IBM's Data Science Experience, Information Analyzer, Information Governance Catalogue, Data Stage, Db2 and Db2 Warehouse. The cohesive set of capabilities is designed to help Cloud Private clients quickly discover insights from their core business data, while keeping that data in a protected, controlled environment. In other words, the new solution is designed to provide a data infrastructure layer for AI behind the firewall.
IBM Launches Data Science Elite Team
IBM also announced the formation of the Data Science Elite Team – a new no-charge consultancy dedicated to solving clients' real-world data science problems and to assisting them in their journey to AI.
This global team of data scientists, machine learning engineers, and decision optimization engineers is dedicated to assisting clients on-site to begin helping them better understand and control their data, and to start making machine learning an integral part of their business.
Specifically, Data Science Elite Team client engagements center around a use case and begin with a discovery workshop that helps clients understand their data environment and break this use case down into 3 to 4 discrete deliverables that can each be realized in two to three weeks. Following the workshop, clients are provided access to powerful data science strategies, technologies and methodologies through data science sprints and validation. The team, which comprises more than 30 people now, and is expected to grow to 200 over the next few years, is currently aiding more than 50 clients.