With the world of cognitive computing rapidly expanding and championed by IBM through its Watson project, diverse sectors are being disrupted beyond what was thought to be even remotely possible. But there is a drawback.
At the IBM World of Watson event held recently in Las Vegas, cognitive thinking-enabled innovation was on display.
Craig Holmes, IBM's Vice President, Cognitive Solutions for MEA region, offered ITWeb Africa a frank account on why Watson is still fairly unpopular among Africa's developers' circle, and how the company is attempting to introduce Watson, Bluemix and IBM cloud-based solutions to Africa and its developers.
Paul Adepoju: Why does it appear as if Watson is more popular here in the US and other developed countries than in Africa, even though the continent's innovation space is undergoing subtle disruption?
Craig Holmes: Innovation can happen at any level, some of the case studies we've seen are largely US-centric, but I think we are going to start seeing expansion of innovation in Africa and it can happen at many levels. Fundamental to our innovation is our investment in research so we have two of our research centers in South Africa and Kenya.
Topically we try and look at how we can take problems in Africa – food, water, road, electricity and education, and how we apply innovation in cognitive in those.
Paul Adepoju: How can African institutions benefit from the numerous Watson initiatives announced at World of Watson, especially the one that offers students and faculties free access to Bluemix?
Craig Holmes: We are a multinational company and our management has made several investments in Africa. Our head is interested a lot in Africa and has chosen Africa as legacy. Within two months of appointment, our head took the entire IBM board to Africa. Since then she has visited the continent five times in the past five years.
In addition to our research centers in Africa, we've donated a lot of our learning capabilities and software to universities and to schools in Africa. We are actively involved in career development in IT especially in South Africa where we are involved in many stages from testing all the way to development and analysis.
We are also working with several partners in Africa, including telecoms operators, in the area of Internet of Things (IoT) around agriculture and helping farmers. By position of the Weather Company, we are able to do a lot of weather prediction and couple that with an application to help farmers determine yields better and then link them to an ecosystem like the stock market and others that can provide basic information services.
Most of what we do in Africa is focused on mobile, mobile is the foundation of initiative in Africa and so telecommunication companies, governments, health and others are our major focus for engagement in Africa. We've done a lot in Kenya largely around the research center providing basic information services. Most of what we do in Africa is driven by mobile, mobile is the foundation.
In South Africa, we are doing a lot. Just six weeks ago, we announced that two of the scientists at the South African research lab have developed a bracelet that helps in identifying and ultimately recording tuberculosis. The bracelet itself is manufactured in such a way that it does not look like a medical bracelet so that the stigma of those wearing it is not there. And we are looking at what we can do with our analytics – look at the spread, communities we can impact and provide education around that.
During the Ebola crisis, we worked with some of the telecommunications companies in Sierra Leone using a data platform and providing education to the people.
Paul Adepoju: What is your opinion on the future of innovation in Africa?
Craig Holmes: It will exist in many levels. Innovation comes from the grassroots level. It is often said that innovation springs better when people have a need and we've seen a lot of innovation built based on our cloud technology and development platform (Bluemix) which is a subscription platform. You only pay when you publish the application. Essentially it's a free development environment.
There are now about 50 Watson APIs that developers can use. You've got the environment, you've got the program languages. We're seeing innovation happening at the entity of one. On the other hand you've got large financial institutions that are spread across Africa – banks in multiple countries looking at how they can use artificial intelligence or chatbox to education their staff, improve customer service through automation, and provide information. Innovation may not be happening at such a grand scale in Africa, but it is still happening.
Paul Adepoju: How do you plan to improve Watson adoption in Africa?
Craig Holmes: We've had about 16,000 students. We actually built a training program where we are working with a number of universities across Africa for the 9-month program where we take students through the basics of cloud which we think will fundamentally change the way application and workload are consumed, a number of our analytics platforms, and some of our social and mobile technologies. We put all of that into a 9-month training course.
We've seen several innovative examples of people using the APIs for analysis at call centers, it is being used for personality insights.
Paul Adepoju: How can an African developer get to use Watson?
Craig Holmes: Individual developers can use our development environment, Bluemix, which is very easy to use. Anybody with basic programming skills can use it. It contains the programming languages. You can get started now, it takes two minutes to register an account.
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