Changed license on my Haskell NLP code and comments on IBM Watson AI system

When I added licensing information on the github repository for my Haskell NLP experiments I specified the AGPL v3 license. I just changed it to GPL v3 so now it can be used as a web service without affecting the rest of any system that you use it for. I also did some code cleanup this morning. In addition to the natural language processing code, this repository also contains some example SPARQL client code and my Open Calais client library that you might find useful.

Some news about IBM Watson: their developer web site now has more documentation and example code available without needing to register to become an IBM Watson Partner.

I am helping a long term customer use IBM Watson as a web service over the next several months so I registered as a partner and have been enjoying reading all of the documentation on training an instance for a specific application, the REST APIs, etc. Good stuff, and I think IBM may grow a huge business around Watson.

Comments

  1. Christian Jauvin2:55 PM

    Hi Mark,

    I'd very interested to know more about the current state of the Watson ecosystem, and what you intend to do with it (if you can share).

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mark Watson, author and consultant11:50 AM

    Hello Christian,

    I can't discuss what my customer is doing, but questions are fine about any general information about IBM Watson that can be answered with their public documentation.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Christian Jauvin12:18 PM

    Hi Mark,

    Thanks for the answer. I understand that you can't discuss specific aspects of the work you're doing with your client, but I was more interested in your general views about what is possible with IBM Watson (currently or eventually), how you think it is going to evolve, what it means for AI/NLP work in general (and especially for freelancers maybe), etc. The last time I looked (at the doc), it actually gave me the impression that it was a lot of fluff talk and vague promises, but not much substance (for the moment).

    ReplyDelete
  4. Mark Watson, author and consultant12:31 PM

    Hello Christian,

    I think that Watson is a very big deal for IBM, not fluff. I also think there is a place at the table for individuals: they want people to curate data and build on the Watson system. I know of no reason why as an individual you could not use Watson, but you might have to wait a while. This is non-authoritative: I think IBM is working on the 'Watson in the cloud' issues, and generally supporting a large number of users. I expect that the platform will continue evolving for many years - Watson is not the kind of product that is "done."

    For general AI/NLP work, there are a lot of good resources: NLTK, Stanford NLP library, OpenNLP, etc. I find myself doing NLP hacking on my own stuff when open source solutions don't really do what I need/want.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a w...
Read more

I am moving back to the Google platform, less excited by what Apple is offering

I have been been playing with the Apple Intelligence beta’s in iPadOS and macOS and while I like the direction Apple is heading I am getting more use from Google’s Gemini, both for general analysis of very large input contexts, as well as effective integration my content in Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. While I find the latest Pixel phone to be compelling, I will stick with Apple hardware since I don’t want to take the time to move my data and general workflow to a Pixel phone. The iPhone is the strongest lock-in that Apple has on me because of the time investment to change. The main reason I am feeling less interested in the Apple ecosystem and platform is that I believe that our present day work flows are intimately wrapped up with the effective use of LLMs, and it is crazy to limit oneself to just one or two vendors. I rely on running local models on Ollama, super fast APIs from Groq (I love Groq for running most of the better open weight models), and other APIs from Mist...
Read more