Cognitive Computing and Knowledge Management: Sparking Innovation
Enter Cognitive Computing
Cognitive computing is going to bring us another step closer to solving some of these problems. What is cognitive computing? Last year I brought together a team of 14 or 15 people to try to define it before marketplace hype completely screwed up any idea of what it was. I don't know if we're succeeding or not.
What are the problems that cognitive computing attacks? They're the ones that we have left on the table because we can't put them into neat rows and columns. They're ambiguous. They're unpredictable. They're very human. There's a lot of conflicting data. There's no right and wrong, just best, better, and not such a good idea but maybe. This data requires exploration not searching. You just have to keep poking at it and shifting things around.
When I'm at the beginning of a project, I find myself jotting down ideas and then arranging them on a large table because sometimes they fit together one way and sometimes they fit together another. You need to uncover patterns and surprises, and computers are very good at this because they don't get embarrassed by wrong ideas. Although they all have the biases that they get from their programmers, their biases are different from yours.
The situation is shifting as well. As we learn more, we change our focus and our goals. We go back and ask the same question that we often do, but we do so hoping for different results because we've already learned that stuff is not so easy in today's systems. If you go to Google and ask the same question, you're not always going to get the same answers, but you'll get similar answers. But if you were looking for pictures of Java because you're planning your vacation today and two months from now you want flights, the system won't know your progress and your decisions.
The Value of Context
How do we make a cognitive system into a partner so that it keeps track of who we are and what we want to know at this time? It gives best answers based on who you are, where you are, what you know, what you want to know, and when you want to know it. It is very individually focused. Its aim is problem-solving beyond information gathering. It gives recommendations based on who you are. I want to give you a couple of examples because context, we have found, is one of the key differentiators of a cognitive system.
In 2011, IBM designed a computer named "Watson" that won Jeopardy against two human champions. That was the beginning of cognitive computing. (You can see it on
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Puhs2LuO3Zc).
For me, as a person who has been in the chaotic world of search and text analytics all my life, it was a validation that the kinds of things that we do--the search index as opposed to the database--were actually really useful for very complex problem-solving. That was the beginning.
For another example, think about patient care. The emphasis on who, what, where, and when you are is one of the differentiators for cognitive computing. We all need slightly different slants on the same question. Let's say we have a patient who has a disease. We know his genetic makeup, his age, his history of smoking, that he has certain allergies, etc. We also know where he is, what kind of access he has to medical care. We also have access to enormous amounts of information especially in health care and possible treatments and confidence scores. How does this change health care, because this is life and death?
Today, in standard health care, if you have a disease, or a particular kind of tumor, there are treatment guidelines. It doesn't matter if you're black, white, female, male, young, or old. That's how you treat them. That's not the way it needs to work. Instead, imagine you have all that information--more information than any doctor can amass in his head--and you've ingested it and you can start to match that person as a query, against that information and all of the applicable drugsí side effects and what's known from clinical trials. You come up with 2 or 3 treatments. Maybe the system says, "Have you considered that if you did this test we would have more confidence in recommending?" It's a dialogue now. It's a dialogue that supports the doctor and the patient in their decision on a treatment and that's the kind of medical care I want. That's another kind of context.
Suppose you're an investor. In that case the context is for the portfolio, the personality. Are you conservative? Are you a risk-taker? How old are you? Do you want a lot of data or do you just want to be told what to invest in? Are you an influencer? How old are you? What's your previous investment history? What are the market trends? What is your investment strategy?
All of those things need to be taken into account. That's what human investment advisors do, but they're not all-knowing. Starting with the evidence, the information, and then the ability to make a better judgement instead of a gut, intuitive decision is a very good idea--especially if it's your money.
Consider a company's customer matrix. They have a sales application. It sits on top of sales force. They do a lot of this. They look at who the sales person is. They look at who the manager is, who the strategist is for the company. They give different answers, but the thing that I'm fascinated by is that they also have ingested your business goals and your business strategy. They will make recommendations according to the usefulness of approaching one prospect or another for acquisition, or sales, or another department based on how a positive outcome will influence the business of the entire company as opposed to just that sales person's commissions. It's not a bad idea.
Another example is an expert system. I'm just showing you that this can be very familiar. These systems do the usual text analytics things. They extract sentiment. One example is about a cat that was a popular resident one of the train stations. But they extract things like sadness and give people who are writing news, for instance, a very good idea by comparing the number of hits, number of readers, and number of Tweets, etc., against the kinds of extractions they've done already in order to understand better what readers are looking for. This is kind of a building block and the context is this particular event.
Click here to see Sue Feldman's take on: "What is Cognitive Computing?" Which we've made into a separate article.
Elements of Innovation
What are the elements of innovation? People, collaboration tools, access tools, information of different types, and a work environment that is designed for cross-fertilization.
What kills innovation? Lack of organizational support, party-line thinking, no time to think, too-rigid innovation systems, lack of encouragement of innovation, poor or limited information and information access, and of course, information overload. We want lots of information but we don't want too much. That's a tall order for knowledge management.
Re-imagining KM
Can we re-imagine knowledge management? What can we do to give us a sort of informed serendipity? How do we do this? Cognitive computing can help with this, but there are some changes we need to make--not just in our systems and our tools, but also in our thinking. To bring us back to that DNA metaphor, we need to get away from structures in some cases. They're useful, but not only do we need to capture information and conserve it, we also need to cut it loose. We need to loosen our grip on the information bits that are attached to those taxonomies, that are contained on those cells of the databases, and that are in the document and the text analytics systems categorized to within an inch of their lives.
Let them loose. Let them float around, bump into each other, and give innovators the opportunity to create their own information soup, if you will, to explore without forcing them into the structures that we have created. Because what they want to do is to find the unexpected by creating schemas and taxonomies we are giving them what we expect in terms of how information works. This is a tall order for knowledge management, and I leave it with you as a challenge and a question.