India's First Cognitive Computing System Developed - Wipro's Holmes - India's Answer to IBM’s Watson

[Chanakya's_Chant]

Wipro’s Holmes will challenge & partner IBM’s Watson

Wipro has developed a cognitive computing system "Holmes" or 'heuristics and ontology-based learning machines and experiential systems'.​

BENGALURU: IBM's Watson is a cognitive computing system, one that behaves like our brain, learning through experiences, finding correlations, and remembering — and learning from — the outcomes.

Now, Wipro has developed a cognitive computing system, and guess what they call it — Holmes. It's also an abbreviation that expands into 'heuristics and ontology-based learning machines and experiential systems'. The expansion looks to have been an after-thought.

So, will Holmes compete with Watson? Or will it partner with Watson, as Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson did in the Arthur Conan Doyle stories? (Incidentally, IBM's Watson derives its name not from Doyle's character, but from IBM's founder and CEO between 1914 and 1956, Thomas John Watson).

Wipro CTO KR Sanjiv says it will be more partnership than competition. "We are working with Watson, we have people trained on Watson. Watson can address certain kinds of use cases, Holmes certain others. Watson does not, for instance, do visual learning (learning from images). We are building Holmes in a way that it will also do visual learning," he said.

Cognitive computing is among the hottest new trends in technology and many of the big IT companies are beginning to build platforms and solutions around it. Traditional computing has a unidirectional flow - if this happens, then it must do this; it tabulates and calculates based on pre-configured rules and programs.

But cognitive computing systems are able to process natural language interactions, they have reasoning capacities, and they learn from data that's fed into it, and from past experiences. What this allows is greater amount of automation, analytics, predictive capabilities and even self-healing of systems. Watson is now being used in multiple areas, predominantly healthcare, but also in fields like cooking.

"Cognitive systems have reached a point where they will make a big impact over the next 3-5 years. We are investing a lot into it," Sanjiv said.

Wipro has internally deployed the system in its help desk. Earlier, when employees logged in technical troubles, they would have to categorize the problem based on what they thought the underlying problem was. But 30% of those categorizations would be wrong, leading to delays in resolving the problem. Now, Wipro has fed in half a million of historical technical-trouble logs into Holmes, and the system itself now categorizes the problem based on its learning from the historical data. The employee no longer as to categorize. And the accuracy has improved dramatically.

Sanjiv said the company is planning to use it in lateral hiring. "We can automate much of the interview process, use AI (artificial intelligence) engines to understand the job description, the competencies and skills required, and have the system throw up appropriate questions to the candidate, may be in a recorded video interview," he said.

In retail, the system would be able to predict what promotion to run at a particular time (it could scan vast amounts of external data also to come to judgments). It could understand when a computer or power transformer would fail.

Holmes even has what are called deep learning algorithms that help to automatically take remedial steps when a system fails. "Holmes learns the solutions to problems, and when a problem occurs, it will apply those solutions," Sanjiv said.

Source:- Wipro’s Holmes will challenge & partner IBM’s Watson - The Times of India

 

[gau8av]

nice name

 

[Sam Manekshaw]

Good development.

 

[sree45]

Nice..

 

[Indo-guy]

Wipro’s Holmes will challenge & partner IBM’s Watson

Wipro has developed a cognitive computing system "Holmes" or 'heuristics and ontology-based learning machines and experiential systems'.​

BENGALURU: IBM's Watson is a cognitive computing system, one that behaves like our brain, learning through experiences, finding correlations, and remembering — and learning from — the outcomes.

Now, Wipro has developed a cognitive computing system, and guess what they call it — Holmes. It's also an abbreviation that expands into 'heuristics and ontology-based learning machines and experiential systems'. The expansion looks to have been an after-thought.

So, will Holmes compete with Watson? Or will it partner with Watson, as Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson did in the Arthur Conan Doyle stories? (Incidentally, IBM's Watson derives its name not from Doyle's character, but from IBM's founder and CEO between 1914 and 1956, Thomas John Watson).

Wipro CTO KR Sanjiv says it will be more partnership than competition. "We are working with Watson, we have people trained on Watson. Watson can address certain kinds of use cases, Holmes certain others. Watson does not, for instance, do visual learning (learning from images). We are building Holmes in a way that it will also do visual learning," he said.

Cognitive computing is among the hottest new trends in technology and many of the big IT companies are beginning to build platforms and solutions around it. Traditional computing has a unidirectional flow - if this happens, then it must do this; it tabulates and calculates based on pre-configured rules and programs.

But cognitive computing systems are able to process natural language interactions, they have reasoning capacities, and they learn from data that's fed into it, and from past experiences. What this allows is greater amount of automation, analytics, predictive capabilities and even self-healing of systems. Watson is now being used in multiple areas, predominantly healthcare, but also in fields like cooking.

"Cognitive systems have reached a point where they will make a big impact over the next 3-5 years. We are investing a lot into it," Sanjiv said.

Wipro has internally deployed the system in its help desk. Earlier, when employees logged in technical troubles, they would have to categorize the problem based on what they thought the underlying problem was. But 30% of those categorizations would be wrong, leading to delays in resolving the problem. Now, Wipro has fed in half a million of historical technical-trouble logs into Holmes, and the system itself now categorizes the problem based on its learning from the historical data. The employee no longer as to categorize. And the accuracy has improved dramatically.

Sanjiv said the company is planning to use it in lateral hiring. "We can automate much of the interview process, use AI (artificial intelligence) engines to understand the job description, the competencies and skills required, and have the system throw up appropriate questions to the candidate, may be in a recorded video interview," he said.

In retail, the system would be able to predict what promotion to run at a particular time (it could scan vast amounts of external data also to come to judgments). It could understand when a computer or power transformer would fail.

Holmes even has what are called deep learning algorithms that help to automatically take remedial steps when a system fails. "Holmes learns the solutions to problems, and when a problem occurs, it will apply those solutions," Sanjiv said.

Source:- Wipro’s Holmes will challenge & partner IBM’s Watson - The Times of India

Hope " Holmes" lives up to the name from legendary character from it derives ...

 

[Kinetic]

Cool. DRDO and DAE should buy few of them.

 

[Chanakya's_Chant]

Cool. DRDO and DAE should buy few of them.

It's just the first step but a significant one for India in the field of artificial intelligence - Wipro has internally deployed the system in its help desk enhancing efficiency of their help-desk system - We will have wait to see what it can do in case military applications and nuclear facilities automation and administration - a lot of research is still to be done.

BTW DRDO has its own Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR) - hope the GoI will invest in this wonderful computing system. I love their hexapod robot - they also developed India's first and only Internet Surveillance System - India's version of PRISM

 

[Echo_419]

It's just the first step but a significant one for India in the field of artificial intelligence - Wipro has internally deployed the system in its help desk enhancing efficiency of their help-desk system - We will have wait to see what it can do in case military applications and nuclear facilities automation and administration - a lot of research is still to be done.

BTW DRDO has its own Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR) - hope the GoI will invest in this wonderful computing system. I love their hexapod robot - they also developed India's first and only Internet Surveillance System - India's version of PRISM

The spider thing really looks cool & can you please explain how much important this system is

 

[Chanakya's_Chant]

The spider thing really looks cool & can you please explain how much important this system is

These form the building blocks/fundamentals of robotics. It is just an experimental project to start things off with - Hexapod robots be used to test biological theories about insect locomotion, motor control, and neurobiology.

Hexapod (robotics) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

They are used to study, experiment and test the methods locomotion in robotics - useful in the development of various ROV's like DRDO Daksh.

 

[Chanakya's_Chant]

Watson Goes Global: How IBM Research – India is Advancing Cognitive Computing - India's Contribution to IBM Watson & the Holmes Project​

By Ramesh Gopinath

IBM's Watson computer, Yorktown Heights, NY​

A lot of the development work on IBM’s Watson, the computer that defeated two former grand-champions on the TV quiz show Jeopardy, was done by a small team of scientists and engineers in New York, near IBM Research headquarters. But you may be surprised to learn that some of the essential components of IBM’s first commercial product based on the Watson technology came from IBM Research –India. As director of the India lab, I’m very proud of that achievement. The contributions from scientists in India demonstrate the value of having a global network of research laboratories.

IBM has 12 labs in 10 countries, with a total of about 3000+ professional researchers. Today (Oct. 8 in India), when we convene a Cognitive Systems Colloquium at the IBM Research–India offices in Bangalore and New Delhi, it will show once again the benefits of having a tightly integrated global research organization.

The colloquium, one of eight such gatherings being conducted this year at IBM’s global labs, is designed to support the company’s comprehensive vision of the future of computing, which we call the cognitive era. Watson is the first step into that era.

The Cognitive Systems Colloquium in IBM Research – India will explore the fascinating realm of “Biologically Inspired Cognitive Systems.” The colloquium will bring together leading academicians and thought leaders from the industry and government. Their domains include natural language processing (Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya – IIT Bangalore), perception engineering (Prof. Sumantra Dutta Roy – IIT Delhi), social listening (Prof. Vasudeva Varma, – IIT Hyderabad), Lovasz function (Prof. Chiranjib Bhattacharyya – IIS Bangalore), and spatio-temporal abstraction (Prof. Balaraman Ravindran – IIT Madras).

I myself am an example of the global and mobile nature of the tech industry’s talent pool. After growing up in India and receiving my undergraduate degree at the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, I got my PhD. at Rice University in Texas, and then worked for IBM Research in New York for nearly 20 years before becoming Director of the India Research operations late last year.

I arrived here in India after the Watson work had already commenced, but knew the whole story because of my involvement in it from the New York end at first. Since the lab was established with an office in Delhi in 1998, one of the focuses has been on developing technologies for IT service delivery—the many contact centers and business-process service centers that are located in countries all around the world.

We had scientists working on machine learning, natural language processing and text analytics–developing innovative solutions that helped IBM run its service delivery centers in India and elsewhere around the world. One such solution was a project called Voice of Customer Analytics (VOCA), a technology for deriving valuable business insights from textual portions of customer satisfaction surveys, call logs and other artifacts of service delivery interactions.

After Watson won on Jeopardy, people from the India lab got in touch with their counterparts in New York to adapt Watson technology to contact centers. At around the same time, back in New York, as part of a services innovation team study, I presented a new research initiative aimed at applying Watson-like technologies to services . This proposal was well-received by the executives and the assignment was taken up by the India lab. They commenced work on a project, code-named Holmes, for Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson’s partner-in-crime-fighting. To help get the India research team up to speed, our colleague, Eric Brown, who heads the Watson research project, invited several of them to New York to learn about the technologies by intermingling with his scientists.

The Holmes project started as a collaboration between teams from IBM’s Global Process Services business unit and Research with the goal of creating systems based on Watson technology for helping contact center agents respond to customer service queries faster and better. This necessitated the crafting of a different notion of questions and answers than the one employed on Jeopardy. Instead of posing answers and expecting responses in the form of a question, the Holmes technology had to be able to answer more open-ended questions. Example: “The battery of my iPhone is draining too fast. What do I do?”

The Holmes effort soon expanded in scope and size. It fed into work being done by the IBM Watson Solutions group, which was busy developing the first commercial product based on Watson. The product was released to the market in May 2013 as Watson Engagement Advisor. Enterprises would now be able to engage their customers better, faster, anywhere and anytime using automated self-assist solutions.

Technologies developed by India research lab were central to the new product. The India team enhanced the Watson technology for finding resolutions to complex customer issues, where the ‘answers’ can be steps, procedures, paragraphs or snippets of text. The agent-assist technology enabled contact center agents to quickly find answers to complex customer questions, e.g. for technical and product support issues. With automated self-assist systems, this enabled end-customers to directly interact with Watson using natural language queries and find resolutions to their issues.

We are currently working on adding a conversational natural language dialog capability to Watson systems that will enable Watson Engagement Advisor solutions to engage customers more deeply and, in future, recommend the best possible products, offerings and service options to them based on other advanced analytics technologies from IBM Research. Natural, intuitive interfaces like conversational dialog will be a crucial pillar of cognitive computing systems.

But that’s just the beginning of our work in cognitive systems. I expect the team here to play a major role in advancing Watson and Watson-like technologies in the months and years ahead. This is an opportunity for our scientists in India to make a mark globally, not just for IBM but for all of society.

Source:- Watson Goes Global: How IBM Research - India is Advancing Cognitive Computing « A Smarter Planet Blog A Smarter Planet Blog

 

[Chanakya's_Chant]

The spider thing really looks cool & can you please explain how much important this system is

 

[IND151]

Name is nice

 

[Echo_419]

View attachment 193512

Saw this yesterday also we need more Indian companies to develop these technologies here

 

[IND151]

Now, Wipro has developed a cognitive computing system, and guess what they call it — Holmes. It's also an abbreviation that expands into 'heuristics and ontology-based learning machines and experiential systems'. The expansion looks to have been an after-thought.

So, will Holmes compete with Watson? Or will it partner with Watson, as Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson did in the Arthur Conan Doyle stories? (Incidentally, IBM's Watson derives its name not from Doyle's character, but from IBM's founder and CEO between 1914 and 1956, Thomas John Watson).

Wipro CTO KR Sanjiv says it will be more partnership than competition."We are working with Watson, we have people trained on Watson. Watson can address certain kinds of use cases, Holmes certain others. Watson does not, for instance, do visual learning (learning from images). We are building Holmes in a way that it will also do visual learning," he said.

 

[Chanakya's_Chant]

Indian IT firms eye robotics, driverless cars for next round of growth

Employees walk along a corridor in the Infosys campus in the southern Indian city of Bangalore September 23, 2014.​

(Reuters) - After decades of low-margin work like server maintenance, India's information technology services firms are moving upscale in search of lucrative contracts for driverless cars and other advanced projects as online innovation changes clients' needs.

Companies from Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS.NS) to Wipro Ltd (WIPR.NS) are all joining Infosys Ltd (INFY.NS) in investing in new, high-end technology, industry watchers say. Earlier this week Infosys bought U.S. automation specialist Panaya Inc for $200 million.

Triggering change is a wave of invention allowing machines to talk to each other online, dubbed 'the Internet of things'. Customers are ramping up: from about 5 percent now, strategy advisor Offshore Insights estimates automation and artificial intelligence work will grow to 25 to 30 percent of an IT outsourcing market seen by the national industry association as worth $300 billion by 2020.

"We're in the midst of a new wave of software, and IT services companies really don't have a choice," said R. Ray Wang, principal analyst and founder of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research.

As well as deals, the prospect is spurring heavy investment. Third-largest IT services exporter Wipro is building computing systems designed to mimic human decision-making abilities, where machines can understand and react to what human beings say to them. HCL Technologies (HCLT.NS), meanwhile, is using robotics to do away with manual testing of hardware.

Though carrying higher profit margins, the new business lines are not as big-ticket as traditional large-scale outsourcing projects, meaning revenue may be reduced in the short term, analysts say.

Infosys and peers may also find themselves competing in some cases with global majors such as Google Inc (GOOGL.O), now developing artificial intelligence business and working on projects including self-driving cars.

But industry watchers see plenty of business openings for players like Tech Mahindra (TEML.NS). Its engineers are busy testing consoles for cars that can monitor driver fatigue and predict signs of heart attacks, as well as working on a technology for driverless cars.

"The larger point here is Internet of things," said KS Viswanathan, vice president of industry initiatives at the National Association of Software and Service Companies. "If you look at any automobile today, 25-30 percent of what goes in is electronics."

"Tech Mahindra will take (its technology) to its global clients...A Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) cannot suddenly change all cars to be software-driven like a Google car is, they have to work with what they have and use technology that fits."

Indian companies are looking to collaborate with startups to jointly develop solutions for clients and in some cases are also eyeing takeover opportunities to get access to skills needed to wins these contracts, said industry officials.

"The catchwords today are digital, analytics, robotics," CP Gurnani, chief executive of Tech Mahindra said. "It is a small part of business, we are still not at the inflection point. But we are laying down the roadmap."

(Editing by Sumeet Chatterjee and Kenneth Maxwell)

Source:- Indian IT firms eye robotics, driverless cars for next round of growth | Reuters