IBM Watson, IoT and how it can help Agriculture in India

Lakshmi Rajan — Sat, 02 Sep 2017 12:24:51 +0000

Convergence of several technologies has made the Internet of Things a reality now in various fields including agriculture. India is predominantly an agrarian society with around 60% of population involved in farming. Of late, agriculture has also been widely reported and is a topic of concern for the hardship the farming community faces due to various reasons. In our continuing article on IBM Watson and IoT, let’s see how IBM Watson can help the agriculture in India. IBM’s India research lab has realized that by combining IoT data with cognitive computing, businesses can extract valuable insights to improve the farming scenario and aid the farmers. The lab is looking at ways of using its Watson cognitive technology to help farmers determine potential crop yields and protect against pests, an effort that could increase the use of such data in farmer loans and insurance. Smart farming is a concept widely gaining momentum in global agricultural business making use of wide amounted of data right from weather, water and soil at the disposal. For the Indian lab of IBM Watson, agri-business is one of the three industries it focuses on in India. The technology — part of a solution called Precision Agriculture — involves the use of a few strategically placed sensors and remote sensing data from satellites to answer questions about the state of the soil, moisture content, weather data and susceptibility to pests. “Blanketing a farm with sensors is extremely expensive and hard to manage. But data from a small amount of local sensors and data from satellites can be married using cognitive technologies — a process called cognitive fusion. We can answer those questions in a cost-effective way,” Sriram Raghavan, director of India Research Labs was quoted by ET. “Agri-businesses have the ability to invest in technology and have an interest in increasing productivity even if the farms are run by individual farmers. The other model is to look at financial institutions,” Raghavan said. “We have seen a lot of issues with agri insurance and credit. And while there are definitely non-technology issues to be solved, but there is an opportunity for technology to help provide better visibility to financial institutions.” “With the technology, the financial products they issue in the agri space do not have to be driven just by the credit history of a farmer, which may not be a viable model, but can be driven by knowledge of the farm and focus on health on the farm. This will increase risk awareness.” ]]>

IBM Watson Conversation: Unlocking goldmine of unstructured information

Lakshmi Rajan — Wed, 22 Feb 2017 15:03:01 +0000

Back in 2011, IBM created a flutter by debuting IBM Watson on the TV show Jeopardy and enthralled the public where the artificial intelligence defeated Jeopardy’s all time champions, not one but two. Since then much water has flown in the AI space and the technology has got into the mainstream consumer technology with companies like Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft focusing on the AI to ease the consumer interactions on mobile devices to execute simple daily tasks. But unfettered, IBM is focusing on IBM Watson for larger picture that would ease, benefit and enrich the development of the society, simplify complicated challenges and find solutions for complex real world problems. IBM Watson is active now in areas like cancer diagnosis/treatment, traffic accident prevention, and tax reporting. I came across an article in Forbes which mentions “Manipal Hospitals in India adopted Watson for Oncology as a tool to support oncologists in making high-quality, evidence-based decisions for their patients. This study is helping reinforce the value of Watson to support clinical practice.” Not, just diagnosing ailments, IBM Watson might be your personal Chartered accountant when you next walk into a accountancy firm. H&R Block an American tax preparation company whose operations spread in various countries including Brazil and India have roped in IBM Watson, the idea is to apply the power of cognitive computing in the tax prep process.

Why IBM Watson ?

In case you are yet to figure out what is IBM Watson, take few minutes to go through the video below. The new service is available on IBM Bluemix where developers can build and train a basic system at no cost. https://youtu.be/_Xcmh1LQB9I

What is IBM Watson Conversation?

The Watson program began with Watson Dialog which enables a developer to automate branching conversations between a user and your application. While this was a good starting point, IBM soon realized there are immense possibilities by tapping into various chatters that happens in the world. The IBM Natural Language Classifier was the next progression which understood the language of short texts and made predictions about how to handle them. Then came the IBM Watson Conversation, which was able to absorb, sieve, identify and collate information from the numerous chatters happening around. IBM Watson can dig into terabytes of information and does not need to be spoon fed with tabulated fields of contents. The natural language learning intelligence can talk like a human mind and sieve the relevant data from a natural conversation type of information. This opens up an immense potential for developers in creating friendlier and ‘intelligent’ chatbots.

IBM Watson Conversation Chatbots

Chatbots are in rage now and they have much practical implications. What makes a good chatbots though is the range of questions it can tackle effectively in a less automated ‘feel’ to it. Effectively the virtual agents or chatbots are ‘fed’ data and trained to answer questions frequently asked by end users and thus automating a variety of customer interactions of an organization. With the Bluemix services based on IBM Watson, it is now possible to automate domains that were not possible to automate before. In particular, the Conversation service allows you to create natural dialogs using virtual agents and bots, reducing the pressure on customer service teams. This is made possible by combining a series of cognitive techniques: defining intents and entities and crafting dialog to simulate conversation, all in one integrated service.

What can you do with Conversation?

Watson Conversation offers a clean and simple user interface that does not require any coding or a deep understanding of machine language providing developers a way to easily build and train a bot – from simple, narrowly focused tools to sophisticated, full-blown virtual agents.

Build Facebook, Twitter, Slack and other messaging and social network platform bots that let users interact instantly
Add a chatbot to your website that can respond to frequently asked questions from customers
Allow customers to control your mobile app using natural language virtual agents