In AI, “Wild Ducks” Can Guide Us
The marketplace isn’t a jungle, but there are plenty of predators and prey. This is particularly true in information technology. Instead of claws and teeth, we have brain power as our weapon — and we use it to innovate for clients, navigate the vagaries of markets and overcome rivals.
So, here’s the conundrum. An enterprise needs the best and the brightest to succeed in a competitive environment. That requires a vast variety of talent, whether it’s the algorithm genius, the sales star or the canny strategist. How do you get them?
Although they’re important, the answers aren’t just better recruiting or compensation. Those are outputs of a bigger force — the commitment to diversity that produces and treasures wild ducks.
These are the people who think a bit differently, don’t follow the flock and challenge the way that we do things. They tend to be the people who truly drive innovation. In their thinking and outlook, they’re the most diverse of the diverse. They’re nurtured by a spirit of openness, unity but not uniformity.
In 1963, IBM Chairman Thomas Watson, Jr. explained what this meant. “Thinking things through is hard work,” he wrote, “and it sometimes seems safer to follow the crowd. That blind adherence to such group thinking is, in the long run, far more dangerous than independently thinking things through.”
Here are four IBM wild ducks — great examples of our commitment to diversity and AI.
Tanveer is an IBM Fellow and Chief Scientist at IBM Research. In 1997, Tanveer’s father was misdiagnosed with the wrong kind of stroke. That type of mistake, she discovered, is surprisingly common.
It triggered an idea for Tanveer. The relationship between visual recall and declarative memory led her to investigate whether computers could start seeing connections between images, opening up the possibility of making deductive observations.
As a result, she conceived Medical Sieve, which is now leading the way in interpretation of medical imaging and breakthroughs in heart disease and cancer diagnosis. Medical Sieve has also opened up the medical imaging market to IBM with five new products. Tanveer’s out-of-the-box thinking converted an idea into a product and changed clinical decision support with artificial intelligence.
You can watch a demo of the Medical Sieve Cognitive Assistant Application here.
Maryam is the “Cool Things Czar” at IBM. She’s part computer scientist, part user experience analyst, and part interface artist.
Maryam wanted a way of making artificial intelligence (AI) easily accessible to us “civilians.” She came up with TJBot, an easy way of putting IBM’s Watson AI technologies into a cardboard figure. This cute little robot can shine its light and wave its arm, and with Watson, it can be programmed to see, hear, and speak, translate languages and understand emotions. TJBots have been created all around the world for tasks ranging from reporting the weather and news to providing emotional comfort and conflict resolution to walking and driving a car!
At first glance, you may wonder how a paper robot could change the world. Think of it this way: if you can put powerful AI technology into a simple box, imagine these types of capabilities in your walls, in your furniture, or in the objects in your home. It’s no longer just smart phones — it’s the next generation of smart objects accessible for anyone to use.
Taking her passion for creating objects that empower and motivate people to learn about programming and making things with technology, Maryam has been looking beyond the realms of conventional computing to teach people about quantum computing and how to program quantum computers. She co-created Entanglion — https://entanglion.github.io — the world’s first open source quantum board game to expose players to several fundamental concepts in quantum computing.
Maryam demonstrates wild duck ideas.
In Bob Schultz’s ideal world, businesses would have the technology to find, hire and retain the talent they need to excel, and workers would have the resources to define their career goals and find the best company in which to pursue them.
Schultz, General Manager, IBM Talent Management Solutions, leads a team that is pursuing that ideal by driving the field of human resources into the cognitive era. He has helped develop and use IBM Watson Recruitment, which helps employers gain a fuller more unbiased view of applicants — giving applicants better insight into potential employers and recruiters a larger more diverse group of applicants.
He’s also taken cognitive recruiting to the next level with IBM Watson Career Coach, an app that helps employees answer questions like, “How can I get better at my job?” or “What do I need to do to transition to a different job?” by engaging Watson to analyze their experience and interests and recommend steps to take to move forward.
“Using artificial intelligence,” says Schultz, “with its ability to learn and reason, allows you to pull information out from across all your company’s systems and provide a much deeper understanding of employees and the factors that make them successful.”
Ellie is a “mainframe” computer software developer. Now, at first glance, you may think the big mainframe is a thing of the past. But Ellie is another wild duck who looks at things differently and works with the mainframe to define the future. She designs and develops innovative web applications for these computers — which are still the backbone of most banking, travel and retail services we use every day. In fact, if you bought something online or sent some money to a friend, your transaction has probably touched a mainframe — and Ellie may the person behind the way you interacted with it.
As an IBM Senior Inventor who holds five patents and has published 15 papers, she’s part of an invention development team and a patent mentor. She also organizes and participates in hackathons around the world. In the Amsterdam “Fishackathon,” she and a teammate took first prize with an app that quickly identifies illegal boats in marine protected areas and gathers critical data about the location of vessels.
Whether she’s using her skills to tackle complex problems in a hackathon or bringing together experienced and new-hire mainframe professionals, she challenges people to re-evaluate what they think they know.
Diversity of backgrounds, experience and thought are the secrets to innovation. And, if well managed, innovation leads to business success.
Tom Watson put it best: “You can make wild ducks tame, but you can never make tame ducks wild again. The duck who is tamed will never go anywhere any more. We are convinced that any business needs its wild ducks. And in IBM we try not to tame them.”
.
