IBM Turns Up Heat Under Competition in Artificial Intelligence
November 24 2015 - 06:29AM
Dow Jones News
By Robert McMillan
Programmers of artificial intelligence software got a new tool
to work with Monday, when International Business Machines Corp.
announced a proprietary program known as System ML would be freely
available to share and modify through the Apache Software
Foundation.
The letters ML stand for " machine learning," a hot technology
in Silicon Valley that enables computers to find common patterns in
large amounts of data. Machine learning has been used to teach
computers tasks such as predicting phrases entered into search
engines, recognizing faces in photos and detecting unusual moves in
stock prices.
IBM is the third company this year to make available proprietary
machine-learning technology under an open-source license. Facebook
Inc. in February released portions of its Torch software, while
Alphabet Inc.'s Google division earlier this month open-sourced
parts of its TensorFlow system.
IBM Vice President of Development Rob Thomas said System ML had
gained preliminary acceptance by Apache, a respected open-source
organization that manages more than 150 projects. Adoption by
Apache was the first step, he hoped, toward System ML's widespread
adoption.
"It's an endorsement of sorts that says, 'This has value,'" Mr.
Thomas said.
System ML, which was first developed at IBM's Almaden research
lab nearly a decade ago, could make it easier for developers to
create customized machine-learning software, Mr. Thomas said. It
could help a bank, for example, program risk modeling software that
would provide early warnings of fraudulent activity. The current
version is intended to work with software known as Spark, another
Apache project that helps process large amounts of data as it
arrives from continuous sources such as smartphones or fitness
trackers.
"It's a pretty early-stage project, but it's pretty promising,"
said Dong-Bang "DB" Tsai, a senior research engineer at Netflix
Inc. and Spark developer. He said System ML could make it easier
for Netflix to improve its recommendation engine, which uses
machine learning to determine which movies a given customer may
want to see over, say, Thanksgiving weekend.
IBM decided to open System ML's source code through the Apache
Foundation to attract a wider community of programmers and
accelerate its development. Mr. Thomas said.
"It's about speed and innovation," he said. "Right now, my
[research and development] is limited to my R&D budget, unless
we're doing work in open source."
But IBM--like Facebook, Google and others--has another reason to
open-source its machine learning code. The move helps it recruit
new AI experts, and these days, AI talent is in great demand.
The release of System ML could give IBM an edge against
companies including Apple Inc., which hasn't open-sourced its
artificial intelligence software, said Brandon Ballinger, a former
Google AI engineer who is now working with the University of
California, San Francisco, on cardiology research.
Many of the world's top AI experts come from academia, and
academics are active users of open-source software, Mr. Ballinger
pointed out. "If you're a holdout, like Apple, you're simply not
going to attract the best people."
Write to Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 24, 2015 06:14 ET (11:14 GMT)
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