What to do after winning Jeopardy against the world’s best
players? Open a food truck, of
course! Yes, that Watson is now running a food truck, and apparently it creates
some truly
delicious dishes! Confused? Don’t be.
The intelligence behind the Watson engine that successfully answered
hundreds of randomized Jeopardy questions is now the creative engine behind a
gourmet food truck. IBM is endeavoring
to show that predictive analytics have uses in the most unusual of places!
As with most predictive analytics, there is still an
important role for humans to play in providing balance, judgment and
expertise. Watson does the data-crunching heavy lifting to find
interesting and appealing flavor combinations, faster (better?) than human
beings can do on their own, and then trained chefs implement the Watson
directions.
This hybrid approach should have a familiar ring to it. Let the software do the hard, data-intensive
number-crunching and then marry that output with human skill and finesse. It’s a winning combination and one that we
employ here at Valora every day. We utilize
our analytics, indexing, and rules platform, PowerHouse, to organize, catalog
and find relationships in content for us and then we add the human skill, the
expertise, to refine the output and do custom things for specific
projects.
Here’s an example: We
run 50,000 emails and attachments through PowerHouse, which quickly finds well
over 150 attributes about each item.
Then we ask PH to find important relationships and insights, such as
trend data or topic clusters. From
there, we adapt the rules programming to customize the output so it yields
middle initials, or zip + 4, or the top 3 issues per document, or whatever it
is that any particular customer needs.
Load it up to BlackCat for easy, online review (often by the client’s workforce)
and we’re done. Predictive analytics
mastery!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think pork belly moussaka sounds
amazing!
