At the conference, which took place last week in Tel Aviv, Michelle Rhoda Unger, the general manager of cognitive solutions at IBM Europe, said "Ultimately, every organization must ask itself one and only one question: what is the business price of not knowing"
About 1,500 participants who came to IBM's Business Connect conference held about a week ago at the Tel Aviv Fair Center were introduced to the company's new technologies, centered on those of the cognitive systems. The professional discussion tracks at the conference, and the large solutions exhibition that accompanied it focused on the areas of digital marketing, security with the help of cognitive capabilities, development tools and development management, cloud infrastructures, analytical systems and cognitive systems.
Michelle Rhoda Unger, the General Manager of Cognitive Solutions at IBM, Europe, who was a keynote speaker at the plenary, stated that in an era where all organizations and companies in the market are working on digitization processes - those who will win the battle for the consumer will be those organizations that take advantage of digitization in order to offer new added value, using cognitive tools. According to her, "In the end, every organization must ask itself one and only question: what is the business price of not knowing".
The CEO of IBM, Rick Kaplan, who opened the conference, emphasized the development of the company's fields of activity in the four years since he took office. According to Kaplan, IBM continues to increase its traditional business in the fields of servers, software, system integration and services - while at the same time it is making substantial progress and a series of projects with clients in Israel, in the fields that IBM Global has defined as its future business pillars: cognitive computing and analytical analysis, cloud technologies, mobile and security.
Ataret Inabi Tabor, from IBM's research laboratory in Haifa, presented the Watson Tradeoff Analytic system to the plenary of the conference. In the demonstration, Inabi Tavor turned to the cognitive system in speaking the English language, and asked it for assistance in choosing a new car. The system asked to know what the criteria are that guide this choice from the point of view of Tabor grapes - and presented possible alternatives, while offering to go further into the details. The system is even able to recognize the user's mindset, and adapts its style of expression to this mindset. According to Inabi Tabor, in all areas of life it is rare to find a situation where a choice is made only based on one criterion, or in order to achieve a single goal. "Criteria are in conflict, and success in one criterion will come at the expense of another. Watson's system makes it possible to settle this conflict, in an orderly and reasoned process."
Naftali Gefen, director of the Watson field at IBM Israel, emphasized Watson's abilities to handle unstructured information and turn it into knowledge and pointed out that these abilities are now also available in the Hebrew language. IBM's knowledge discovery system, Watson Explorer, collects information from any textual information source open to it, in the organization or on the Internet in general, analyzes the information, identifies the mindset of those who upload it, and builds a detailed map of the various information entities and the factors involved in the processes of creating and handling them. The processes of change in organizations - transformation - rely on a better understanding of the information that is already available anyway. According to the data presented at the IBM conference, less than 12% of the information in organizations is currently available in a structured format, in systems that can be searched using traditional tools. The rest - texts, images, video, articles from external sources, data accumulated from sensors, devices and systems that serve the organization - are characterized by an unstructured format, and require handling with completely different tools. The one who, from IBM's point of view, is destined to drive this transformation, is Watson.
IBM also used the conference to recruit new developers in the fields of cyber security. The company's ever-expanding activity in this field, as well as its participation in the winning group in the tender to establish the National Cyber Defense Center of the State of Israel, lead IBM to recruit additional employees in the field - researchers, developers and professionals in the fields of application.
