At IBM’s Think conference, the firm announced its advances in artificial intelligence. Hybrid cloud and quantum computing were also highlighted. The objective of these innovations is to help IBM’s clients and partners accelerate their digital transformation or improve their strategy. IBM Watson Assistant, Cloud Pak for data, CodeNet, Watson Orchestrale and Qiskit Runtime, five of the group’s major announcements.
Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM expressed the willingness of the brand, to offer innovations in cloud, quantum computing and artificial intelligence:
“We will look back at this year and the previous one as the time when the world entered the digital century head on. Just as we electrified factories and machines in the last century, we will use the hybrid cloud to infuse AI into 21st century software and systems. And one thing is certain: it’s a future that must be built on a foundation of deep collaboration of all players in the digital sphere. No one understands this better than IBM, and it’s one of the reasons we’re increasing investments in our partner ecosystem. Also at Think 2021, we’re unveiling our latest innovations in hybrid cloud and AI – the technologies that are critical components of a new architecture for business.”
Of the announcements made at the conference, below are the five that resonated the most: IBM Watson Assistant, Cloud Pak for data, CodeNet, Watson Orchestrale and Qiskit Runtime.
IBM Watson Assistant: Helping those affected by COVID-19
In a collaboration with CVS Health, a company specializing in health services, the IBM Watson Assistant solution was developed. This customer service platform leverages IBM Public Cloud, artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) in the critical workflow of a customer care telephone system.
For example, CVS Health used this tool to answer a variety of questions about COVID-19, including all aspects of testing, vaccines, and symptoms. With this program, patients get an answer to any basic question about the virus, leaving the human operators to handle the more technical cases. As government measures evolved, the system updated and the virtual money personalized answers based on vaccination status in all 50 states.
Cloud Pak for data: automating the way customers access data
Using AI, Cloud Pak for data has been given a new feature that allows people to get much faster and cheaper responses to the queries they distribute. This is made possible by AutoSQL, which automates the way users access, integrate and manage data without ever having to move it.
With the launch of AutoSQL, the goal is to solve one of the most critical problems users face when trying to reduce the complexity of curating data for AI. IBM Cloud Park fot Data can work seamlessly in any hybrid multi-cloud (private cloud, on-premises, public cloud) environment. The intelligent data framework will automate complex data management tasks using AI.
CodeNet: Understanding and Translating Code with AI
The CodeNet project launched by IBM Research consists of leveraging a large-scale open source dataset. 14 million code samples, 500 million lines of code and 55 programming languages are being used to enable the developed AI to understand and translate the code.
CodeNet aims to address three main code use cases: code similarity (identifying overlaps and similarities between different codes), code constraints (customizing constraints to a developer’s specific needs and parameters) and code search (automatically translating one code into another, including legacy languages like COBOL).
Watson Orchestrale: helping professionals automate their work
Watson Orchestrale’s goal is to improve the personal productivity of all professionals in sales, human resources, operations, etc. This interactive AI capability requires little computer skills to use and provides the user with tools such as Slack, Salesforce, SAP, Workday or natural language emails.
Watson Orchestrale’s AI engine, developed by IBM Research, automatically selects and sequences the pre-packaged skills needed to perform a task. At the same time, the platform ensures that the user can connect to applications, data and history related to that task. This tool is expected to be available sometime in 2021.
Qiskit Runtime: accelerating quantum circuit processing
To make it easier for developers to use quantum software, IBM is launching Qiskit Runtime. Hosted in the hybrid cloud, the software runs most of its code there instead of on the user’s computer. The platform aims to increase the speed of quantum circuits by 120 times. It allows quantum systems to perform complex calculations such as financial risk analysis or chemical modeling.
While such tasks usually take several weeks to complete, IBM claims that they can be done in a matter of hours with Qiskit Runtime. The brand illustrated this with the example of a test on the lithium hydride (LiH) molecule, which was modelled in 9 hours, whereas under normal circumstances it would have taken 45 days. The application was designed to make quantum computing accessible to as many developers as possible.
Translated from Conférence Think 2021 de IBM : des innovations dans le cloud hybride et l’intelligence artificielle
