Media Dojo

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Given the latest results from the Watson’s performance on Jeopardy last night, it would seem that strong AI claims that computers can master natural language are being fulfilled at last.

Therefore, congratulations are due IBM for enabling a machine to rise above imbecility toward having a decent shot at becoming a moron.

Watson’s mastery of natural language problems arises from a very impressive mix of hardware and software. According to HPCwire, Watson is comprised of 90 Power 750 servers, 16 TB of memory and 4 TB of disk storage. The 360 Power7 chips that make up Watson’s brain represent IBM’s best microprocessor technology. Each Power7 is capable of over 500 GB/second of aggregate bandwidth and Watson has 2,880 cores at its disposal.

But the real fuel for this Ferrari comes in the form of a software system called DeepQA, which analyzes all the colloquialisms and relationships among phrases and facts that make up a Jeopardy game. It does so by dynamically correlating in real-time all of the “as-is” information sources out there (dictionaries, encyclopedias, books, thesaurus, newspaper clips etc.) that can be used to statistically analyze a Jeopardy problem.

I don’t want to cast aspersions on IBM for this very impressive technical feat. IBM wants to sell Power 750 servers into the enterprise analytics market. Jeopardy is probably the best natural language product placement opportunity out there. So kudos for shrewd marketing.

But just as we have no issue with a bulldozer or steam shovel besting our ability to dig ditches, we should avoid either paranoia or far worse, ecstatic mysticism over the fact that Watson is probably the best Jeopardy player that ever existed.

Therein lies why Watson is effectively a moron—albeit a very smart one. The Cretan Epimenides’ timeless statement that “all Cretans are liars and this statement is true” introduced us to the fact that you can have a correct statement in natural language that is also a logical paradox. Kurt Godel took it further in mathematics with his Incompleteness Theorem, which said “all consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions”. Translated, Godel means that you can make mathematic statements (what is stated and how it’s proved) that can be complete (covers all known phenomena) but will have inconsistencies (exceptions). Or you can make mathematic statements that are logically consistent (no exceptions) but are not complete (only a small slice of phenomena). But you cannot have BOTH completeness and consistency.

Watson wins at Jeopardy because according to the rules that define a legitimate English language Jeopardy proposition (logical consistency), the machine’s algorithms and processing power will now beat human opponents—probably time and again. I don’t see a John Henry of Jeopardy out there who will beat Watson, then lay down his buzzer and die.

But I also believe that civilization will somehow endure. I’m equally confident that Watson will become a very useful tool for the enterprise analytics market as well as other logically consistent, small universes.

That said, we currently have strong AI proponents like Ray Kurzweil out there doing movie tours and selling the idea of a digital Rapture for true believing Singularitarians. The drum being pounded talks of exponential growth of processing cycles somehow leading to a direct symbiosis between man and machine to the point of being able to upload one’s mind into a database. Watson’s Jeopardy performance will no doubt be cited as a quickening step toward the fabled Singularity. A news flash Ray: given the fact that Watson is about as socially aware as a mollusk, you’ll die of old age long before biology makes true communion with silicon. If Watson’s heirs have any sense, they’ll view a lot of those uploaded human minds as pathogenic and take appropriate action.

Because of the reality and imminency of death, human beings make Art. The late poet Cid Corman taught me that most misunderstandings of Shakespeare arise from trying to impose “truths” or “meaning” where none were intended. Shakespeare’s work does NOT offer solutions to our problems, It offers us realizations of the human predicament because at certain levels, we are ALL Hamlets and Lears and Macbeths and Othellos, Antonies and Cleopatras, Timons and Troiluses. We connect with these characters because we have shards of them within us. We go to the theatre, the cinema, the concert or we go online to feel ourselves made better by experiencing consistent though incomplete realizations (thanks Kurt) of stories which fire us to explore what it means to be alive and human.

Intelligence isn’t spitting out a solution to a fucking Jeopardy problem. It’s about how you make meaning out of the limited time you got.

Of course I’m biased, but GigaOm puts on by far the best gathering of the cloud computing industry in June with Structure. All the C-level players who count will  be there: AWS, Salesforce.com, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Rackspace, Cisco, AT&T, the list goes on.

I’ve got my 15min of fame on the second day at an “Ask the Analyst” session. Basically, it’s going to be the cloud equivalent of the bullring experience from high school football. For those of you who didn’t play, you get in the middle of a circle of players, coach nods at someone, and they charge at you from any direction to try to knock you on your butt. And as the good book says, it is truly better to give than to receive.

Given that it’s a hard-core tech-savvy audience in San Francisco, I expect some very hard hitters coming my way. Keeps one on their toes.

Equally important to my analyst duties, I’ll be prowling the guest list of behemoths, start-ups and VCs on behalf of my major media client. Cloud is fundamental to a HUGE transformation they’re funding with some serious dosh. I’ll be collecting contacts for a corporate version of “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette” depending on the particular execs.

Should be fun.

Post Structure there will be a lot more interviews on site plus some of initial thoughts from the ongoing research I’m doing for GigaOm Pro on the consumer media business in the cloud. This is bullring on steroids.

Next week on 27 May, I’ll be talking about media cloud computing at a bootcamp for visual journalists. The event will take place in Langley, WA—about a hour and change north of Seattle. Some top notch talent in the form of Brian Storm from Media Storm, Tom Kennedy ex-Washington Post multimedia director and now head of Kennedy Multimedia, as well as Paige West, Director of the Interactive Studio at MSNBC, will be joined by a clutch of other visual journalism practitioners to spend a day laying out the planets and then another day of hands-on multimedia production via Media Storm.

My role as the cloud guy will be to convince people to break the bias that success revolves around having the best stories on a given web site. Creating content as a function of a destination runs into the wall of the mobile, social web—just ask Yahoo! which is trying for the umpteenth time to get people to come to its site for their content. They just bought Associated Content, which has many observers shaking their heads. Content, visual or not, acts more like software to feed devices and use cases. Context rules. Content ain’t the king it used to be.

I’m beating the drum that visual storytelling will find its way into applications and services, things that will be found on computing clouds more than cable head ends or media servers. Story becoming software is a regular meme for me, one which I’ve taken to numerous audiences to present and have tempered by questions. I’m looking forward to it.

There’s still time for registering. I hope to see you there.

Mike Dano, Managing Editor of FierceMarkets Wireless Group, interviewed me and others about mobile cloud computing. It’s a good overview of the current state of play.

http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/cloud-computing-quiet-requirement-mobile/2010-05-04

Flying out tomorrow for Osaka and Kyoto. Kids are old enough now to where they need to see cousins and get in touch with their other culture.

In the meantime, I’ve started the next piece of research, which will look at how we build APIs into branded content franchises and where the cloud might fit in. I spent the morning with Brent Friedman, founder of Electric Farm Entertainment. His latest transmedia series Valemont has been running live on MTV for some months now. It’s pulled in serious backing through Verizon and others. I can’t go into a lot of the data stats just yet but the upshot is that the Internet and, by extension, the cloud have become the ultimate IP incubators for storytelling.

We did a 2hr brain dump for notes for my flight. Should get a shorter piece out during the May/June timeframe. Contact me if you’ve got any pointers related to transmedia and the cloud.

Next month will see me in San Francisco to address a hard-core geek audience at the Emerging Communications Conference about what it might mean to build an API into a branded content or marketing franchise. Some of the first baby steps are being taken by information publishers like Guardian and NPR. Developers can bake an app that executes an API call to permitted content feeds as part of its feature set. I think it’s going to get a hell of a lot more interesting in an iPad world. Here’s the basic gist:

STORY AS SOFTWARE: Transmedia storytelling is hot in both Hollywood and Madison Avenue. The success of franchises such as Heroes, Afterworld, and Valemont has proven the value of extending narrative across many platforms to create multiple doorways for end-users to enter and engage with a story. The next stage of transmedia storytelling will pair narrative extensions with functionality extensions to open up completely new user experiences and business models for producers, distributors and marketers. Recent deals between content providers like Bravo with location-based players like Foursquare, in which Bravo branded content is made part of the Foursquare experience is indicative of a larger trend of integrating function with media experiences. This talk will explore some of the examples of new marriages of form and function in media, with special emphasis on the operational and technology challenges needed to pull it off. Drill downs will focus on mobile augmented reality, handling the data challenge, as well as integrating audience input into the evolution of a branded content franchise. For developers, there is no better time to think about what it means to build an API into a content franchise.

Comcast is probably starting to think that I’ve gone over to the dark side and become a spammer. I’ve been pushing through lots of copies (at 9mb a crack) of the full e-book to about 300+ media and marketing leaders on the hit list. These are people with whom I’ve had direct contact from my days at Economist Intelligence Unit, eMarketer, and the Monaco Media Forum. So far so good…crisp feedback and interest in pursuing projects. I’ve also opened things up more. There’s a separate tab above that takes you to a download link for domestic users. If you’re of European persuasion, my friend Monty Metzger in Germany has a download link to the paper on his blog where you can pull the whole thing.

One of the potential projects to come out of this paper will be a scenario planning event during this summer on Whidbey Island. No keynotes, no panels, no presos, just 50-70 people from across technology, media and marketing who collectively influence > $1 billion in decisions. We’re going to take over a town for 2 days to roll up the sleeves and start populating the first cross industry database of future expectations about cloud computing and media/marketing 2020. I’m still debating the level of Mad Max vibe that needs to be baked into the event….any volunteers to be the Toecutter?

I’m in London and Munich over the next couple of weeks. London is a special pleasure as my wife and I lived here for four years during the early 90s. Our daughter was born in St. Marys hospital in Paddington.

Things are very busy now…aside from the Mobile Augmented Reality work done for GigaOm Pro, this coming Monday (18 Jan), I’m scheduled for 90min in front of the 25 or so managing directors of Associated Northcliffe Digital to talk about secular shifts in consumer media markets caused by convergence. AND is the largest premium website publisher in the UK, with about 1/3 of the adult population checking in as uniques each month. It’s been a hell of a task to work on a preso up to that level. I appreciate the confidence of Richard Titus and Dan Taylor to let a humble researcher comme moi arrive at the start of a 2 day executive away meeting to stir up the pot. After the presentation, I’ll re-work some of the material for posting here.

I’m also finishing off the Media Dojo Cloud Computing for Media opus during this week in London. It will weigh in about 65-70 pages and will include four scenarios about the media world in 2020 plus a technical overview of cloud computing specifically targeted to media and marketing professionals. I’m working with Laura Urban Perry, a Seattle-based designer to insure that the visual layout is congruent with what I hope to say. That damn Avatar movie has raised the bar for all of us.

Of course, no trip to London would be complete without dropping in on my old martial art training buddies. So if I get a fetching shiner above or below an eye, I’ll be sure to post a picture.

Following London will be Deutschland…my first time. I’m going to Munich to attend the DLD Conference. The speaker line up is world class and it’s got a similar vibe as the Monaco Media Forum in being invitation-only, small crowd, low key and high powered—just the way I like it.

Expect some posts and interviews over the coming days as these events fall into line…for right now, however, I’m going to crack a beer and watch Hulu…9+ hours in British Airways can do that to a person.

It’s been crazy the last few months of 2009 in terms of travel and projects.

Monaco Media Forum was a huge success, yet one that sucked up massive amounts of bandwidth before and during the event. Superb speakers and networking. I don’t know if I’m cut out to be an editorial programmer in the long run but having the experience of doing it at this level of intensity was great. Hopefully, I’ll be able to announce participation to help program a major event on emerging media economies over the next few weeks. Stay tuned.

After Europe, I took a DEEP dive into mobile augmented reality for GigaOm Pro. That one should publish later this month or after the beginning of the year. I’m going to start 2010 with a series of posts about mobile AR here at Media Dojo and on Mediabizbloggers, which is part of Jack Myers site. I’ve already done my first post there. Also during November/December, I pitched and scored a presentation gig in the olde country for one of the UK’s largest digital publishers. It’s a small heavy hitting audience of 25 managing directors with serious budgets and a bad case of WTF is going to happen in media and marketing during 2010. We’ve got 90min together so it’s not a quick and dirty PPT but real deal analysis of media’s flip to a mass customized business and what that means.

Of course, there’s the ever pressing Media Dojo Guide to Cloud Computing for Media and Marketing, which will publish near the end of January 2010 or early February.

And then, to top it off, I’ve entered the Pacific NorthWest Indoor Rowing championships for January 30, which means about 40,000+ meters on the indoor rower each week.

In order to balance out all that industriousness, I’ve penciled in a proper 2 day drunk during February to coincide with the Superbowl.

It’s my fourth year going to Monte Carlo for the Monaco Media Forum. The MMF is an invitation-only get together of about 350 digierati from the media and marketing worlds. Groupe Publicis (the number 4 advertising holding company but number 1 in digital revenue) and HSH Prince Albert II are the main patrons, along with Microsoft, Lenovo, Orange, Google (YouTube) and Booz & Co. I’ve helped with the agenda for a couple of years now. There will be a special panel on media clouds that will include Media Dojo alum Sean Knapp from Ooyala among others. At the event, I’ll launch the MD Guide to Cloud Computing for Media and Marketing. The Guide will be a first stop for business layer media and marketing professionals who need to get a handle on the foundation concepts, tech, companies, and impact of cloud computing on their industry.

If you’re interested in attending, drop a line at

contact@monacomediaforum.org

to request an invite. If accepted, you’ll pay for air travel and hotel with all the ground costs picked up by the organizers.