AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning: Is there really a

difference?

While on my “stay-cation”, I was reflecting back on a colleague whose Tesla drove her from
home to Newark airport and then drove itself back home – without her in the car. I’m still in
disbelief. That made a connection to when I was watching the news and Budweiser drove
50,000 cans of beer across 120 miles of highway, marking the first commercial shipment by
a self-driving vehicle. I’m still amazed. This also made a connection to the IBM Integrated
Account Activations where I heard of so many clients building Cognitive Applications and
Data Science Apps. I took a pause… I know all of this is powered by Cognitive but what
really is the difference between Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning and Deep
Learning? The terms are used interchangeably but are they the same thing? How and where
to do our offerings fit into each domain? I wanted to find out and really make this simple for
our sellers, especially those coming from units outside of Watson & Analytics (ex. Cloud
Services, Hybrid Cloud Software) so they can think about how to construct their client
conversations around this transformation. This is the future and IBM needs to lead the
conversation.

This is the first blog in a 3-part series to help our sellers:

1. Understand the difference between AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning (this
blog)
2. Articulate what’s on the truck and how clients are using AI, Machine Learning and De
ep Learning
3. Getting started now!

After endless google searches and a some really great videos in Coursera, I’m going to distill
it to the simplest way that I explained it to my 6-year-old who is obsessed with Robots and
still thinks he’s getting Watson for his birthday (… he plays for hours with Anki’s Cozmo. By
far, the best robot for kids that I’ve come across!).

AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning have been around for some time, so why the hype
now? Three key enhancements in technology:

 Data: Structured and unstructured data, as well as its storage, has grown
exponentially in the last decade. Data is also more accessible.
 Algorithms: The algorithms and models take advantage of both GPUs and Big Data
to train large deep neural networks with large data sets
 Computing: There are great advancements in GPUs compute capacity along with the
hardware becoming more widely available at a cheaper cost.
Is AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning different? YES. Now, I want you to think of 3
Russian dolls where AI is the largest, within it is Machine Learning, and within that is Deep
Learning. AI is how we make machines intelligent – “the science” - while Machine Learning is
the compute methods (algorithms) that make the machines smarter without them specifically
being programmed. All Machine Learning is AI but not all AI is Machine Learning. It’s the
fastest growing part of AI and shows the most promise. Deep Learning is a subset of
Machine Learning and focuses even more narrowly on a subset of Machine Learning
techniques and requires “thought”.

Source: www.kdnuggets.com

I. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around since 1956 where students at Dartmouth
College were solving problems with machines winning at checkers. AI is when a machine
simulates a human task. It does so by “learning” the task vs. being hard wired using
programming techniques. AI tackles problems that one would associate with human thinking
such as reasoning, knowledge, planning, learning, understanding, natural language
processing, and translation, to name a few. It can solve specific or narrow tasks such as
getting really good at answering automobile maintenance questions or it can be general
where it performs a range of tasks.

One of the most common use cases of AI that we see our customers wanting to adopt is
Conversational Apps which uses Natural Language Processing. Conversation focuses on
reasoning strategies for language and content of the questions. Organizations want to
embed Conversational Apps into their applications to improve call center service and
response and improve customer satisfaction. One thing, reps asked me NOT to call this is
“chatbots”. They feel it downplays what Watson can really do.

Another use case is around Discovery which ingests unstructured and structured data and
uses reasoning strategies, helping you find value in data - fast. It answers 100,000s of long
tail types of questions such as “My engine is making a rattling noise, how do I trouble shoot
it”, whereas Conversations answers the most frequent types of questions and requests such
as “Turn on my headlights”. Additional Discovery use cases would be things like “Voice of
your customer “– understanding what matters to customers by ingesting, consolidating, and
discovering new insights from customer feedback. “Brand Protection” by staying on top of
public sentiment by adding intelligence-infused news into apps to get insight about product
perception.
II. Machine Learning has been around since 1959 when IBM’s own Arthur Samuel coined it
(take that Microsoft!). Machine Learning is a subset of AI, it uses historical data to recognize
patterns to better predict the future. Machine Learning algorithms iteratively learn from data,
thus allowing computers to find hidden insights and patterns without being explicitly
programmed where to look. Examples of pattern detection can be speech recognition, object
recognition, or image recognition, to name a few.

Machine Learning can be organized into three main categories:

 Supervised Learning – where you have "ground truth data" (x as input, y as

output) so these types of models will automate the prediction of those answers with
higher accuracy. You have data the represents how the problem has been solved by
feeding the model "labeled data" for training. Think about a real-estate application
that estimates the sale price of a house. We’ll start by providing a set of training data
that contains square footage, number of rooms, zip code, schools, and sale prices for
similar homes in the area. You can continue to feed it housing characteristic values
and it should predict the sales price along a regression line. Classification is another
supervised learning method in which you get a discrete value – something like a yes
or no. For example, is this a fraudulent case – yes or no. Classes of models include:
regression, clustering, dimensionality reduction, anomaly detection, reinforcement
learning, neural nets.
 Unsupervised learning - you still have "ground truth" data to compare your results to
but you only have the input (x) - not the corresponding output (y). You are trying to
uncover what the output is based on the input. It's called unsupervised because
there is no answer. The algorithms are left to discover and present interesting
results. Think about news coming in and the algorithm clustering the stories into top
stories/headlines, sports, business, and technology. Classes of models include:
clustering, anomaly detection, generative neural nets, latent variable models
 Semi-Supervised - this is learning where you have all of the inputs (x), some of the
outputs (y) are labeled. Think of photos where some of the outputs are labeled (ex.
football, baseball, soccer ball) and most of the outputs are not labeled. Many
problems fall into this category because it's expensive and time consuming to label
data. You may need domain experts here to get data labeled.

III. Deep Learning is a subset of Machine Learning based on artificial neural networks where
there are connections, layers, and pathways of nodes (“neurons”) for data to propagate. It is
inspired by our understanding of the biology of our brains – all those interconnections
between the neurons.

It’s called “Deep” because the number and depth of layers can go into the hundreds. You
might, for example, take an image, chop it up into a bunch of tiles that are inputted into the
first layer of the neural network. In the first layer individual neurons then passes the data to a
second layer. The second layer of neurons does its task, and so on, until the final layer and
the final output is produced. Neural networks need hundreds of thousands or millions of
training sets to predict what something is. The neuron inputs and outputs are tuned so that
that machine can teach itself, for example, what fog is versus rain.
A few use cases:

 Image colorization: Adding color to black and white photos requires very large
convolutional neural networks and supervised layers that can recreate images with
the addition of color. I can see this being used in Marketing, Medicine, Retail.
 Automatic Image Capture: Once you detect objects in photos, imagine being able to
generate labels for those objects. Take the labels and convert those into longer
blurbs and then into shorter sentences. This could be used in just about any industry,
but education, medicine, manufacturing, and troubleshooting device come to mind.
 Automatic Gaming: Given my husband is a gamer, I can’t go without adding this one.
Imagine a model learns how to play a video game based on the pixels on the screen.

I hope this helps with some of the basic definitions. With this we can now delve into the IBM
offerings available that leverage each of these technologies and show you how to quickly get
your clients started.

AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning: Offerings

This is my second blog in a 3-part series to help sellers better understand Data Science
technology:

1. Understand the difference between Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, and
Deep Learning
2. Articulate what’s on the truck and how clients are using AI, Machine Learning, and
Deep Learning (this blog)
3. Getting started now!

In my last blog, I went through the differences between AI, Machine Learning, and Deep
Learning. In this blog, I’ll talk about our offerings, their differentiation, and what clients are
doing with each. Please note that this blog is designed to be more of a cheat sheet and is
not meant to replace your role-based learning courses.

I. Artificial Intelligence (AI): Watson Discovery, Conversation, and

Extend

As mentioned in my previous blog regarding the differences between AI, Machine Learning,
and Deep Learning, AI is the superset of the three in which a computer simulates a task by
learning how to do it. When you hear AI or cognitive in the broadest sense, think of Watson
APIs for developers or Watson SaaS solutions – for business users (no coding, it’s an app).
It differs from machine learning in that the models are pre-built, the models are trained for
you. The data collection, cleansing, exploration, feature engineering, model training, and
evaluation are done for you. These models are fine tuned to specific scenarios: language
translation, speech to text, text to speech, image recognition, etc.

There are three use cases within AI that customers want to adopt:

Use Case 1 - Conversations: With the Watson Conversations API, developers can create,
within minutes, powerful conversation interactions between end users and the business.
Your clients can write once and deploy via different channels such as a mobile device, Slack,
or even a physical robot. Backed by natural language processing and machine learning,
Watson Conversation understands “intent” and “context” in the discussion. Watson
Conversations has software development kits, code examples, and real simple tooling that
allows the construction of dialog flow.

With the Watson Conversation Service, Developers are “building” the dialog and
conversation app. With Watson Virtual Agent, business users quickly configure the agent
using pre-built content without needing any technical skills. It comes pre-trained on common
questions your customers will ask, clients need to feed it info about the domain or problem
the conversational app will address. Questions like “Where do I pay my bill?”, “Am I eligible
for an upgrade?” Industry content is coming. What’s really cool is that there’s an engagement
metric dashboard so LOB can identify the most common questions their clients are asking.

Use Case 2 - Discovery: Discovery provides a set of Watson APIs that shorten the time it
takes developers to ingest, enrich, and explore data – all data – both structured and
unstructured – so they can rapidly build intelligent search and content analytics to extract
value from the data. Discovery makes it super easy to ingest your client’s data or publicly
available data, convert it, normalize it, and enrich it. They can enrich with Natural Language
Processing (NLP) that supports concepts, relationships, sentiment, and tone, to allow
machines to understand text and other content. Discovery has simple tooling and a built-in
query language to make it easy to build queries and embed data into your applications. For
example, extracting all Airbnb data to look for properties near several tourist attractions that
don’t have a negative sentiment analysis, click here to see a demo.

Use Case 3 - Extend: Watson Extend Services empower organizations with APIs to extend
existing applications with cognitive learning. Developers can translate speech to text and
translate that to multiple languages. They can analyze tone in customer or employee surveys
to get a read on the mood. They can understand language by extracting metadata from
content such as concepts, entities, emotions and sentiment.
We have boatloads of customers using IBM Watson services. For example, Staples wanted
to provide anywhere, anytime service – removing friction from its ordering process – for
customer retention. They transformed the “Easy Button” with Watson APIs to order supplies
from voice text, and email. Another great example is Catalyst Investors, they were
challenged to mine through 50,000 pieces of new content across multiple sources every day
to find investment opportunities. This content is unstructured and growing in volumes daily.
Using IBM Watson Discovery, they were able to find the 1% of content most relevant and
valuable while filtering out 99% of content that didn’t matter. They delivered actionable
intelligence on 20% of the thousands of companies they track, and automated their prospect
pipeline automatically by monitoring companies for early indicators of investment
opportunities.

The question of differentiation has popped up over and over again in our
Microsoft (MSFT) war rooms.

 Customer: Watson’s growth and differentiation is in enterprise and professionals

from tax to legal to health to banking. Our competitors have APIs for developers but
it’s no surprise or secret they are heavily targeting the consumer space (Alexa,
Google Home), We solve the hard problems – like healthcare diagnoses.
 Discovery: MSFT doesn’t have an equivalent offering. Developers have to build this
by integrating different services for ingestion, normalization, analysis, enrichment and
query.
 Conversation: Watson provides a unified tool with a user interface for “NLP and
Dialog” as a single solution. We support 8 NLP enrichments and 9 languages, MSFT
provides 4 enrichments and 4 languages -- we can scale greater around the globe.
 Vision: Out of the box we are more complete than MSFT with tagging, more tags
and custom classifiers and similarity search.
 Emotion: We provide sentiment, tone, emotion, and personality -- MSFT only
provides sentiment.
 Virtual Agent: Watson Virtual Agent comes pre-built with 100+ skills pre-built and
pre-configured for faster time to value -- MSFT doesn’t have a comparable offering.
 Compare and Comply: Watson can parse, compare, and contrast elements across
disparate industry documents enabling 50%+ time savings vs manual methods --
MSFT doesn’t have a comparable offering.

Machine Learning: Data Science Experience and Watson Machine Learning

Machine Learning (ML) quickly applies knowledge to recognize patterns in massive amounts
of data. Machine Learning is everywhere influencing almost everything we do. From Netflix
recommendations to Facebook facial recognition tagging to Gmail spam, machine learning is
behind the scenes. In the enterprise, we see a lot of interest from using it for risk scoring,
fraud detection, optimizing supply chain, and hyper personalization.

ML requires a lot of collaboration between developers, LOB analyst, and computer scientists
– all which can be lumped into the category of “data scientist”. A mix of “unicorn” skills come
to play and they need a playground to gather the data, build the models, deploy them, and
integrate the predictions into applications.
 For example, a model may predict which banking customers will churn. We have the
customer service exec, the data scientist, and the application developer. The data scientist
determines the factors and algorithms used to predict how likely it is that a customer will
leave and builds this into a machine learning model. The developer leverages this model by
displaying a customer satisfaction indicator when the customer record is pulled up. The
customer service rep can then try to alleviate the situation in the course of their conversation.
Collaboration between these 3 roles is needed to determine the best course of action based
on the output of the model. As the data and business changes, these models may need to be
retrained to understand the data as it exists today. They can use RESTful APIs to query the
model as a micro service, they can apply monitoring, and scale to support large volumes of
data.

By now you’ve probably heard of Data Science Experience (DSX). It’s our integrated
offering with notebooks or RStudio to build models and test and deploy them with machine
learning in a single integrated experience. It enables data science to move from an individual
sport to a team sport using built-in projects. DSX embeds open source frameworks enabling
data scientists to work in a language of choice such as R, Python, and Scala. Equipped with
learning and tutorials, it’s a really slick tool to help data scientists come together to
collaborate on the models. DSX is the front end (or IDE) for building models in IBM Machine
Learning and is supported in public cloud, private cloud, and desktop environments.

Watson ML solves a major pain point for customers by enabling them to build self-learning
systems that can score, act, monitor, and ingest feedback to drive better business outcomes.
It includes over 30 data connectors to connect to your private and public cloud assets –
Cloudant, Azure, AWS, etc. These data assets can be cataloged in Watson Data Platform
(early beta). Within DSX, we’ve integrated in the SPSS canvas for those who wish to have a
drag and drop interface. We also have an API for creating machine learning models on
different runtimes (SparkML, SPSS). Once the model is deployed, the model can be
evaluated as part the testing with a score on how accurate it is. Models can be monitored
and automatically retrained if the data changed significantly or if the model is not accurate.
Watson ML models can be integrated into websites, mobile apps, and dashboards to
improve things like transaction risk scoring and personalized content on a mobile app.

DSX and Watson ML differentiate from the competition in the following ways:

 We are the only vendor that supports private cloud and on premises. This means,
clients can build on private and deploy on public cloud OR… they can build on public
and deploy on private.
 We are the only vendor with one, integrated offering that supports the “clickers” and
the “coders”. This means that a data scientist not so comfortable with code can use a
nice canvas for building the model. Also, a developer can use the language of choice
to build and deploy the model; Java, Scala or Python.
 Cognitive Assistant for Data Scientists suggests the best algorithm to use based on
the data and Hyper Parameter Optimization to help determine the best parameters to
use in the selected model
 Model management is a major pain point of almost every enterprise Data Scientist.
Data Scientists can readily determine if their model performance is deteriorating and
proactively retrain the model. We will offer a continuous monitoring and feedback
loop to assist the Data Scientist in this portion of model management.
 Through a simple UI and modern RESTful APIs we are enabling the exchange of
information across tools and other technologies for data scientists who want to use
Python, Scala, R, SPSS, and SAS and Java.
Customers such as Group M are using our data science capabilities to determine effective
ad placement. Group M improved their customer conversion for existing marketing
campaigns by more than 50%. Argus Health came into our Machine Learning Hubs (more on
that in blog 3) to apply ML to determine the effects of drugs on different patients. Argus
Heath is improving patient well-being and proactively preventing deterioration of the patient
condition.

III. Deep Learning: Watson Machine Learning Internal Beta

Right now, we have an internal beta of deep learning inside of Watson Machine Learning. It’s
being used by our worldwide community of deep learning researchers. It’s powering many of
the deep learning within Watson Developer Cloud and it’s being integrated into DSX to solve
complex problems. Think of problems that require high visual or audio quality and very large
convolutional neural networks.

IBM Research had a major breakthrough in reducing the time it takes for deep learning
systems to digest data from days to hours. Deep learning algorithms tend to run on a single
server due to complexity in moving huge amounts of data between machines and keeping
the data in sync between servers. With this advancement, it can divide up tasks among 64
servers running up to 256 processors total and still reap the benefits of speed. Scaling from
a single processor to 64 servers with 8 processors each can boost performance 50 – 60
times. That’s huge and it’s lifesaving when we think of scenarios in medicine and healthcare.
For image recognition, we have a system that showed a 33.8% accuracy rate with 7.5
million images over 7 hours – shattering a record that was set by Microsoft with 29.8%
accuracy over 10 days. Astounding. You can read more about the advancement in this
Fortune.com article and also more about what Beth Smith and her development team are
doing with Deep Learning here.

As we progress this capability, stay tuned. We’ll want to ensure you get this in front of your
clients fast. The possibilities for differentiation and business model disruption are
tremendous!

I know this was somewhat long but we are doing so much in this space, I wanted to do it
justice. The third and final blog in this series on getting clients started now with our solutions
is coming soon!

AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning: Get Started

Now!

This is my final blog in a 3-part series to help sellers better understand Data Science
technology:
 1. Understand the difference between Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, and
Deep Learning
2. Articulate what’s on the truck and how clients are using AI, Machine Learning, and
Deep Learning
3. Getting started now!

By now, I hope you’ve had a chance to read through the differences between AI, Machine
Learning, and Deep Learning and understand what IBM has to offer our clients in this space.
As much as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft claim to have taken the lead in this space, you
need to know that this market really is in its infancy days. IBM has received accolades and
recognition for the innovation, share, and leadership. Let’s hit a few …

 In August 2017, IDC named IBM the leader in WW AI Software Platforms for its
continued expansion in the market, including clients such as H&R Block and
Salesforce adopting Watson Services, new versions of Conversations and Virtual
Agent, and simplified pricing. Read more here.

 API World named IBM Watson Conversation “Enterprise API of the Year” in 2017

http://apiawards.co

 IBM was named the leader in Gartner 2017 MQ for Data Science Platforms. We
received this award due to the evaluation of SPSS, our leading predictive modeling
tool with a simple and easy to use UI, and our strategy and direction with the Data
Science Experience Platform.

https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-3TKD8OH&ct=170215&st=sb

We have the credentials, so now you need to get your client started! There are 2 key
tactics that I want you to consider: Watson Business Services for AI and the Machine
Learning Hubs for Machine Learning. Stay tuned for Deep Learning, more is coming as
we go live with our offering in 2018.

I. Watson Business Services

Let’s face it --- businesses looking to transform, innovate, and disrupt are demanding,
and they want to see value fast. They want to see their use cases with their data in a real
solution or an MVP quickly. They want to be part of the experience in designing, building
and deploying solutions. Watson Business Services are expert services where we work
together with the customer, using their data, to prove value fast. We have three new
Watson Business Services to help customers get enabled and on-ramp solutions to solve
THEIR use cases. Let’s look at each one:

1. Voice of the customer – Time to Value in 4 weeks!

Problem: Companies get customer feedback from multiple channels including social
media, digital surveys, voice response surveys and the web. They need to provide
consistent, high quality customer service experience across multiple channels.

Solution: An organization can use Watson to gather structured and unstructured

feedback, make sense of it, and take action on it.

Components: Watson Discovery, Watson Knowledge Studio, Expertise/Architecture/Pre-

built Assets, Customer Data

2. Customer care – Time to Value in 4 weeks!

Problem: Despite the number of self service options to get support (forums, FAQs,
support docs), customers tend to lean on human channels to get support. Interestingly
enough, more than 30% of the questions are common, repetitive questions. Businesses
need to scale while supporting the channels for customer interaction to get answers to
their questions.

Solution: An organization can augment human agents with digital virtual agents. Watson
understands end user questions in natural language and can solve for the most common
customer issues. Virtual Agent comes with a set of pre-built capabilities that cover the
most common customer service areas, and they work out of the box.

Components: Watson Virtual Agent, Watson Conversation, Watson Discovery,

Expertise/Architecture/Pre-built Assets, Customer Data

3. Expert assist - Time to Value in 4 weeks!

Problem: The top two reasons for customer attrition is (1.) when they feel they are
treated poorly (2.) when their problems aren’t resolved quickly. We’ve all experienced
frustration when we can’t quickly locate information or when a customer service rep can’t
answer our question - at all or in a timely manner.

Solution: Watson Expert Assist enables advisors, agents and service reps to have more
information at their fingertips so they can be the expert and answer questions fast. This
will improve customer and employee satisfaction. Watson provides service reps with the
ability to search structured and unstructured data to find information in seconds. Watson
can be trained to understand language nuances within the domain and service area it’s
supporting.
 Components: Watson Virtual Agent, Watson Conversation, Watson Discovery,
Expertise/Architecture/Pre-built Assets, Customer Data

For more information on the Watson Business Services, check out our enablement page.

II. Machine Learning Hubs – Time to Value in 3 Days!

Did you know that we have 5 Machine Learning Centers around the world, stacked with
Data Scientists to help your clients work through a use case that requires Machine
Learning…available for FREE? Yeah, me neither until I learned about the Machine
Learning Hubs located in San Jose, Beijing, Toronto, Bangalore, and Stuttgart! These
hubs are helping customers think through and solve their industry use cases – together –
by hosting organizations eager to collaborate and work with our data scientists and
Machine Learning specialists. Their purpose is to share expertise and help clients learn
how to apply Machine Learning in their use cases. Customers can engage in technical
learning sessions on tools, build and implement a prototype, or engage with IBM in open
source and research discussions.

The Machine Learning Hubs are working with clients TODAY. Here are some real
customer use case examples:

Customer: Argus Health

Use Case: Impact on patient’s health using different drugs

Problem: Understand the effects of different drugs on different patients

Solution: Using classification and regression, our data scientists were able to predict the
recovery of patients given several factors: hundreds of test measurements, drug names,
age and gender. We were able to predict the change of a patient’s measurements (e.g.,
white blood cells) after taking a drug.

Benefits: By understanding the predicted changes on specific patient tests based on

what drug or how much of a drug to give, healthcare specialists can better understand
the effects of on different patients.

Customer: BlocPower

Use Case: Predicting Energy Consumption

Problem: Identify inefficient energy usage across buildings in NYC to understand if new
buildings are energy inefficient.
 Solution: Using unsupervised learning (see my Blog #1 if you don’t know what this is),
our data scientists organized buildings into efficient and inefficient groupings, and built a
predictive model with the output, identifying if a new building is consuming energy
efficiently. We also predicted the annual energy bill.

Benefits: Organizations can better plan their energy budgets for the upcoming year and
put plans in place to become more energy efficient.

Customer: IT Company

Use Case: Customer churn

Problem: Identify customers that are likely going to leave and put tactics in place to keep
them.

Solution: Using classification, our data scientists predicted the probability of losing a
customer. The model output even showed key factors explaining WHY each customer
would likely churn.

Benefit: The customer was able to identify high risk customers at risk of being lost within
six months of the anticipated date and implemented tactics to re-engage with them.

There are 4 steps to get started with the Machine Learning Hubs.

1. Send an email to MLHub@us.ibm.com with the customer’s business challenge

2. Identify who will participate in a discussion with the data scientists
3. Jointly agree on the problem statement
4. Visit the Machine Learning Hub

More information on the hubs can be found here: http://ibm-ml-hub.com

Team, the resources supporting the Watson Business Services and Machine Learning
Hubs are available to help you accelerate your opportunities in AI and Machine Learning.
Use them!

This wraps up my 3-part blog series on AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning. I hope
this gives you a better appreciation of the differences, our offerings, and how to get your
clients started, now!