Thursday, March 31, 2011

TechCrunchTV Interview Anjul Bhambhri (VP of Big Data at IBM) on IBM's Big Data direction

TechCrunchTV did a 5 piece interview with Anjul on March 30, 2011 on IBM's Big Data direction

Part1
  • Anjul talking about her early career and how did she get to managing IBM's Big Data mission.
Part2
  • Talks about Watson's role in Big Data. Anjul suggest that humanity should celebrate its accomplishment.  Watson has something like 200 million pages of data (ie dictionaries, thesaurus, etc ..).     The challenge was to ingest, search and makes sense of Big Data to be able to respond to a question.  
Part3
  • Waton is becoming more like "human".  Watson is a good example of how a computer can understand natural language and how a computer can understand Big Data.  Computers or robots can not replace humans.  
Part4
  • What's IBM's goal in the investment in Watson?  The possibilities if we can tap into Big Data and do analytics can drive change in our society (eg Smarter Planet, Health care, etc ...).   The possibility to be able to make a decision at the right time.   IBM's is working on simplifying analytics on Big Data (aka making it easier to ask questions on Big Data).
Part5
  • IBM is more than just about mainframes.  Anjul's business is managed as a start-up within IBM.  IBM is looking at helping customers consume and make sense of Big Data(petabytes++) along with their traditional data.   IBM's is working on helping customer's make sense of their growing amount of data.  IBM is starting 1200 bootcamps on the technology behind Watson and what IBM's doing around Big Data.   This bootcamps will be able to help with concepts, labs/example, Proof of Concept, etc... around Big Data.