IBM opens the Watson Centre in Singapore to co-create business solutions based on disruptive technologies

Senior executives join DPM Tharman on-stage for the beating of the auspicious gong to signify the official opening of the Watson Centre at Marina Bay.

IBM invests to accelerate development and commercialisation of disruptive technologies in Asia

Close to 5,000 IBM Cognitive Solution Professionals across the region co-creating with clients to drive transformation

New Watson Centre at Marina Bay to house IBM Garage Singapore and IBM Studios - Singapore

A dance performance featuring traditional Chinese lions decorated with flashing lights was part of the opening ceremony for The Watson Centre at Marina Bay. 


In less than five years, disruptive technologies such as cognitive computing and blockchain are expected to drive shifts in every industry. To help clients in the Asia Pacific region lead in shaping the future of their industries, IBM has announced plans to assist in the rapid prototyping and commercialisation of solutions based on cognitive computing and blockchain.

IBM has opened The Watson Centre at Marina Bay, an incubator designed to bring together organisations of all sizes, business partners and IBM experts to co-create business solutions that leverage IBM's cognitive, blockchain and design capabilities. IBM’s new Asia Pacific headquarters is based in the same location, in the heart of Singapore’s financial district.

Watson Centre at Marina Bay will act as a centre of expertise for almost 5,000 IBM Cognitive Solutions Professionals in the Asia Pacific region alone, including researchers, IBM Watson specialists, data scientists, software engineers, agile developers and analytics experts. It will also offer education, hackathons, and customised workshops for a broader ecosystem of innovators including software companies, startups, developers and systems integrators.

The Centre will play host to Asia Pacific clients looking to lead in a variety of markets and industries, using Watson technologies that reason, improve through learning, and discover insights hidden in large amounts of complex data. IBM has been working to meet growing demand for cognitive computing in Asia Pacific through a variety of avenues, including partnerships with Bumrungrad International Hospital in Thailand and IT services provider SK Holdings C&C in Korea, as well as establishing a developer ecosystems in the region.

Said Yeoh Keat Chuan, Managing Director, Singapore Economic Development Board: “This is a testament to Singapore’s growing startup ecosystem, presence of strong industry verticals and the availability of digital talent with deep capabilities.”

DPM Tharman addresses the audience.

Singapore Deputy Prime Minister (DPM) Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who is also Coordinating Minister for Economic and Social Policies, commented that the locating of IBM’s Asia Pacific Headquarters in Singapore and Watson Center are important advances in the relationship between Singapore and IBM. "Relationships are very important. The Singapore economy, because it’s not very large, is really all about relationships – between government and companies large and small, and between companies and their clients and people. We have to keep these relationships going. What makes business sense for you, we want to enable it to be done in Singapore – that’s what it’s about. So I’m very happy with what’s happening in our relationship with IBM," he said.

He added that disruption is inevitable, with many incumbent players disrupted. "Some jobs too will become redundant. But at the same time, there is something profoundly enabling about these technologies. Whether it’s blockchain, or digital commerce, or even artificial intelligence, it’s going to be profoundly enabling for a broad range of enterprises, as well as for us as human beings," he said.

"We know that there’s going to be a disruption, but the reason why we are embracing disruption in a whole range of technologies is because we also want to maximise their enabling potential, for enterprises and people. The new technologies and digital platforms that we are talking about will allow small players to participate on a level playing field with the big. And we want to make that possible as quickly and efficiently as possible."

DPM Tharman pointed out that collaboration occurs naturally between large companies and smaller players in the same supply chain and cluster. "We want to maximise that collaboration within the cluster. This Watson Centre itself aims to do that. It’s about partnerships and co-creation of solutions between suppliers, between firms and customers, between big and small. So there’s this very interesting space to be exploited. Collaboration between enterprises, all competitive players, but seeing merit and advantage in collaborating with partners. We want to maximise that enabling feature of these new technologies for small enterprises especially," he stated.

DPM Tharman acknowledged that jobs will be lost with the advent of new technologies, but that it is a small price to pay for the benefits received in return. He used the example of healthcare to illustrate his point. "Artificial intelligence will not displace most humans in healthcare but lead instead to ‘augmented intelligence’ – with human-computer interactions enabling better and more customised care for each individual. Healthcare is therefore going to be transformed, from a focus on diseases to a focus on each individual. We will be able to collect and make sense of far more information about a person, including information about themselves that they didn’t know about," he noted.

"A lot of it is unstructured data. It is information from many sources – the electronic health records, diagnostic imaging, the prescriptions they had, whether they have taken their drugs or not, their genomic profiles, and the information streamed from their wearable devices – it’s a whole new set of information. Not possible for even the most capable doctor to analyse this data, quickly and accurately. So it is this combining of artificial intelligence with professional capabilities, this augmented intelligence, that will deliver targeted, better quality healthcare for individuals, or deeply personalised healthcare. This is a huge opportunity, and we are only at the cusp of what is to come. I’ve talked about healthcare, but we could say the same about a range of other industries.

"We’re a small country, we don’t have that many people, but we can have everyone employed, with better quality jobs, through this interaction with technology... If you leave it to the market, it might eventually happen, but it may not happen in Singapore. It may happen somewhere else. But if we work together actively, we can make things happen here in Singapore. It will be for the better of everyone."

IBM is collaborating with businesses across a wide range of industries: 

Gupta talks about disruption in the financial industry.

Financial services

DBS Bank, a leading financial services group in Asia, will work with Watson Centre at Marina Bay to develop new use cases based on disruptive technologies, and to assist in its strategy to support fintech startups in the region.

Piyush Gupta, CEO of DBS said, “At DBS, we seek to leverage digital technology to make banking simple and effortless for our customers. As we shape the future of banking, it is important to work with a thriving innovation ecosystem to tap into disruptive technology and ideas. Our partnership with IBM will help us to continue driving innovation within DBS, as well as assist in the acceleration and development of locally-generated fintech innovations.”

Healthcare

Parkway Pantai, one of Asia’s largest integrated private healthcare groups, is working with IBM to enhance the quality of patient care and improve patient outcomes in its intensive care units at Mount Elizabeth Novena Hospital, Singapore. In line with Parkway Pantai's effort to leverage new technologies to improve patient care and outcomes, the use of Watson technologies is helping to provide proactive patient monitoring and early intervention through real-time data analysis and notifications to nurses in anticipation of critical and life-threatening events.

The ICU Advisor tracks a number of vital signs.

Dr Kelvin Loh, Chief Executive Officer of Singapore Operations Division, Parkway Pantai said, "Systems like cognitive computing can continuously read, monitor and quickly make sense of vast amounts of data. With decision support tools like Watson, our clinicians and nurses can get data in the right context, faster, and personalised to the patient's needs. This translates to greater efficiency and better outcomes for our patients."

In a cognitive healthcare and Internet of Things demonstration at the Watson Centre feature work with Parkway Pantai, a Watson-driven ICU Advisor complements doctors and nurses in providing probability-based advice about patient outcomes, ultimately improving critical care delivery and outcomes.

A patient's vital signs might all seem normal even as he or she is trending towards life-threatening sepsis, for instance. Watson would be able to sound a warning long before the sepsis is reflected in the vital signs, helping to ensure early medical intervention. The intention is to have Watson read the latest medical literature and intensive care information - information that medical personnel may not have time to read - so that the ICU Advisor can guide nurses in treatment options with accurate confidence levels and help doctors' expertise scale. The ICU Advisor can thus improve patient outcomes, decrease morbidity, shorten hospital stays while enhancing skills and retention for critical care nurses.

Watson-driven technology is also in use at Bumrungrad International Hospital in Thailand, and at Manipal Hospitals in India.

Tourism

A key element of advancing cognitive technologies around the globe is making Watson APIs and services available to enterprises and developers via the Watson Platform. Singapore-based ZUMATA Technologies, a supplier of consolidated hotel inventory services to online travel companies around the world, is leveraging IBM Watson to enable customisation for hotel recommendations. ZUMATA’s platform learns from every customer interaction, delivering more personalised experiences and thereby improving booking conversions.

Robert Meza, Director of ZUMATA said, “For many people, planning a trip can be overwhelming and time consuming. There is so much information to digest and choosing where to go, where to stay and comparing price with value can be daunting. During the process of booking travel and accommodation, customers are looking for both inspiration and convenience. We aim to make travel personal again and match consumers with their perfect trip more efficiently.”

IBM Garage Singapore

A demonstration of how blockchain could work. Temperature and humidity are tracked throughout the journey of a shipment of flowers, with the information stored securely with blockchain technology. The recipients of the flowers will only pay for them if the temperature and humidity were within agreed parameters. 

With the advent of blockchain, and the increasing demand from clients across Asia to explore the possibilities of this transformative technology, IBM will help accelerate the design, development and commercialisation of Singapore blockchain applications through the IBM Garage and the IBM Global Entrepreneur programme.

At the IBM Garage, experts collaborate with clients, developers and entrepreneurs to test-drive tools, processes, and procedures to make blockchain real. The garage creates a bridge between the scale of enterprise and culture of startups and supports the development of an open standards-based blockchain ecosystem and creates new work opportunities in Singapore.

The IBM Global Entrepreneur Program helps startups and entrepreneurs who are building new generation of distributed ledger applications on the blockchain harness the power of IBM Cloud, as well as deeply connect and embed them into IBM’s vast global network of enterprise clients, consultants, Innovation Centres and more to rapidly build, scale quickly and accelerate growth. Distributed ledger applications based on blockchain allow information to be exchanged between parties more securely than is presently possible. The data is said to be resistant to revisions and tampering.

"Watson and blockchain are two technologies that will rapidly change the way we live and work, and our clients in Asia Pacific are eager to lead the way in envisioning and creating that future,” said Randy Walker, Chairman and CEO, IBM Asia Pacific. “Here they can leverage the latest in customer experience design, use cognitive technology to draw insight from vast quantities of data, and draw on IBM's huge investments in research and development. In partnership with our clients we are nurturing local talent and building an ecosystem to accelerate the development of cognitive solutions and blockchain platforms.”

IBM Studios - Singapore

The Watson Centre at Marina Bay will also host IBM Studios – Singapore, a new centre that will blend experience design and digital expertise to support customer innovation. With this studio, IBM will help Asia Pacific clients analyse business challenges and develop solutions grounded in more individualised digital experiences through a combination of IBM’s research technology, cognitive capabilities and experience design.

This is why Watson can achieve so much with natural conversation. Watson understands reasons and learns, enabling deeper engagements, scaling expertise, and facilitating the creation of new products and offerings. It can discover entities and relationships that people have not been able to find. The result is personalised, customer experiences and tasks that are accomplished more quickly.

A randomly-chosen picture of a car is shown to Nao-Mi, a Watson-driven robot which is able to identify the car by the second try. Watson is able to recognise images and converse naturally with humans both through robot interfaces as well as directly through computers.

Watson represents a new era in computing called cognitive computing, where systems understand the world the way humans do: through senses, learning, and experience. Watson learns from all interactions, gaining in value and knowledge over time. To advance Watson, IBM has three dedicated business units: Watson, established for the development of cloud-delivered cognitive computing technologies that represent the commercialisation of artificial intelligence (AI) across a variety of industries; Watson Health, dedicated to improving the ability of doctors, researchers and insurers and other related health organisations to surface new insights from data to deliver personalised healthcare; and Watson IoT, focused on making sense of data embedded in more than 9 billion connected devices operating in the world today, which generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of new data daily.

Interested?

Watch the video on Connie, the Hilton's robot concierge powered by IBM Watson and Nao-Mi.

Hashtags: #ibmwatson, #NewIBM, #WatsonCentreSG, #IBMStudiosSG

posted from Bloggeroid