It started in Jeopardy and ended in loss. IBM's flagship AI Watson Health has been sold to venture capitalists for an undisclosed sum thought to be around a billion dollars, or a quarter of what the division cost IBM in acquisitions alone since it was spun off in 2015. ... When clinical trials were published, Watson came up short every time. It didn't matter what field it was in, it consistently scored less well than human clinicians – sometimes under 50 per cent – and demonstrated some alarming blind spots in suggested treatments. Medical professionals had enough to worry about without babysitting a broken AI: it got dropped. ... IBM's Watson Health failed at the time, like so much AL/ML, because it didn't know what the question was – ironic, since the game of Jeopardy at which it excelled is all about deducing questions from data. It wanted to automate the highest skilled aspects of healthcare, diagnosis and treatment, but the problem wasn't one of getting the most data and the best algorithm. Rather, the problem was one of meaning. ... Fortunately, this sad case does not mean AI-based tools can't work in medicine, nor even that Watson Health won't do so, nor that AIs' evaluation and adoption has been slowed down. Ask the right questions, such as "why do some patients get readmitted" and can you spot them early?, and you get the right answers. AI in healthcare is being adopted, and it shows every sign of deserving its place. ... https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/31/machine_learning_the_hard_way/ -- EN ===================================================================== Prof. Enrico Nardelli Dipartimento di Matematica - Universita' di Roma "Tor Vergata" Via della Ricerca Scientifica snc - 00133 Roma tel: +39 06 7259.4204 fax: +39 06 7259.4699 mobile: +39 335 590.2331 e-mail: nardelli@mat.uniroma2.it home page: http://www.mat.uniroma2.it/~nardelli blog: http://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/blog/enardelli/ http://link-and-think.blogspot.it/ ===================================================================== --