Archive for the ‘ibm’ Category

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Conversational Internet : A prototype

Wednesday, September 12th, 2012

tl;dr

We’ve built a prototype to show how we could interact with the Internet using a command-driven approach.

  • A screen reader, but one that uses machine learning and natural language processing, in order to better understand both what the user wants to do, and what the web page says.
  • One that can offer a conversational interface instead of just reading out everything on the page.

It’s a proof-of-concept, but it’s an exciting idea with a lot of potential and we’ve got a demo that shows it in action.

I wrote yesterday about what it was like going to the BBC to talk about a project I’ve been working on this summer. I didn’t talk about the project itself. Here’s an overview.

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Posted in ibm, tech | 4 Comments »

My inevitable media stardom

Tuesday, September 11th, 2012

BBC Broadcasting House

I went to London today to be interviewed for a radio programme on the BBC.

The topic was a project that I’ve been working on over the summer.

I’m not a typical spokesperson, certainly not for something the size of IBM. I’m definitely happier as the behind-the-scenes geek type. The prospect of going on the radio to represent the project, let alone IBM, was more than a little terrifying.

But my best efforts to get someone more able to talk coherently failed horribly, and this afternoon I dutifully got the train up to London to go to Broadcasting House.

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Posted in ibm | 2 Comments »

Talking about Watson

Thursday, May 31st, 2012

I was in London yesterday to give a talk about the work that has been done with Watson in the last year or so. Rather cruelly, the organisers filmed me and put it on the Internet. 😉

If you can ignore my ridiculous voice, some incoherent rambling, an uncomfortable and ill-fitting suit, and a lot of “erm” and “umm”, there was some interesting stuff in there, so I thought I’d share it.


YouTube : Dale Lane – Keynote at PCTY London 2012

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Posted in ibm | 6 Comments »

Migrating from ActiveMQ to WebSphere MQ

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012

Overview

A side-project I’ve been playing with in the evening: Writing a JMX layer to allow apps written for ActiveMQ to migrate to WebSphere MQ with minimal modifications

Background

This came out of working on something that uses a JMS messaging provider. It uses it internally to allow components to communicate with each other, even when spread across multiple machines.

It uses Apache ActiveMQ – an open-sourced implementation of JMS. I wanted to try and get it working using WebSphere MQ – IBM’s implementation of JMS that I used to work on until five years ago.

As a messaging standard, the fact that both ActiveMQ and WebSphere MQ (WMQ) are JMS providers means that the way it puts and gets messages should just work.

But the JMS standard doesn’t cover administration (how queue managers are created and configured, how they’re started, how queues and topics are created, etc.) or monitoring (getting statistics about how many messages have been put or got, how many messages are on a queue, etc.)

All of this was done in an ActiveMQ-specific ways. This was what needed to be ported if I was going to get this to work with WebSphere MQ.

The project I’m porting is actually a bit of a black box. Rather than make a significant rewrite to get it to go from being ActiveMQ-specific to WMQ-specific, I wanted to see what I could add so that as much of the existing code could just work transparently.

I wanted to write a layer to sit between the ActiveMQ-app and WebSphere MQ, so that the app needn’t realise it’s not talking to the ActiveMQ broker it was written for.

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Posted in code, ibm | 4 Comments »

Posting to IBM Connections from WP7

Friday, February 24th, 2012

IBM Connections is something we use at work: an internal, intranet-hosted social network for work stuff.

I use stuff like the wikis, file sharing, and bookmarks, quite a lot. But I don’t make status updates as often as I could.

I wonder if that’s because I couldn’t do it from my phone? I know that I certainly started using Facebook a lot more since getting a phone with support for posting to facebook and twitter built-in.

So I set up a way for me to post to Connections from my phone with just one tap on the home screen.

Well, one tap, plus all the taps to actually type the status message… plus another tap on the Send button. But you get the idea.

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What has Watson been up to since Jeopardy?

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

It’s been about a year since the computer system IBM Watson entered a TV quiz show against two of the best people to play the game, and won.

You knew that already, right? If not, skip reading this and go watch some of the footage instead. It’ll be more interesting.

But what has been done with Watson since?

Watson still makes the news even if not as much as during Jeopardy!. And with updates on twitter, facebook and YouTube there’s a lot of info out there about the project.

With all those updates, it’d be useful to bring some of it together into an overview of what sort of work has been taking place in the last year.

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The problem with Jeopardy!

Tuesday, November 15th, 2011

The I’ve-been-blogging-for-five-years-but-am-still-paranoid-about-work-related-posts-being-misrepresented disclaimer:
I do work for IBM as a developer on Watson but that role doesn’t extend to this blog. My responsibilities for Watson are limited to writing code… so any ramblings here are my personal views, and not necessarily representative of IBM’s positions, strategy or opinions.

The first time most people saw or heard of Watson was on “America’s favourite quiz show”, Jeopardy!

And that association seems to have stuck. For the moment, at least, Watson’s identity seems to bound up with Jeopardy’s. It’s “the computer system that won on Jeopardy!”

I’m not sure that’s entirely a good thing.

Jeopardy! was a great demonstration of Watson’s capabilities in a lot of ways. It showed the breakthroughs in interpreting natural language, the breakthroughs in coming up with evidence and rationale and identifying the level of confidence in it’s answer’s, and the power of machine learning systems.

But… it does make it easy to misunderstand the future potential of the technology.

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MQTT over WebSockets

Sunday, April 10th, 2011

Overview

Extending WebSphere MQ to include support for WebSockets, allowing messaging to web browsers, including mobile browsers, without any additional client software

Background

I’ve talked about MQTT before – a lightweight messaging protocol that I’ve used both on personal projects and my day job.

From mqtt.org:

It is useful for connections with remote locations where a small code footprint is required and/or network bandwidth is at a premium.

I’ve used it in CurrentCost projects, mobile apps and with small and embedded computers like my Slug.

But in all cases, I’ve needed MQTT client software to talk to the messaging server. Whether writing in C, C#, Java or Python, I’ve needed a client library to get me started, something that knows the sequence of packets that make up the MQTT protocol.

It’d be useful to have a zero-install MQTT client: an MQTT client app delivered over the web, without the user needing to install any additional client libraries, or resort to Java applets.

What this does

One possible way to do this could be WebSockets. Part of HTML5, this is a protocol that describes how to do two-way messaging between web servers and web browsers. And I mean proper two-way communication, including push-notification from the server to the browser, without resorting to hacks or kludges like long polling or hidden iframes.

It’s an emerging protocol, still in draft form, but there are a few implementations around so there are already a few browsers that know how to manage WebSockets.

We’ve been exploring recently how this could work with MQTT – the aim was to build in support for WebSockets into an MQTT messaging server: IBM WebSphere MQ (WMQ).

I’ve mentioned WebSphere MQ before, as back in the dim-and-distant past (well, five or six years ago) I used to be a developer of it.

It’s one of the server implementations that support the MQTT protocol.

By adding support for WebSockets to it, it means that WMQ could send and receive messages to web browsers. It means a web app could be a fully-fledged MQTT client.

(more…)

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Posted in code, ibm | 6 Comments »

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