Has Watson broken the "sound barrier" of our times?

"Watson, come here! I need you" - These were reportedly the first words spoken by Alexander Graham Bell to his assistant Thomas Watson on his "electrical speech machine", which would later be called the telephone. With this one sentence, Bell broke a seemingly insurmountable barrier of enabling live conversations over long distances. Until that time in 1876, the telegraph was the only thing that allowed long distance communications, that too only one way at a time. His new technology allowed the same infrastructure of installed telegraph wires to send live conversations. To the 19th century America, it probably sounded like magic. In a sense, he had broken the figurative "sound barrier".

Fast forward to last week. My entire family was watching the show "Jeopardy". Everyone was glued to the set for three days, since it was the new "Watson", a computer built by IBM, going up against two of the best human Jeopardy players ever. At the end of the first day, the computer was tied with one of the players. By the end of the second day, it was no contest. The computer pulled away rapidly and finished first. By the end of the two round tournament, Watson had won more money than the two remaining contestants combined. One of the other contestants, Ken Jennings, wrote a humorous remark in his Final Jeopardy answer welcoming the "new overlords", i.e., the computers.

So, what is so special about Watson? To get the answer, needs to go back to some history of computing. During my years at Intel, I had the opportunity to discuss speech recognition with leading edge researchers at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in New York. They were heady times as Moore's Law routinely brought twice the computing power into the field every two years. By 2008, there were more than a billion transistors produced for every man, woman and child on this earth. And yet, the "sound barrier", so to speak, was not broken. What I mean is the ability of computers to understand natural language. The kind that movie goers watched in "2001 A Space Odyssey" as the astronaut commands computer HAL to "open the pod bay door, HAL", HAL rebuts him by saying "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that". To the human brain, this skill is learned by age two or three. And yet, training a computer to understand natural language has eluded scientists for a long time, until now. Watson's accomplishments are even more significant, in that the computer had to understand the quirks of the game, unusual contexts, and go up against two of the best players ever to play on TV. On the minus side, Watson only had to decipher the text, not the spoken words. But I am guessing integrating it is not that far off either, since many commercial programs like Dragon Naturally Speaking already convert spoken words to text.

What does this mean for the future? For now, at least, Watson is a supercomputer in IBM research lab that fills an entire room, and was programmed by some leading research scientists. However, the same can be said for the Eniac, the first computer ever built, circa 1950. The four function pocket calculators that had more processing power than the Eniac followed less than two decades later, using the newly invented transistor technology. Since then, the pace of innovation in computer hardware has accelerated to the point where we may have Watson like technology in our palms less than a decade from now. Elements of such technology are already in use and ubiquitous today. These can already be put to good use to help our students learn new skills and concepts much faster than traditional methods, especially in fields like mathematics.

These are exciting times to be consumers of technology, and the future looks even better.

Superman Meets Rip Van Winkle

In the recent weeks, there has been a lot of buzz about the movie Waiting For Superman. It has had rousing premiered in New York and Los Angeles on September 24, and has been released in Seattle and Portland. Directed by Davis Guggenheim of "An Inconvenient Truth" fame, and promoted by high powered leaders like Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, and President Obama himself, this movie promises to raise the awareness of another inconvenient truth - that our public education system has failed. But unlike other movies on the subject, it presents some ideas that have actually worked. I had a chance to see this movie, and I think it presents most of the issues in a format that hits home with those on main street. There are several myths that are broken in this movie. First, success can be had in the toughest of neighborhoods in the country (starting with Harlem), and can be reproduced anywhere (Kipp Academy has 100 schools nationwide, all with excellent results). All the schools portrayed are charter schools that have limited enrollements. The hardest truth of all is that for most disadvantaged students, their shot at a good education (defined by one that will prepare them for college) depends on the luck of the draw. Poorer the community, longer the odds (I had to do some mental math from the raw numbers that popped up on the screen to come to this conclusion).

The root of the problem has arguably existed for at least the last 30 years, or at least since the "Nation At Risk" report came out in 1983. And I think the public has been asleep for that period of time, blissfully ignoring the problem and wishing it would go away. Well, Einstein was right in saying that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. I choose a much milder state of mind, i.e,. sleep, to compare the public's reaction during this time. Many people have tried heroically to change things. But it is reasonable to believe that since nothing has changed with their effort, the problem is structural, and a lot more is needed to bring about structural change.

Let us pretend that all the voting public in this country fell asleep (at least as far as public education is concerned) in 1990, and woke up in 2010 and looked at the education statistics. In those 20 years, they would have missed several national studies done on the lack of focus in Science and Math, the "Math Wars", and the recent developments such as the Race To The Top. They would miss the fact that billions were poured to reduce class sizes and teacher development, with no measurable impact on student achievement. They would miss the excitement of watching our top students slide down lower and lower in academic competitions compared to their global peers. "But wait a minute!" you say. "They were not asleep during this time!!" Did it make a difference? I think not. Perhaps because they were caught up in the excitement of the gulf war, the internet revolution, the stock market boom, the 9-11 attacks, gulf war #2, the real estate boom, and so on. Whatever the reason, the most important structural problem plaguing our economy went unnoticed like termites in the basement.

Enter a rotten economy stuck in the greatest downturn since the great depression. "A Nation at Risk" has now become a nation almost completely consumed by risk. Unemployment is stuck near double digits, those who are employed are overworked and stressed out fearing they may be next, and homelessness and poverty are at depression levels. During no other time since the depression have so many people have so much fire in their bellies and so much time on their hands. Add "Waiting For Superman", and now you have added fuel to the fire.

Will the movie finally get the general public angry enough to take control of their children's education? After all, it is our tax money entrusted to the public employees (teachers, administrators, and others) to make sure they stay competitive in this dog eat dog global competition. If the system has failed us, isn't it our civic duty to find out why and demand that it be fixed? I sincerely hope, for the final time, that this is what ends up happening, and not another 20 years of sleep!

Welcome to Amerinko Academy - A New Vision in After School Programs

And welcome to the 21st century.

We at Amerinko Academy are proud to be on the threshold of opening our first Academy. The founders, which include myself, are technology professionals and parents of school age children, who have lived through the struggles of educating their own children. After many years of trying to influence the current system to provide what we consider to be world class education, we came to the conclusion that we can achieve the same goal much quicker through an after-school program. Being technology professionals, it was easy for us to see how technology can actually help with educating. What lies ahead is the culmination of several years of thinking, research, and actual results. We think that it offers the best of breed in after school programs. We hope our future students and their parents will agree with us.

In order to see our vision come to life, we chose the best curricula that have produced excellent results all over the world, including Singapore math. This math curriculum has a proven track record of teaching both concepts and mastery of skills, which the others claim to do but struggle to provide. It also recognizes what the rest of the world already practices - multilingualism; and that the best way to accomplish it is through language immersion at a very early age.

Amerinko Academy is an after school program which takes all these ideals to their logical conclusion. Reinforcing what is learned at school with homework help, using the latest technology to accelerate cognitive ability, and providing a choice of third language, robotics, chess and martial arts to round out the student. More information is available on our webiste here.

I personally believe that a blog is a great way to express our ideas and opinions to our viewership, while leaving the door open for feedback, which may be anonymous if so desired. We will be publishing more posts as time goes, so you can follow the progress of our developments.

Again, welcome!