Michael Karasick

Former VP of Innovation, IBM Watson · 1 appearance on the record.

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executivescientistengineer

Michael Karasick is a computer scientist and longtime IBM research leader who directed global research labs and oversaw innovation and R&D for IBM Watson. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from McGill University and published extensively in solid modeling, pervasive computing, and conversational AI systems.

9statements → 5claims → 2claims resolved → 4/5average certainty → 1.22/5average debate potential →

1 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

5 assertions · 1 insight · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Michael argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
IBM Watson used Apache UIMA and did not replace Hadoop
“I wouldn't assert that it replaces Hadoop. In fact, it's based on UEMA. It's an Apache project.”
Michael Karasick Jan 15, 2015 ▶ 23:14 Michael Karasick, IBM Watson // Data Driven #33 // Jan 2015 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
100% certainty 4
50% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

234 words/min while actually speaking · 85.2 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Michael Karasick: only 2 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,261 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Michael Karasick said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Not checkable as stated
IBM Watson was engineered as modular specialized bots, not one model
“The right way to think of Watson is, And the engineering is, is a lot of cooperating little bots. So think of all of the Watson engines as having an NLP component which is trained according to the domain. So there isn't one Watson, there's a bunch of them.”
Michael Karasick Jan 15, 2015 ▶ 11:50 Michael Karasick, IBM Watson // Data Driven #33 // Jan 2015 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Supported
IBM Watson used Apache UIMA and did not replace Hadoop
“I wouldn't assert that it replaces Hadoop. In fact, it's based on UEMA. It's an Apache project.”
Michael Karasick Jan 15, 2015 ▶ 23:14 Michael Karasick, IBM Watson // Data Driven #33 // Jan 2015 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Disclosure
IBM created a $100 million Watson investment fund
“And we created a hundred million dollar investment fund.”
Michael Karasick Jan 15, 2015 ▶ 2:35 Michael Karasick, IBM Watson // Data Driven #33 // Jan 2015 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Disclosure
IBM Watson has made three minority investments in startups
“And we've done, I guess, three minority investments in startups who have decided to work with us.”
Michael Karasick Jan 15, 2015 ▶ 2:40 Michael Karasick, IBM Watson // Data Driven #33 // Jan 2015 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Disclosure
IBM Watson venture fund targets Series B and C startups
“B and C, yeah. We want people to sort of, kind of know where, where their feet are.”
Michael Karasick Jan 15, 2015 ▶ 3:57 Michael Karasick, IBM Watson // Data Driven #33 // Jan 2015 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Partly supported
IBM Watson released a cookbook on Amazon with 50 AI-created recipes
“There's a cookbook out also, and it's available on Amazon. Done, done with the Institute of Culinary Education. There's kind of 50 Watson-created recipes.”
Michael Karasick Jan 15, 2015 ▶ 9:10 Michael Karasick, IBM Watson // Data Driven #33 // Jan 2015 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Oncologists, not financial firms, first contacted IBM Watson after Jeopardy
“The first people to call us after the Watson game, we expected the standard, I should say, really, really interesting IBM Customers, financial houses, didn't call us. In fact, oncologists, cancer doctors did.”
Michael Karasick Jan 15, 2015 ▶ 10:36 Michael Karasick, IBM Watson // Data Driven #33 // Jan 2015 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Insight
Deploying AI systems requires explicit evidence behind recommendations
“One of the things we learned about systems like Watson, if you're going to deploy it is people want to know why. You know, give it an answer, and they go, they want evidence.”
Michael Karasick Jan 15, 2015 ▶ 15:49 Michael Karasick, IBM Watson // Data Driven #33 // Jan 2015 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
IBM Watson hardware efficiency improved 1,700x since the Jeopardy setup
“Watson began life as a, 2300 power seven servers running a multi-processing version of Watson, all in memory, running on Linux. The original cluster is still in Yorktown, people still want to see it. We've improved it by a factor of about 1700, so now it's a l…”
Michael Karasick Jan 15, 2015 ▶ 19:33 Michael Karasick, IBM Watson // Data Driven #33 // Jan 2015 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Michael Karasick, IBM Watson // Data Driven #33 // Jan 2015 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital) Jan 15, 2015 17m
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