Finding Swimming Pools with IBM Watson

Much of my recent research and development time recently has been spent exploring IBM’s machine learning. For anyone that’s spent time with me will know that I’m a little bit obsessed with the potential of Watson’s APIs. I’m impressed with the direction that IBM is taken and they’ve become creators of innovate software services of the future. As they transition away from hardware this is a very exciting time.

I was grateful for the opportunity to share my knowledge and excitement for Watson at both BathCamp and PHP South West.

Youtube

Slides

In my presentation I share how easy it is for experienced developers but novice ‘machine learners’ are able to get up and running without needing a background in statistics.

The highlight of my experience with Watson so far is working with the Visual Recognition API.

I first experimented with this API through my interests in website profiling. I was looking to classify the industry vertical of ecommerce sites. I first attempted this with naive Bayes with not a lot of success. I then trained Watson on screenshots of 1000 ecommerce home pages that I had classified. The results were impressive.

I then moved on to an opportunity whereby I classified property photography for an estate agent. With automated feeds of properties coming through, it’s hard to validate the images are optimised and adhere to the terms and conditions of the site.

The property was primarily located in Spain so some of the categorisations that were important to us where whether the photo was of: Swimming Pool, Inside, Outside, which room it was in and whether there were any company logos inserted into the image.

While only a prototype project, I was able to correctly classify images with Swimming Pools over 80% of the time.

I’ve released a PHP library should you wish to integrate this into your own site which is available on Packagist.

There are plenty of other APIs that I’m looking to get experience with:

  • Trade-off Analytics
    • Can I work this into Ecommerce. We’re used to using filters to represent our product desires but this is far too rigid a system. If we could show alternative products that fall just outside the customers filters in theory you may be able to up-sell/aid discovery of products that wouldn’t otherwise have been found.
  • Retrieve and Rank
    • This appears to be tailored to larger text sources and natural language questions and search.
      By my reckoning there is still potential for this to be used as a product search service that is trained to re-rank products based on their add to basket and conversion rate for that keyword. Admittedly it may be overkill when their service is capable of much more.
    • The other idea is using it to train it on Meanbee’ internal documentation site, Confluence, so that we can use a Slack bot that can advise on the best place to look when someone is struggling.
  • Visual Recognition
    • I would enjoy working more with this. Image recognition is one of the areas of machine learning which has only recently achieved better than human accuracy. This means there’s greater application opportunities that haven’t been tried so often before. One idea is training it on social media photos to help discover and filter out feeds for brands so that they can prioritise engagement with customers.
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