Hello, Cramer is excited to share out creative thinking for the 2015 World of Watson. We understand how critically important the event is to IBM as an organization. In the pages ahead, we present two engaging creative approaches. Both will reflect the Watson brand well, and you’ll see how Cramer’s dynamic team of creative, technical, and video experts will work with you every step of the way to create, coordinate, and produce creative solutions that will exceed your expectations. To make this event as innovative and memorable as ever, IBM must choose a project management team that is well-organized and a production company known for flawless execution. We stand ready to ensure that the appropriate brand and messaging is conveyed to the attendees in a sophisticated and powerful way. Cramer is confident that if given the opportunity, we will exceed all expectations. Sincerely,
TJ Martin Executive VP, Managing Director
What We Heard
World of Watson is a new conference for born-on-the-cloud developers, entrepreneurs, ISVs, and organizations in the tech space interested in the Watson Ecosystem. Watson is a new era of computing. IBM announced the historic Watson division in January of 2014. The Watson headquarters was opened in October of 2014 in Silicon Alley at 51 Astor Place, New York. Watson enables a new partnership between people and computers that enhance and scale human expertise. IBM is trying to be a little different with Watson. “We expected something like Watson for Google.� Watson is a large-scale start-up and the conference should reflect this persona. The World of Watson will take place at Dugall Greenhouse with an expected audience of 1,000 people. The main objectives are to communicate the latest news from Watson, gain press and analyst exposure, create a learning environment among peers, and build advocacy around IBM Watson and Cognitive Computing. The budget is not to exceed $2M for all costs associated with the event pre-production, production, and post-production including all labor, equipment rental, and purchased materials. At the onset of the project, the team (IBM and Cramer) will agree to a project timeline and budget that is aligned to the most realistic way to design and execute World of Watson.
Concept 1
Watson Alley
Concept 1 | Watson Alley
Walk-In We’re bringing Silicon Alley under the big roof with an experience that’s part street festival, part business conference, and 100% developers’ playground. This is a showcase for the human spirit. An endless discovery zone with the soul of a start-up and the mind of the world’s most powerful machine. Our guests begin their journey with their eyes on the horizon and the awe-inspiring view of Watson’s HQ - a 3-dimensional, high-tech installation, at the far end of the arena, that includes Watson rising in the sky above. This is the staging area where headlines are made and announcements make waves. Where keynotes and panels and entertainers come to share their greatest. It’s an interactive launch point, engaging and highly motivating for the masses who have gathered here to usher in a new era of computing. Watson Alley will buzz with activity as our community of hackers, hopefuls, and dreamers work with Watson to bring their vision to life and venture into uncharted thinking. Accented with inspiring imagery, session stages, and moving displays, Watson Alley will immerse our guests in a perpetual exchange of information and ideas from the like-minded.
Watson Alley Will Be Buzzing With Activity.
Satellite Stage for Industry Roundtable
Watson Alley Will Be Buzzing With Activity
Speaker Support
Opening Experience A video begins. Playful music as lines of code type across the screen. A female voice fills the room.
Concept 1 | Watson Alley
VOICE How big do you dream? A line of code is typed onto the screen. The cursor blinks and waits. VOICES To here? Or here? Another line of code is typed onto the screen. The cursor blinks and waits. VOICE Or out there? The camera takes flight and leaves the computer screen to the real world with a breathtaking horizon that stretches across the room. VOICE Do you dream of the difference you will make in the way humans communicate. Heal? Protect? The camera moves into a world beyond the horizon to visit a series of vignettes where the human spirit – and cognitive computing – has lead to breakthrough moments. VOICE Will your dream save a life? Or make millions of lives better? Happier? Or worth living? We see a young woman in physical therapy who is able to walk again (bio-mechanics). VOICE Will your dream secure a future for generations or generate an endless supply of power? Or food? Or water? A relief organization at work in a remote village.
VOICE
Concept 1 | Watson Alley
Do you know? Cut to a live shot of the crowd from a camera mounted above the screen. Text transition as the words come full screen over the image. Why Are You Here? Watson graphic enters and alters the words. Why You Are Here. VOICE You are here because within you lies the answer. You are here because you have the soul of a start-up that could start a revolution. Montage of the many faces of young people who are putting Watson into practice. At your disposal the tireless mind of the world’s most powerful machine, whose thirst for knowledge is only exceeded by your own…human spirit. The words Human Spirit are typed onto the screen. The cursor rests and blinks. The words are blended together with an animated Watson graphic. We invite you to dream, explore, and engage with Watson. To share your spirit and see how far you go together. We go live to a ‘stadium cam’ overhead that captures a fly-over of the crowd.
VOICE Welcome to Watson Alley. Are you ready? Cut to a live shot from a camera mounted at the top of the screen looking down at our audience. Music, sound design, and animation build to a crescendo, landing on the show theme. The cursor blinks. And waits.
Main Stage General Session & Feature Session
Satellite Stages Industry Round Tables
Partner Peds & Developer Playground Floorplan
Technical Drawings
Concept 2
Watson is Waiting
Mood Board (Brad)
Concept 2 | Watson is Waiting
Walk-In As our guests enter they will be immersed instantly into the World of Watson. Transfixed in our moment of awe. It’s theater-in-the-round on a grand scale with Watson as our living centerpiece. Throughout the conference, Watson will play an integral role, interacting (via lighting and special effects) with every corner of the room in a continual exchange of information and ideas. Pulsing and vibrating - the room will always feel alive and gaining strength. Developers at play. With the world’s most powerful tool. Building with Watson. Designing and engaging. Testing and challenging their own capacity to think. To learn. In constant pursuit of their breakthrough moment. As Roundtable Discussions lead into our General Session and break times into Feature Sessions, we will employ lighting, sound design, and projections to capture our audience’s attention and lead them from one experience to the next.
Our Guests Will Be Immersed Into World of Watson
Center Stage for General Session and Feature Sessions
Center Stage for General Session and Feature Sessions
Satellite Stage for Industry Roundtable
Center Stage for General Session and Feature Sessions
Developer Playground
Concept 2 | Watson is Waiting
Opening Experience Massive sound vibrates through our audience as the screens buzz to life - our opening moment will set the tone with a challenge to human curiosity. The video begins. Screen goes static with a cacophony of sound hitting our audience from every direction. Mixes of voices, languages, sound design. Mostly imperceptible, with the hint of crackled historic recording that repeats... “Watson. Come here. I need you.” Screens flash with sound waves. Quick hits of light bounce across the room. The screen blinks dark to a singular pinpoint of white light. (Two ethereal female voices with ambiguous accents bounce dialogue and build on each other’s lines.) VOICE Welcome to the World of Watson. Watson orb glowing heartbeat triggers an ‘ekg’ like blink across the screens and goes 360 around the room. VOICES Never before has there been a gathering of this kind. Where the perpetual intelligence of technology converges with the limitless curiosity of the human spirit. Your spirit. Bright pinpoints of light beam from the orbital satellites that surround Watson like lightning flashes into the crowd. Dreamlike imagery splashes across the screens. Music builds momentum.
VOICES You are here for a purpose. To think. To build. To Design.
Concept 2 | Watson is Waiting
To unlock the questions and answer the challenge.
VOICES
VOICES
To engage in the community of discoveries
Watson’s cognitive power knows no limitations. There are no barriers and no boundaries.
(together)
Expand your thinking.
Exponentially infinite.
It’s not humanly possible to comprehend all that is possible.
But Watson needs you.
The children stop running and stare down at the crowd. The screen blinks black. A blinking cursor appears.
Text on the screen morphs:
Watson is Waiting.
The World Needs Watson Just know that it is.
Watson Needs You
Here. In this room.
The World Needs You
Within you there is a hunger to solve. An insatiable curiosity.
VOICES To ask To seek
A desire to connect.
To discover
With each other.
To work together To be the next human who propels humankind
To connect the dots.
To accelerate the evolution of imagination by advancing your theory.
A camera in the crowd captures live audience reactions and seamlessly blends them into the dizzying array of imagery in constant motion around the room.
To be the vision that leads beyond our horizon.
Bright lights beam from the four corners of the room connecting with the rotating panels below Watson. Watson feeds from the energy and glows brighter, pulses faster.
Watson is waiting.
The world’s most powerful tool is at your disposal. A bright display of lights emanate from our Watson centerpiece. Flashing to all corners of the room, across the crowd. A child runs with a kite across the screens, being chased by other children in our 360-degree theater. It’s dizzying and nearly overpowering until all that’s left glowing is a cursor on the screen and one impossibly bright light inside Watson.
Satellite Stages Industry Round Tables
Center Stage General Session & Feature Session
Satellite Stages Industry Round Tables
Partner Peds & Developer Playground
Floorplan
Technical Drawing (Chris Moran)
Technical Drawings
Speaker Recommendations
Jerome Pesenti
David Ferrucci
David Karp
Jerome Presenti has been involved with natural language processing, search, big data, and machine learning for the past 16 years. He currently leads a global team of researchers and software engineers within IBM Watson. His team is developing state-of-the-art software in question and answering, dialog, speech, natural language processing, and automated machine translation, and is responsible for the Watson Developer Cloud, which exposes these and other cognitive technologies as easyto-consume cloud services.
David Ferrucci is the principal investigator who in 20072011 led a team of IBM and academic researchers and engineers to the development of the Watson computer system that won a television quiz.
David Karp is an American web developer and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of the short-form blogging platform Tumblr. According to Forbes, Karp’s net worth exceeds $200 million, and Tumblr has been valued at $800 million. On May 20, 2013, it was announced that Yahoo! and Tumblr had reached an agreement for Yahoo! to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Karp would remain as CEO of the company.
Presenti joined IBM through the acquisition of Vivisimo, the search and text analytics company he co-founded in 2000. Vivisimo grew organically to 130 employees and had many large corporate and government customers such as P&G, Airbus, J&J, DIA, SSA, or the US Air Force. Vivisimo’s technology was based on the machine learning research conducted with his co-founders in the CS department of CMU from 1998 to 2000. Presenti is also active in the big data community through a local non-profit that he created, Pittsburgh DataWorks, whose mission is to promote and provide access to big data education, projects, talent, and technologies and to help establish Pittsburgh as a leader in big data.
Ferrucci graduated from Manhattan College, with a BS degree in biology, and from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in 1994 with a PhD degree in computer science, specializing in knowledge representation and reasoning. He joined IBM’s Thomas J. Watson in 1995 and left in 2012 to join Bridgewater Associates.
Kevin Rose Internet entrepreneur Kevin Rose was born February 21, 1977, in Las Vegas, Nevada. After dropping out of the University of Las Vegas, Rose began coding software and in 2004 launched Digg, a social news website, with just $1,200. In a few short years, Digg was a smash success—and its founder, a rock star. A shrewd investor, Rose has put money into the early launches of Twitter and Foursquare.
Karp began his career as an intern under Fred Seibert at the animation company Frederator Studios, where he built the studio’s first blogging platform and conceived, wrote, and edited their first internet video network, Channel Frederator. Karp went on to work for online parenting forum UrbanBaby until it was sold to CNET in 2006. Karp then started his own software consulting company, Davidville, where he worked with computer engineer Marco Arment on projects for clients. During a gap between contracts in 2006, the two began work on a microblogging website, which was launched as Tumblr in February 2007. As of February 1, 2015, Tumblr hosts over 221.3 million blogs. In August 2009, Karp was named Best Young Tech Entrepreneur 2009 by BusinessWeek and in 2010, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.
Ray Kurzweil
Robert Scoble
Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions. Called “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes magazine, Kurzweil was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison.” PBS selected him as one of the “sixteen revolutionaries who made America.”
Robert Scoble is an American blogger, technical evangelist, and author. Scoble is best known for his blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technology evangelist at Microsoft. He currently works for Rackspace and the Rackspace sponsored community site Building 43 promoting breakthrough technology and startups. He previously worked for Fast Company as a video blogger.
Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Among Kurzweil’s many honors, he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, holds twenty honorary Doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents.
Hugh Herr Hugh Herr, who heads the Biomechatronics research group at the MIT Media Lab, is creating bionic limbs that emulate the function of natural limbs. In 2011, TIME magazine coined Herr the “Leader of the Bionic Age” because of his revolutionary work in the emerging field of biomechatronics–technology that marries human physiology with electromechanics. A double amputee himself, he is responsible for breakthrough advances in bionic limbs that provide greater mobility and new hope to those with physical disabilities. Herr’s research group has developed gait-adaptive knee prostheses for transfemoral
amputees and variable impedance ankle-foot exoskeletons for patients suffering from drop foot, a gait pathology caused by stroke, cerebral palsy, and multiple sclerosis. He has also designed his own bionic legs, the world’s first bionic foot and calf system called the BiOM. Herr is the author and co-author of over 80 peer-reviewed manuscripts and patents, chronicling the science and technology behind his many innovations. The computercontrolled knee was named one of TIME magazine’s Top Ten Inventions in 2004; the robotic ankle-foot prosthesis, which mimics the action of a biological ankle and, for the first time, provides transtibial amputees with a natural gait, was named to the same list in 2007. Also in 2007, Herr was presented with the 13th annual Heinz Award for Technology, the Economy and Employment. Herr’s story has been told in the biography Second Ascent, The Story of Hugh Herr; a 2002 National Geographic film, Ascent: The Story of Hugh Herr; and 2012 features in CNN, The Economist, Discover, and Nature.
Entertainment Recommendations
Penn & Teller
Joel Thomas Zimmerman (deadmau5)
Penn & Teller are famed American illusionists and entertainers who have performed together since the late 1970s, noted for their ongoing act which combines elements of comedy with magic. The duo, having been featured in numerous stage and television shows, currently headline in Las Vegas at The Rio. Penn Jillette serves as the act’s orator and raconteur. Teller, however, generally does not speak while performing, and instead communicates through mime and nonverbals, although his voice can occasionally be heard during their live shows and television appearances.
Joel Thomas Zimmerman, better known by his stage name deadmau5 (pronounced “dead mouse”) along with his signature headgear, a giant mouse head. He is a Canadian progressive-house music producer and performer from Toronto, Ontario. Zimmerman produces a variety of styles within the house genre and sometimes other forms of electronic dance music. His tracks have been included in numerous compilation albums such as In Search of Sunrise 6: Ibiza and DEADMAU5 Tech-Trance-Electro-Madness.
Thomas Wesley Pentz (Diplo) Louis C.K. Louis C.K. is a Mexican-American comedian, editor, writer, producer, director, and actor. He is the creator, star, writer, director of the highly acclaimed FX comedy series Louie. C.K. is noteworthy for innovating direct-to-fan sales of tickets to his stand-up shows and DRMfree video concert downloads via his website. Over the course of his career, he has been nominated for 30 Primetime Emmy Awards, winning writing awards for The Chris Rock Show, Louie
Thomas Wesley Pentz, who goes by his stage name Diplo, is a Grammy award-winning American DJ, music producer, rapper and songwriter based in Los Angeles, California. He founded and manages record company Mad Decent, as well as co-founding the non-profit organization Heaps Decent. He is also the co-creator and lead member of the electronic dancehall music project, Major Lazer. His 2013 EP “Revolution” debuted at #68 on the Billboard 200. Diplo has worked with many notable pop artists, such as Britney Spears, Beyoncé, No Doubt, Justin Bieber and Usher