How IBM's Watson Is Helping Train Service Dogs

Can man's best friend be a machine's best friend? Guiding Eyes for the Blind—a non-profit dedicated to breeding, raising, training, and placing service dogs with the visually impaired—is adopting the IBM Cloud to help it get out from under a mountain of paperwork.

"People don't typically think about an organization like ours as a Big Data company, but we cannot succeed or grow without it," CEO Thomas Panek said in a statement.

Years worth of information about dogs—breeding details, medical reports, genetic mapping, communications from trainers and host families—allows Guiding Eyes to uncover insights about health, behavior, temperament, and more.

"However, all of that was becoming increasingly difficult on our legacy systems," Panek said. "By putting it on the IBM Cloud, we will simplify our IT and make our data more accessible for more analysis."

Guiding Eyes has graduated more than 7,300 guide dogs since its founding in 1954; this partnership, it hopes, will improve the organization's current dog graduation rate of 36 percent annually.

Considering it costs $50,000 to train a guide dog, any improvements to the process would be a boon for finances—and make more guide dogs available for those in need.

But migrating records will also provide easier access to national colleagues, partners, and scientists studying this genetic and behavioral data.

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In January, the non-profit invited Dr. Chris Tseng, professor of computer science at San Jose State University, to analyze its trove of DNA and behavioral data. Using IBM Watson Personality and Natural Language Processing, Tseng and his students are spending the semester evaluating data; by May, they hope to establish a process for identifying data patterns and correlating traits, environmental conditions, and personalities—of dogs and trainers.

"Guiding Eyes is a great example of how IBM Cloud can help organizations innovate new business models and processes that were heretofore unthinkable," said William Karpovich, general manager of the IBM Cloud Platform. "Through the IBM Cloud, Guiding Eyes is now able to advance even further its critical work in breeding, raising and training service dogs for those in need."