Have you guys heard about IBM Watson? In 2011 IBM participated in the american television game show called Jeopardy!. Not by sending one of their employees but by sending their supercomputer IBM Watson. It won Jeopardy! against some of the show’s best players and since then IBM developed it into a full scale cloud-based platform that can be used for analysis, web services and developmental activities.
IBM Watson competing in Jeopardy!
Throughout the years Watson has been used by many companies in different industries to boost revenues, improve efficiency and in some cases save lives. As mentioned before these uses are realized through cloud-based cognitive computing services that allow users to ask natural language questions and visualize data patterns.
Some interesting uses worth mentioning are:
- Wimbledon
The cooperation between Watson and Wimbledon’s AI-powered video software allows for the automated generation of video highlights. Watson pulls in information and based on factors such as crowd noise, social traction, facial recognition and sentiment analysis of players it will develop highlight packages. This is a good example of how traditional tasks performed by video editors are more efficiently executed by new technology.
- American Cancer Society
This partnership is focused on providing cancer patients with personalised information and advice based on their current needs. Patients are able to ask questions in natural language and receive audio responses based on data from Cancer.org and the National Cancer Information Centre. This allows for a large scale but personalized offering of health services.
- Mears group, UK housing and social care provider
This company maintains over 700.000 social homes and employs around 20.000 individuals. The Mears group partnered with IBM watson to faster analyze its 600 million health and safety/accident reports in their databases. Based on this analysis Watson suggested new revenue opportunities to the company.
Based on the information above it becomes clear that IBM has managed to transform their supercomputer, once started as a single project to win a specific game show, into a multi-industry cloud-based consultancy tool.
My question to the readers is whether you have any personal experience with IBM Watson and in what way?
