The Watson Update

July 15, 2016

IBM invested a lot of resources, time, and finances into developing the powerful artificial intelligence computer Watson. The company has been trying for years to justify the expense as well as make money off their invention, mostly by having Watson try every conceivable industry that could benefit from big data-from cooking to medicine. We finally have an update on Watson says ZDNet in the article, “IBM Talks About Progress On Watson, OpenPower.”

Watson is a cognitive computer system that learns, supports natural user interfaces, values user expertise, and evolves with new information. Evolving is the most important step, because that will allow Watson to keep gaining experience and learn. When Watson was first developed, IBM fed it general domain knowledge, then made the Watson Discovery to find answers to specific questions. This has been used in the medical field to digest all the information created and applying it to practice.

IBM also did this:

“Most recently IBM has been focused on making Watson available as a set of services for customers that want to build their own applications with natural question-and-answer capabilities. Today it has 32 services available on the Watson Developer Cloud hosted on its Bluemix platform-as-a-service… Now IBM is working on making Watson more human. This includes a Tone Analyzer (think of this as a sort spellchecker for tone before you send that e-mail to the boss), Emotion Analysis of text, and Personality Insights, which uses things you’ve written to assess your personality traits.”

Cognitive computing has come very far since Watson won Jeopardy. Pretty soon the technology will be more integrated into our lives. The bigger question is how will change society and how we live?

Whitney Grace, July 15, 2016

There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden Web/Dark

Web meet up on July 26, 2016. Information is at this link: http://bit.ly/29tVKpx.

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Analytics, Cloud computing, Data, IBM Watson, News, Technology

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.