IBM Watson For All: What is IBM Watson? (Part 1 of 5 Series)

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In February 2011, most of us got the first glimpse of ‘IBM Watson’ which represents a new era of computing called ‘cognitive computing’ with the potential to forever change the way we live and work. Watson defeated the two champions of the US TV quiz show, Jeopardy!, best known for its complex, contextual and punning wordplay covers questions from a wide variety of topics (including history and current events, the sciences, the arts, popular culture, literature, and languages). Word spread virally of the Watson’s victory with Twitter reaching 11.7M, 30121 blog mentions, and 15025 forum posts.

Cognitive Systems are defined as systems that can navigate the complexities of human language and understanding, ingest and process vast amounts of structured and unstructured data, generate and evaluate countless possibilities, and scale in proportion to the task. These systems apply human-like characteristics to conveying and manipulating ideas, that when combined with the inherent strengths of digital computing can solve problems with higher accuracy, more resilience, and on a massive scale. Watson is an example of Cognitive System, which can -

teases apart the human language to identify inferences between text passages
demonstrate human-like accuracy
performs at speeds far faster, and at a scale far bigger, than a human

Cognitive systems like Watson builds on the current paradigm of Programmatic Systems and is not meant to be a replacement. Programmatic systems will be there for the foreseeable future but in many cases, keeping pace with the demands of an increasingly complex business environment and challenges requires a paradigm shift in IT. A right approach is needed that recognizes realities and treats them as opportunities rather than challenges in order to address it.