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IBM's Watson: The Future of Computing
by Darryl K. Taft
Optimized for Tasks
IBM's Watson signals a new era in computing, where computers will increasingly be built and optimized for specific tasks and be able to learn.
Natural Language
Watson represents a major breakthrough in the ability of computers to understand natural language, which humans use to capture and communicate knowledge.
Voracious Appetite
Watson can evaluate the equivalent of hundreds of millions of pages of material—books, reports, articles and so on—in 3 seconds or less.
Experience
Watson can understand and learn how to improve its performance as it plays. It learns from experience.
T.J. Watson
Named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, Watson will enable computers to be even more helpful to humans moving forward.
Analytics
When combined with Watson's ability to understand natural language, IBM's analytics technology is able to analyze massive amounts of data and arrive at the correct answer to a staggering variety of difficult questions across multiple industries.
Wave of Change
Watson is a glimpse into the enormous amount of change that will come to all kinds of industries. The potential benefits are endless—a better informed and more engaged citizenry, and a dramatic increase in the ability of everyday people to access the information essential to modern life.
Potential Uses
This technology is poised to vastly improve the experience that people have with medical professionals, finance industry, retail, government and transportation.
Radiology
Watson's technology and IBM's analytics offerings hold the potential to create algorithms to automatically identify and flag anomalies on MRIs and images much smaller than a radiologist can see with the human eye.
Cardiology
Watson can be used to guide cardiologists to avoid the most common mistakes in the field by ingesting and analyzing treatment data and test results and automatically looking for causes for concern such as the overuse of diuretics.
Primary Care
Watson has the ability to combine diagnosis data and treatment recommendations with analytics and even locate specialists in a patient's health plan who have the highest cure rate and live within 15 miles of the patient's home. Such capabilities can provide patients with better care under their primary care team, reduce costly chronic illness and offer more effective treatment.
Financial Services—Risk Management
Watson can dramatically improve financial services firms' risk management and provide answers in real time about a company's strategic decisions and market changes.
Financial Services—Investing
The supercomputer also can help investors learn about their portfolios and decide what investments to make. The system will help investors answer specific questions, such as, "What should I do with that $10,000 bonus I just received?"
Government—Social Services
Watson's capabilities can help drive smarter government, particularly in areas such as social services. Social workers sometimes can't differentiate the claims for life-saving treatments from the hundreds of other requests in their queue. A system with Watson's abilities can help the caseworker not only identify those claims, but also find answers to questions like, "How many cases in the past looked like this?"
Government—Permits
Obtaining a building permit for a new municipal structure often requires an employee to digest a number of data sources, often totaling thousands of pages and written in an unstructured (i.e., not machine-readable) form. Watson-like technology would be able to quickly read and understand those thousands of pages and provide the employee with a concise list of the processes and dependencies for obtaining the permit. Work that might take a week could be delivered in an hour to the employee's computer.
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If you watch the quiz show "Jeopardy" on television this week, you will no doubt be amazed at what you see—a computer from IBM named Watson. That the outcome of the match is not as important as the system itself does not matter. IBM's Watson signals a new era in computing, where computers will increasingly be built and optimized for specific tasks and be able to learn. On Feb. 14, Watson will face its toughest challenge yet. "Jeopardy! The IBM Challenge" will pit the two greatest champions in the show's history against a computing system that will rival their ability to deliver a single, precise answer to a "Jeopardy" clue. (If you can't wait until the show's airing to find out who won, click here.) Over the last century, IBM has reached numerous scientific breakthroughs through its commitment to research and its tradition of Grand Challenges. These Grand Challenges work to push science in ways that weren't thought possible before. "Jeopardy! The IBM Challenge" poses a specific question with very real business implications: Can a system be designed that applies advanced data management and analytics to natural language to uncover a single, reliable insight—in a fraction of a second? Watson relies on advanced analytics to answer questions precisely. But how does analytics work? Operating on a single CPU, it could take Watson 2 hours to answer a single question. A typical "Jeopardy" contestant can accomplish this feat in less than 3 seconds. For Watson to rival the speed of its human competitors in delivering a single, precise answer to a question requires custom algorithms, terabytes of storage and thousands of Power7 computing cores working in a massively parallel system.