How IBM Watson Is Helping to Make Data-Driven Breakthrough Discoveries

by Darryl K. Taft

IBM President, Chairman and CEO Ginni Rometty joins (counterclockwise starting from her left) Mike Rhodin, senior vice president of the IBM Watson Group, in talking to Dave Aldous, vice president of Sanofi; Dr. Olivier Lichtarge; and Tom Malone, the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, prior to the beginning of the Watson in the Age of Discovery event at the Museum of Art and Design in New York City.

Mike Rhodin, senior vice president of the IBM Watson Group, talks about how Watson has moved from winning the Jeopardy! game show to helping to treat and seek cures for cancer, as well as to fight crime.

Dave Aldous, vice president of Sanofi, talks about how his company is issuing Watson to help speed up the discovery of alternate indications for existing drugs. Watson is able to understand and extract useful information by reading millions of pages of scientific literature and then visualizing relationships between drugs and other potential diseases they could target while providing supporting evidence each step of the way.

Ajay Royyuru, director of the Computational Biology Center at IBM Research, talks about the use of Watson in genomics research, where IBM is working with the New York Genome Center in a clinical study to help oncologists deliver DNA-based treatment for glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer that kills more than 13,000 Americans a year. The results of the study could help lead to more personalized treatment opportunities for patients.

Soledad Cepeda, director of epidemiology at Johnson & Johnson, talks about how her team is collaborating with IBM to teach Watson to read and understand scientific papers that detail clinical trial outcomes used to develop and evaluate medications and other treatments.

Scott Spangler, principal data scientist for IBM Watson Innovations, talks about how, working with Baylor College of Medicine, IBM Watson cognitive technology can visually display connections in scientific literature and drug information. In this image, Watson displays protein pathways that can help researchers accelerate scientific breakthroughs by spotting linkages that were previously undetected.

David Goldstein, director of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), talks about how engineers can use Watson to accelerate R&D. “Forget about search; it’s all about retrieval,” he said. “There’s no analytics.”

Roberto Villasenor, chief of police for the city of Tucson, Ariz., speaks about how his department worked with IBM to create IBM i2 CopLink, a database application that consolidates policing data from many sources, aids collaboration and helps generate tactical leads. Villasenor says he looks forward to using Watson technology to advance law enforcement efforts in Tucson. “If cognitive computing can help us to analyze all the mounds of data we have to go through, that would be tremendously beneficial to law enforcement,” he said.

James Briscione, director of culinary development at the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE), speaks of how the institute has teamed up with IBM and Watson to help create new recipes and mouth-watering dishes. Briscione manned the IBM Watson Cognitive Cooking food truck at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference earlier this year.

The Institute of Culinary Education’s Briscione displays an image of a Portuguese-inspired lobster roll that Watson conjured up from its cognitive computing data banks.