Inside IBM’s Watson Headquarters in NYC’s Silicon Alley

by Darryl K. Taft

On Oct. 8 in New York City, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty and Senior Vice President Mike Rhodin opened IBM’s new global Watson headquarters at 51 Astor Place in Silicon Alley, the home for next-generation computing systems that learn.

On Oct. 7, IBM Watson Group Senior Vice President Mike Rhodin demonstrates Watson at work in its Client Experience Center at its new global headquarters at 51 Astor Place in New York City’s Silicon Alley. Watson is a groundbreaking platform that represents a new era of computing based on its ability to interact in natural language, process vast amounts of big data to uncover new patterns and insights, and learn from each interaction.

On Oct. 7 in New York City, IBM Watson Group Senior Vice President Mike Rhodin and travel entrepreneur Terry Jones attend the opening of IBM Watson’s global headquarters in New York City’s Silicon Alley. Terry Jones is launching a new company powered by Watson called WayBlazer that will transform the travel-planning experience.

On Oct. 7, IBM Watson Group Vice President, Client Experience Centers, Ed Harbour stands in front of the IBM Watson global headquarters in New York City’s Silicon Alley.

Terry Jones, founder of Travelocity and founding chairman of Kayak.com, is launching a new travel company WayBlazer, based on IBM Watson.

Here’s a look at the interactive wall in the Client Experience Center in IBM’s Watson headquarters at 51 Astor Place in NYC.

Here’s a look at the lobby of the Watson headquarters at 51 Astor Place in New York City.

IBM Watson global headquarters is open for business at 51 Astor Place in New York City’s Silicon Alley.

Red Ant offers a retail sales trainer mobile app that lets store employees easily identify individual customers’ buying preferences by analyzing demographics, purchase history and wish lists, as well as product information, local pricing, customer reviews and tech specs. It uses voice or text input to enable a natural question-and-answer interaction against the wealth of information available within a retail business, including product information, copybooks, manuals, customer reviews and more.

Reflexis takes insights from Watson and provides prioritized real-time alerts and tasks with best practice actions to corporate, regional and store managers—based on local events, social media and other influences on demand—to provide the best possible customer experience.

Findability Sciences changes the way “good” is done by bringing a Watson app to the non-profit sector to enable investors and donors to ask questions using natural language and receive answers instantaneously. This enables funders to make smarter investing decisions and better work to maximize existing investments to deliver the most impact.

LifeLearn is changing the way veterinarians better care for pets by empowering doctors with its mobile app that crowd-sources data using simple Q&As to identify better treatment options.

GenieMD is a mobile platform that empowers patients to ask questions regarding health conditions, medications, etc., using conversational, natural language. Watson understands and can learn from the questions and answers, and provides health recommendations to the patients.

Welltok built the CaféWell Concierge app, which processes massive volumes of health data and content to dialogue with consumers and provide dynamic, personalized guidance to optimize their health.

@Point of Care is a physician-facing mobile app that is successfully using Watson’s cognitive computing technology to understand questions posed in natural language and find relevant clinical information within resource libraries quickly and with a high degree of accuracy.

WayBlazer, a new company led by travel visionary and entrepreneur Terry Jones, who founded Travelocity and Kayak.com, is looking to redefine the travel experience. Powered by the cognitive intellect of Watson, WayBlazer knows, engages, advises and learns about a consumer with each interaction, using a visual and natural language interface to make sure optimal travel choices are made.

SparkCognition, a pioneer in cognitive security, is deploying Watson to think like a security expert and can discover potential threats that may not even yet exist by making queries into an organization’s big data.

SparkCognition’s fast-growing cognitive security repository aggregates massive numbers of security events to fuel our cutting-edge ML and Pattern Recognition algorithms.