New Initiative Aims to Expand Watson’s Reach

IBM’s famous cognitive computer is getting some new attention aimed at expanding the societal footprint of the interactive computing system. IBM has announced that a new initiative is underway to build new systems to help people interact with the Watson system, and move humanity further down the path of what IBM says is a new era of computing.

The new initiative aims at discovering and expanding the ways in which people can utilize the Watson system across vertical markets. Participating in the program are Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

The collaborative research initiative, announced at the Thomas J. Watson Research center last week, will seek to identify areas where Watson can be leveraged to provide value. Initial research topics underway include the following:

• MIT – How socio-technical tools and applications can boost the collective performance of moderate-sized groups of humans engaged in collaborative tasks such as decision making. 
• RPI – How advances in processing power, data availability, and algorithmic techniques can enable the practical application of a variety of artificial intelligence techniques. 
• CMU – How systems should be architected to support intelligent, natural interaction with all kinds of information in support of complex human tasks. 
• NYU – How deep learning is impacting many areas of science where automated pattern recognition is essential. 

Already, Watson is being used in healthcare applications. Earlier this year, IBM announced a Watson-based cloud service, dubbed “IBM Watson Engagement Advisor,” that is targeted at providing call centers and mobile customer service apps with the power of cognitive computing.

This summer, IBM Research director Dr. John Kelly discussed how Watson was being used by doctors to aid in tricky diagnosis processes. “We’re finding… that experts in their field use Watson not to get the top answer – the number one or number two diagnosis– but what’s number three and number four that Watson came up statistically,” explained Dr. Kelly. “They want to be able to probe into Watson’s logic, and how did Watson conclude that? Because that’s where discovery occurs, and that’s where they’re making sure that their own personal backgrounds and prejudices aren’t influencing their decisions.”

Kelly explained that the Watson system ingests raw information in unstructured text and, deciphers it using a very sophisticated natural language system developed through 20-plus years of IBM research. Kelly says that the Watson system can understand very subtle implications in natural language and draw correlation and contexts in different pieces of natural language information. Watson, Kelly says, uses sophisticated mathematics and statistical engines to not only understand the language, but to look for possible information that could be relevant to whatever is being searched for.

While they are looking for new ways to deploy the Watson system, it has started to become entrenched in the medical field, particularly in the field of cancer research, where Kelly says the Watson system has been employed and is working with some of the top oncologists and medical systems in the United States. “Watson has been learning all of the world’s written knowledge about cancer research,” he said. “[Medical professionals in the space] see Watson as a way of advancing their own capability and deploying their knowledge.”

For IBM, Watson represents a “third era” of computing technology, where computers are no longer rote input and processing systems, but rather cognitive learning systems that take advantage of the large amounts of data being generated.

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