Solutions architects are the experts on our team at understanding and implementing Watson technology. They have developed this expertise by providing technical support to our partners through multiple mediums. Through their work, they have a deep understanding and point of view about the Watson APIs, but also the cognitive landscape at large. I interviewed solutions architect, Chris Ackerson on his thoughts on Watson and cognitive computing, as well as his specific tips and resources. Where do you see the Watson APIs growing in 2016 and beyond?

DEDHAM, MA--(Marketwired - Mar 30, 2016) - Rage Frameworks, a provider of knowledge-based automation technology and services, today announced new deployments of its traceable "deep learning" technology known as Rage AI across several global financial services, consumer products and manufacturing firms. The challenges these organizations faced required the understanding and interpretation of complex documents and integration of other transaction data from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to identify significant cost efficiencies and compliance conformance. RAGE AI incorporates deep linguistic parsing and proprietary linguistics-based innovations to understand the real meaning of documents and interpret them as a human would, and can operate completely unsupervised or with assistance by human experts. With its traceable, deep learning technology, RAGE AI significantly extends the frontier of deep learning and machine intelligence from "natural language processing" to "natural language understanding." The platform reads and interprets documents within its context, and as a totally transparent solution, RAGE AI enables knowledge workers to move forward confidently knowing the reasoning behind the platform's insights is completely auditable.

Achievements like DeepMind's AlphaGo are making headlines in the popular press, large tech companies have started a "platform war" to become the go-to company for A.I., and entrepreneurs are increasingly building machine learning products that have the potential to transform how companies operate. Exciting though the hype may be, the commercial potential of machine intelligence won't be realized unless entrepreneurs and data scientists can clearly communicate the business value of new tools to non-technical executives. And the first step to communicating clearly is to define a vocabulary to think through what machine intelligence is, how the different algorithms work, and, most importantly, what practical benefits they can provide across verticals and industries. Shivon Zilis, a partner and founding member of Bloomberg Beta, is doing just that. She has spent the past few years focused exclusively on machine intelligence, building out a vocabulary and taxonomy to help the community understand activity in the field and communicate new developments clearly and effectively.

If Bloomberg Businessweek's latest cover story didn't make obvious enough, the hour or so the company dedicated to them on stage at its BUILD developer conference should have cleared up any doubts: Microsoft sees Cortana as a big part of its future. It wants the AI assistant to do everything, but knows it can't make that dream a reality by itself. Its new framework allows developers to build an independent chatbot that plays nice with users and Cortana. It's not the only one pursuing the goal of the perfect assistant, though, and there's no telling if its efforts to inspire an army of chatbots will be successful. Although chatbots have been around for half a century, they didn't have a practical use until the internet took hold.

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Unfortunately, Microsoft Corp.'s most high-profile attempt at showcasing the future – the conversational chatbot called Tay – turned into a racist, anti-social monster that appears unfixable. But even if Tay worked perfectly, it didn't actually have any jobs to do, and the kind of bots Microsoft wants its software partners to develop and host on platforms like Skype are intended to reshape technology from something based on pointing and clicking to an actual conversation with our machines. Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella outlined his vision of the future to a crowd of software developers in a keynote speech on Wednesday at the company's Build conference in San Francisco. The event was chockablock with updates to Microsoft services: The first major update to Windows 10 was confirmed for the summer, Xbox will be better integrated with Windows, the same goes for Linux, and the HoloLens augmented reality visor will begin to ship to developers immediately. But the main thrust of the event was for Mr. Nadella to describe how bots and machine learning tools are going to create a new "distributed computing fabric" that will vault Microsoft back into relevance on mobile platforms that are built and owned by rivals at Apple and Google.

Microsoft also announced a series of APIs (22 of them) as part of its Cognitive Services. These APIs are built around more general intelligence services (vision, speech, search, contextual knowledge and so on) that developers can build into their applications. Microsoft demonstrated some incredible early applications of this, such as the ability to take a picture and have it recognize the objects in it, but also to build information about the image using what it called CaptionBot. In one demonstration, Microsoft showed off what it called CRIS, or custom recognition intelligence service, and compared a speech-to-text translation of a child speaking. Naturally, its analysis showed a much higher precision of interpretation based on its knowledge of child speech patterns.

At Microsoft's Build conference on Wednesday, CEO Satya Nadella laid out his company's vision for the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Microsoft has already made plain its ambitions to make Cortana and its machine learning-based engine more useful and pervasive. Nadella elaborated on those ambitions during Wednesday's Build keynote, describing Microsoft's concept of "conversational computing" and how it will be integrated in everything from Windows, its Edge browser, Outlook and Skype, to the entire ecosystem of software, hardware and cloud-based SaaS offerings. Nadella sees conversational computing using speech as the next user interface and framework for how all applications are developed and connected. In a callback to the name of the conference, Nadella called on developers to "build" the next wave of applications based on tools and services that Microsoft is rolling out, including 22 Cognitive Services APIs for the Azure-based Cortana Intelligence Suite (previously called the Cortana Analytics Suite) and the new Microsoft Bot Framework.

Microsoft spoke at length at Build 2016 about its vision for the future of communicative computing. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella expressed his belief that the next leap in consumer interactions with platforms will move beyond the traditional confinements of everyday operating system navigation to a more predictive artificial intelligence presence in people's lives. However, before Nadella's utopian science fiction fantasy becomes an everyday reality for the average consumer, Microsoft along with the rest of the industry will need to refine the API's, natural language frameworks, and machine learning of the bots that will be communicating with people. Shortly after Build 2016, Microsoft Cognitive Services page surfaced on the internet to help developers enable natural and contextual interactions between their services and the customers they link to. Microsoft Cognitive Services let you build apps with robust algorithms using just a few lines of code.

If you'd inadvertently unleashed a Neo-Nazi sex-bot on an unsuspecting Internet, you might be reluctant to proclaim the technology as the future of computing. Microsoft, it seems, has no such qualms. Just a few days after yanking the errant chatbot Tay from the Internet, Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, announced that he expects similar (though presumably less offensive) bots to become a commonplace. In fact, Microsoft seems to believe that "conversational computing" could be a major new paradigm in computing. "We want to take the power of human language and apply it more pervasively to all of the computing interface and the computing interactions," Nadella said during his keynote at the company's Build 2016 conference for developers.