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The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE is a $5 million competition, challenging teams globally to develop and demonstrate how humans can collaborate with powerful AI technologies to tackle the world's grand challenges. The prize aims to accelerate adoption of AI technologies and spark creative, innovative, and audacious demonstrations of the technology that are truly scalable and solve societal grand challenges. To encourage innovation in any form, the competition is an open challenge in AI. Rather than set a single, universal goal for all teams, this competition will invite teams to each create their own goal and solution to a grand challenge. The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE is a four-year competition with annual milestone competitions in 2017 and 2018.

Photocopiers, PCs, and video conferencing rooms all rose from being technological novelties to standard tools of corporate life. Researchers at IBM are experimenting with an idea for another: a room where executives can go to talk over business problems with a version of Watson, the computer system that defeated two Jeopardy! An early prototype has been made in the Cognitive Environments Lab, which opened last year at IBM's Thomas J. Watson research center in Yorktown Heights, New York. It is intended to explore how software that can understand and participate in human interactions could "magnify human cognition," says Dario Gil, director for symbiotic cognitive systems at IBM research. The lab looks more or less like a normal meeting space, but with a giant display taking up one wall, and an array of microphones installed in the ceiling. Everything said in the room can be instantly transcribed, providing a detailed record of any meeting, and allowing the system to listen out for commands addressed to "Watson."

Data scientists have a lot of tools at their disposal, but not all of them are equally accessible. Aiming to put IBM's Watson AI within closer reach, analytics firm Columbus Collaboratory on Thursday released a new open-source R extension called CognizeR. R is an open-source language that's widely used by data scientists for statistical and analytics applications. Previously, data scientists would have had to exit R to tap Watson's capabilities, coding the calls to Watson's application programming interfaces (APIs) in another language, such as Java or Python. Now, CognizeR lets them tap into Watson's so-called "cognitive" artificial-intelligence services without leaving their native development environment.

I have seen the future, and it is a world of unparalleled convenience, untold marketing opportunities, and zero privacy. IBM held an event in San Francisco Thursday to show off new capabilities in Watson, it's artificial intelligence system that's being made available to developers to let them build smarter, "cognitive" applications. To set the futuristic tone, IBM invited Peter Diamandis, founder of the nonprofit X Prize Foundation, which humbly describes itself as "a catalyst for the benefit of humanity." To give you an idea of Diamandis' interests, he said he is currently "prospecting" asteroids that he plans to mine for resources. He put the value of one asteroid at $5.4 trillion.

IBM has upgraded its Watson Discovery Advisor data analysis service so it can answer your questions before you even ask. The updated Watson Discovery Advisor can examine a body of data and identify trends, correlations and other points of interest for researchers, IBM said. The service will provide you leads "when you don't know the question to ask, and for when you want to uncover and discover in the data new insights and patterns," said Steve Gold, IBM vice president for the Watson platform. Many fields of expertise could benefit from the service, particularly those that collect large amounts of data that require analysis, such as law, medicine and finance, he said. "It turns out there is a huge appetite in industry for this type of capability," Gold said.

"Although Watson is a tremendous engineering achievement, there are some things it can't do," said Patrick Henry Winston, a professor and former director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "For example, if there was a conference about Watson, Watson couldn't attend. It would have nothing to say about itself. It can't participate in discussions about how it works." Winston was among dozens of researchers who spoke at MIT's Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything symposium, which is part of the school's 150-year anniversary celebration this year.

Early indications suggest that Watson will be favored in its competition against Jennings and Rutter since the supercomputer already beat its opponents in a practice round in January. But Watson is not an unstoppable machine and does have its weaknesses, especially if the clue involves a high degree of wordplay or ambiguity. It's anybody's guess who will win tonight, but in honor of what may be Watson's intellectual triumph over humanity, here is a look at the rise of the supercomputer in human history. Watson is seen as a giant leap forward in artificial intelligence because to play Jeopardy it had to understand and answer English language questions using idioms and common expressions. This is unlike previous computers, which required specific input keywords before they could respond to human speech.

Watson, IBM Corp.'s supercomputer that famously competed on the television show "Jeopardy," is coming West. The technology giant said Thursday it planned to open a second headquarters in San Francisco early next year for the project, which represents one of the most advanced investments in artificial intelligence. The move, which includes giving developers access to Watson's technologies, will help IBM connect with data scientists and start-ups in Silicon Valley. "Since introducing the Watson development platform, thousands of people have used these technologies in new and inventive ways, and many have done so without extensive experience as a coder or data scientist," Mike Rhodin, senior vice president for IBM Watson, said in a statement. "We believe that by opening Watson to all, and continuously expanding what it can do, we are democratizing the power of data, and with it innovation."

That's a true partnership between humans and AI. Watson takes information that people produce, considers a variety of factors and provides knowledge that is then used to help a human doctor do their job better. But Watson is not a replacement for an actual doctor.