In 2014, IBM launched the Watson Developer Cloud, making the power of cognitive computing available to developers across the world through a set of APIs on IBM's BlueMix platform. We've seen volumes of applications built by companies covering everything from personal health and fitness to travel and entertainment to financial services. It was amazing to see these early adopters jump onboard and showcase the power of cognitive computing. We want to make it even easier for developers to learn how to build and deploy cognitive applications – and even more importantly, to distinguish themselves for having developed these critical skills. That's why today, IBM is announcing a new program -- the IBM Watson Application Developer Certification -- designed to help developers all across the world build and validate their skills as well as connect with companies looking to leverage their unique talents. We watch every day as individuals explore and apply Watson in new ways -- from building natural language interfaces in a variety of languages so consumers can get answers faster to helping doctors uncover critical new insights from medical imagery.

Enterprise search leader Lucidworks is tapping into the IBM Watson Developer Cloud platform for its Fusion platform, an application framework that helps developers to create enterprise discovery applications so companies can understand their data and take action on insights. Today's knowledge workers face an avalanche of data and documents. Lucidworks' Fusion is an application framework for creating powerful enterprise discovery apps that help organizations access all their information to make better, data-driven decisions. Fusion can process massive amounts of structured and multi-structured data in context, including voice, text, numerical, and spatial data. By integrating Watson's ability to read 800 million pages per second, Fusion can deliver insights within seconds.

IBM just made another major step toward getting its Watson supercomputer into hospitals around the world. Siemens and IBM Watson Health are teaming up in something they're calling a five-year "global strategic alliance" to bring Watson to population health -- a concept that's aimed at improving the health of people in an entire community, not just those in the hospital needing immediate care. The companies did not disclose the financial terms of the partnership. Siemens is a German industrial company which, in addition to a healthcare branch (dubbed Siemens Healthineers), also works in energy and transportation. The partnership basically just gives Watson a chance to reach out to a lot more people who provide healthcare, as according to Siemens, the company is involved in more than 70% of "critical clinical decisions" thanks to Siemens instruments.

IBM Australia is looking to maintain its first-mover advantage in the burgeoning enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) space by putting more resources behind its cognitive drive. The vendor has spent 2016 arming its commercial operation with a new team that has the industry domain knowledge to drive Watson harder into specific verticals. Its local Research team has revealed involvement in cutting-edge projects for IBM's nascent Watson Health business, as well as around neuromorphic computing, which is seen as the next evolution of Watson. Since IBM created the US 1 billion ( 1.3 billion) Watson Group in 2014, the vendor has been selling business on the benefits of cognitive computing, while at the same time trying to create as many applications and use cases for the technology as it can. While these efforts were initially internally-driven, the growth of Watson over the past two years has increased the number of people and organisations working with the technology, with a growing amount of this work being done behind the scenes.

The film studio 20th Century Fox has called in IBM Watson, the supercomputer, to create the trailer for its upcoming AI horror/thriller, Morgan. IBM Watson has done many things; beat human contestants in quiz shows, created bespoke recipes and described the contents of photos. Now it has become the first-ever AI to produce a film trailer for the new sci-fi film. IBM researchers fed Watson more than 100 horror film trailers cut into separate moments and scenes. It performed a series of visual, sound and composition analyses on each scene to get an idea of how to create the dynamics of a trailer.

Bret Greenstein, vice president of the IBM Watson Internet of Things Platform, says we'll come to love the autonomous car. Speaking at UPSHIFT 2016, he said it all has to with how the cars will listen to us and how we'll form relationships with them. Greenstein introduced the topic by talking about his first car, a 1960s Oldsmobile. He talked about all the classic car guy tropes, that he could fix it with "a screwdriver and duct tape" and how he knew what the car needed just by listening to it. With smart, autonomous cars, those roles will be reversed, with the car listening to you to find out what you need.

It knew enough about medical diagnoses and literature to beat "Jeopardy!" Now, an IBMcomputer platform called Watson is taking on something really tough: teaching third-grade math. For the past two years, the IBM Foundation has worked with teachers and their union, the American Federation of Teachers, to build Teacher Advisor, a program that uses artificial-intelligence technology to answer questions from educators and help them build personalized lesson plans. By the end of the year, it will be available free to third-grade math teachers across the country and will add subject areas and grade levels over time. "The idea was to build a personal adviser, so a teacher would be able to find the best lesson and then customize the lesson based upon their classroom needs," said Stanley S. Litow, president of the IBM Foundation. "By loading a massive amount of content, of teaching strategies, lesson plans, you'd actually make Watson the teacher coach," Mr. Litow said.

In some use cases, it is impossible for humans to replicate the performance of artificial intelligence. But businesses will need a lot of data for AI systems to be effective. Maybe you've seen an artificial intelligence (AI) system like Watson at work on "Jeopardy!" or have heard of its successes in medical diagnoses or other fields. Maybe you've only heard about other similar systems working through incredibly complex and large sets of data to produce results that even non-experts can understand, through visualizations or natural language. Either way, AI systems are impressing many on their march toward becoming essential business processes.

Memorably spoken by Alexander Graham Bell, these were the first words ever heard through a telephone. Since then, speech has become the natural format for long-distance communication across the globe. The impact of voice-to-voice communication has meant that even written messages, sent via email and social media, have become increasingly conversational in tone. That Watson was not IBM Watson, of course, or Watson's namesake Thomas J Watson. But IBM Watson, by bringing a cognitive, learning approach to the absorption of data, has made it possible for computer systems to understand spoken language, and the more natural, colloquial way we now express ourselves in text.

Watson, IBM's artificial intelligence computer system, is ridiculously prolific. In the last few years it's written a cookbook, crafted a movie trailer, joined the debate team, and helped in medical education, among many other projects. The latest point on the system's resumé is to help make hospital stays more comfortable for patients and relieve the strain on doctors and nurses through smart speakers that can answer basic questions and grant patients' control over things like room temperature, the lights or the TV.