IBM's Watson has done everything from winning at Jeopardy to cooking exotic meals, but it appears to have accomplished its greatest feat yet: saving a life. University of Tokyo doctors report that the artificial intelligence diagnosed a 60-year-old woman's rare form of leukemia that had been incorrectly identified months earlier. The analytical machine took just 10 minutes to compare the patient's genetic changes with a database of 20 million cancer research papers, delivering an accurate diagnosis and leading to proper treatment that had proven elusive. Watson has also identified another rare form of leukemia in another patient, the university says.

What do you see when you think about artificial intelligence? With a new competition, XPRIZE and IBM Watson challenge us to think slightly more pragmatically (or at least less apocalyptically dystopian) about the implications of artificial intelligence research on the future of humanity. To date, more than 1,000 people have registered to form teams with plans to tackle such issues as health, climate, transportation, space travel, robots, city planning, surgery, education and even civil rights. Because the competition is an open challenge, teams are expected to come up with criteria on which they will ultimately be judged in 2020. Some teams may be backed by corporations or angels, while others may go it alone as a team.

Now an evangelist for the cognitive cause, no one is better placed to tell us what lies in store for AI as part of The Drum's AI issue, guest edited using IBM Watson technology. Firstly, AI is an incredibly vibrant field. We're discovering ways of evolving the technology and applying it to solve profound social and business problems – problems where previous generations of computing systems were not able to provide much benefit. It has a tremendous ability to amplify our own cognitive strengths – it contributes to my ability to make better decisions, to see the world through a lens I would have otherwise been blind to. There are tremendous opportunities and we are only at the threshold of what is possible. Watson is being developed as a tool that can help build and grow businesses – what do you see as the potential for AI in this field?

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Pokémon Go has opened up the consumer world to augmented reality and some agencies have said this could be a good sign for future advertising opportunities. A developer has now added artificial intelligence to the mix, using IBM's Watson to find Pokémon for users. The Pokémon Go Smart Stop was created by San Francisco developer Michael Hsu and just won the Best Use of Watson challenge at the AT&T Shape Tech Expo Hackathon. "Ever since Pokémon Go came out last week, I've been playing it nonstop," Hsu said at the event. "The Hackathon just happened to be this weekend and I looked at the available sponsor APIs and saw the new Watson Visual Recognition API. I thought, what if I can get Watson to play Pokémon Go for me."

IBM Watson Health has formed a medical imaging collaborative with more than 15 leading healthcare organizations. The goal: To take on some of the most deadly diseases. The collaborative, which includes health systems, academic medical centers, ambulatory radiology providers and imaging technology companies, aims to help doctors address breast, lung, and other cancers; diabetes; eye health; brain disease; and heart disease and related conditions, such as stroke. Watson will mine insights from what IBM calls previously invisible unstructured imaging data and combine it with a broad variety of data from other sources, such as data from electronic health records, radiology and pathology reports, lab results, doctors' progress notes, medical journals, clinical care guidelines and published outcomes studies. As the work of the collaborative evolves, Watson's rationale and insights will evolve, informed by the latest combined thinking of the participating organizations.

I'm pleased to announce that the IBM Watson IoT Platform now has the ability to add Internet of Things (IoT) data, to Blockchain transactions. Leveraging blockchain for your IoT data opens up new ways of automating business processes amongst your partners without setting up an expensive centralized IT infrastructure. This gives you the potential to improve business networks, reduce costs, increase trust and open up new markets. A solution brief provides an overview of the capabilities and use cases being announced. The new features within the Watson IoT Platform are available through two new Lab Services Offerings.

Entrepreneur extraordinaire Elon Musk published part one of his self-proclaimed "master plan" 10 years ago, when Tesla Motors and SpaceX were fledgling companies with heady ambitions. Today he unveiled part two, laying out the full extent of his vision and using the opportunity to argue for the rapid adoption of self-driving vehicles and solar power. "When used correctly," he wrote, Tesla's Autopilot software "is already significantly safer than a person driving by themselves and it would therefore be morally reprehensible to delay release simply for fear of bad press or some mercantile calculation of legal liability." A Tesla owner died in May while using the Autopilot software in his Model S, the first death to occur in a self-driving vehicle. In the long-term, Autopilot represents just one piece of the puzzle for Tesla.

At Satisfi, we are on the hunt for ways to improve customer engagement in retail spaces and change the way brands and consumers interact. By tapping into the cognitive computing smarts of IBM Watson, coupled with our intelligent engagement platform, our goal is to uncover new ways retailers can reach customers and deliver the personalized experiences they crave.Today, Satisfi has teamed up with IBM and Macy's to unveil the pilot of Macy's On Call, a first-of-its kind, in-store shopping assistant powered by artificial intelligence. Using our platform and Watson's Natural Language Classifier and Language Translation APIs, we've built a tool to help shoppers easily access the information they need as they shop and navigate the store. Consumers can ask questions in natural language and seek out information in-store, all from the palms of their hands.Macy's On Call is being piloted at 10 Macy's across the country. In response, the tool will deliver a relevant response and the location of that product in the store.

IBM's Watson may be putting its cognitive muscle to work battling cancer and cybercriminals, but it's no slouch at shopping, either. On Wednesday, retail brand Macy's announced that it's testing out a new mobile service that lets in-store shoppers ask Watson for help. Dubbed Macy's On-Call, the tool gives smartphone-equipped shoppers a way to ask Watson questions about a store's products, services and facilities by typing their questions into a mobile browser. It's delivered through location-based engagement software from IBM partner Satisfi, which accesses Watson from the cloud, and it works in both English and Spanish. Natural-language processing allows shoppers to ask questions in their own words.