This weekend saw Michael Hsu, a front-end and back-end developer, and part-time university lecturer in California, win the Best use of Watson award at the AT&T Shape Hackathon in San Francisco. Michael won the hackathon with his app focused on the Pokémon Go game. The game, using augmented reality and GPS, allows players to capture, battle, and train virtual creatures, called Pokémon, who appear on device screens as though in the real world. In this video you can see Michael, using IBM's Watson IoT platform and the Watson Visual Recognition service to take periodical screenshots, identify the Pokemon characters in them, and alert other users to where the characters are.

Under Armour, through a strategic partnership with IBM, released the UA Record application with insights powered by IBM Watson.

Microsoft has rolled out the beta release of TypeScript 2.0. Developers can get it after downloading TypeScript 2.0 Beta for Visual Studio 2015, which will require VS 2015 Update 3. This release includes new features like a workflow for getting TypeScript type definition files. "Null and undefined are two of the most common sources of bugs in JavaScript," and before this release, null and undefined were in the domain of every type. "If you had a function that took a string, you couldn't be sure from the type alone of whether you actually had a string--you might actually have null."

Pharma's digital health ambitions: Where are the opportunities and what's hindering progress? Looking to the future, Michael Doherty, head of strategic innovation for pharma development at Roche, said: "We are heading to a new model of drug development that will be more flexible, data will be much more continual and contextual...It won't be...

Watson combines a number of cognitive techniques to help you build and train a bot - defining intents and entities and crafting dialog to simulate conversation. The system can then be further refined with supplementary technologies to make the system more human-like or to give it a higher chance of returning the right answer. Watson Conversation allows you to deploy a range of bots via many channels, from simple, narrowly focused Bots to much more sophisticated, full-blown virtual agents across mobile devices, messaging platforms like Slack, or even through a physical robot.

It's a privilege to have Rama Akkiraju, IBM distinguished engineer and master inventor, participate as a Vision and Opportunity panelist at the 2016 Sentiment Analysis Symposium. I organize the symposium – this year's event takes place July 12 in New York – and recognize the many ways IBM has, over the years, expanded what's possible in the realm of what I'd characterize as "human data." "My team at IBM has been focused on developing technology to better understand people at a deeper level based on sentiment, emotion, attitude, and personality," said Rama. "With our work with Watson APIs – such as Tone Analyzer, Personality Insights, Emotion Analysis, and Sentiment Analysis – we're working to enable more compassion, engagement, and personalization in conversations across various channels." IBM's Marie Wallace, a 2014 sentiment symposium speaker, relates in a blog article that she "joined IBM in 2001 to build the next generation of NLP technology for IBM… the 3rd generation of IBM LanguageWare, which initially started back in the '80s." And I wrote, myself, in a 2008 InformationWeek article, BI at 50 Turns Back to the Future, about 1950s work by IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn on the creation of business intelligence via text analysis.

With an eye toward taking the healthcare supply chain to new levels, UPMC on July 8 introduced Pensiamo, a new company whose goal is to help hospitals improve supply chain performance, where costs are high and getting higher, second only to labor costs. Pensiamo is an Italian word. We can provide insights that others cannot," UPMC's James Szilagy told Healthcare IT News. Pensiamo starts up with 150 employees, spinning out certain functions of UPMC's supply chain into the new company. For now, UPMC itself is the sole customer, but Szilagy said there has been strong interest from others. "So now that we have the organization stood up, we can take them to the next level," he said. "Many healthcare entities across the country have not invested in their supply chain organizations over the years, so they are not as far down the maturity curve as UPMC is.

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IBM Watson Provides Self-Service AI for Developers By Darryl K. Taft Posted 2016-05-07 Print In what IBM calls "self-service AI," the company enables developers to easily tap into the power of its Watson APIs to build cognitive apps. When IBM initially launched its Watson cognitive computing platform, one of the first questions on a lot folks' minds was, "When can I tap into the power of Watson?" IBM responded by opening up Watson to developers via the Watson Developer Cloud, which offers Watson services and APIs as well as useful documentation and tutorials, starter kits and access to the Watson developer community. IBM started slow and continued to evolve its Watson strategy for developers. The company started with just a few Watson partners and offered just a handful of Watson services.