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.

Machine Learning is going to revolutionize so many different aspects of our lives, and it's starting to enter into game development with IBM's Watson. Developers can integrate cloud-based AI services into their game to dynamically change the game design progression curve based upon a user's behavior and performance. If the player is zipping through a series of easy puzzles with no problems, then Watson could detect that and more quickly progress the player to advanced levels in order to keep the game challenging and interesting for them. I was able to get a sampling of how a number of different innovative game designers have started to integrate machine learning resources last week at an Intel Buzz Workshop presentation by IBM's Interactive Media CTO George Dolbier. He showed off some code sample of how to integrate Watson with Unity with IBM's Watson Developer Cloud API and gave a number of different use cases for how to integrate machine learning into VR experiences.

KPMG will hold a series of workshops over the next few months with IBM Watson staff to work out how to use the artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to carry out this new type of audit. "No-one knows exactly what the audit of the future will look like, but you can be sure it will involve two things - bright human beings and cognitive technology," said Duncan McLennan, the firm's national managing partner of audit. "Cognitive enables greater collaboration between humans and systems - so while it's a game-changer for audit in terms of depth of analysis, it will still require insights from talented people. We're being helped, not replaced."

IBM's Watson is still in its early days, but the cognitive computing system could end up having a substantial impact on a number of industries, particularly healthcare and education. For example, Alder Hey Children's Hospital in England is currently using the technology to improve the patient experience, while an interactive toy called the Cognitoys Dino uses Watson to answer a child's questions in a kid-friendly and personalized way. Another space that could largely benefit from Watson's capabilities is the gaming industry. The interactive nature of games paired with Watson's natural language processing capabilities and data analysis has already led to a number of new gaming initiatives, including the first-ever Minecraft game that utilizes Watson. Called'Medical Minecraft,' the game was recently created by a group of high school students.

A recent announcement out of the company reports, "XPRIZE, the global leader in incentivized prize competitions, today announced that registration is now open and guidelines are available for the 5 million IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, a four-year global competition challenging teams to develop and demonstrate how humans can collaborate with powerful artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to tackle the world's greatest challenges. The AI competition is XPRIZE's first open challenge where teams will define their own goals and create AI applications that solve some of humanity's most pressing challenges in areas such as healthcare, education, energy & environment, global development and exploration." Marcus Shingles, CEO of XPRIZE, commented, "In the coming decade, as XPRIZE strives to achieve its impact mission through incentive competitions and crowd-sourcing, we see tremendous opportunity in this emerging generation of problem solvers to use AI to solve humanity's grandest challenges… The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE is intended to promote and progress the notion of'AI for impact' among the global bold innovator crowd, both the established community of practitioners, as well as encourage newcomers to experiment and ultimately demonstrate how AI can be used as a tool for good." The article adds, "Teams have until December 1, 2016 to register through the XPRIZE website for the four-year competition, and then will have until March 1, 2017 to submit a detailed development and testing plan for their proposed solution. There will be three subsequent rounds of selection each fall during which a panel of expert judges will choose the top 10 teams that will advance to compete at IBM Watson sponsored events where they can receive Milestone Prizes."

Artificial Intelligence is the theory and development of computer systems that normally require human intelligence. These days A.I. is also buzz word that contains any technology achieving intelligent systems. 'Cognitive' technologies -- designed to simulate human thought -- are organized into Cognitive Systems. They make use of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to enable humans to interact more naturally with machines, with the aim of enhancing and scaling human expertise.