IBM Watson, the distributed natural language processing platform, isn't the only advanced system available, but it's the highest-profile and arguably the most sophisticated. It's also important to recognize how shrewdly Watson is being marketed. Even before Watson was Watson, IBM was adept at generating publicity for its futuristic computing activities. Most famously, Big Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Four years later, Watson, in a form far more rudimentary than today's commercialized version, beat Ken Jennings, the human Jeopardy!

Although our project is to make robots play poker, our main focus is to demonstrate the power of the Watson Developer Cloud. We were all blown away when we found out how simple and easy it was to use the APIs on Bluemix to do things like natural language classification, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, visual recognition, and much more. The hard part, as is usually the case, is coming up with an idea. We want to inspire others to be creative and make use of these services. To do that, we will be sharing everything we've been doing with the robots in a series of blog posts.

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? Watson is transforming the way businesses approach their operations and fuelling their growth with tools that help them understand, reason, learn and interact in a way that has clear and obvious benefits to the human condition.

The startup yesterday opened a new facility in National Harbor, Maryland, and along with it, a new range of miniature buses that can autonomously take passengers wherever they ask to go. Local Motors' new buses, which look a bit like ski lifts on wheels, are called Olli, and will be puttering around the greater Washington, D.C., area after their maiden voyage yesterday. The electric vehicles, which have a top speed of about 12 mph and a range of roughly 30 miles per charge, use similar technologies to Google's self-driving cars to see the world as they roll around. But they also use Watson, IBM's suite of artificial intelligence software, to understand what's around them as they move, as well as whatever their human passengers ask of them. Olli has the same speech recognition and language understanding built in that allowed Watson to beat a bunch of smart humans at the quiz show "Jeopardy!"

That dream of universal expertise is what IBM says its Watson question-answering, machine-learning system makes possible. Watson can be trained to answer questions on any subject you choose. The system uses natural language processing to read huge numbers of documents, extracts and organises information about a particular topic and then refines its understanding of that subject based on human feedback. But how useful are the answers given by Watson and how difficult is it to train? One person who's well-placed to talk about using the Jeopardy!-winning

National Harbor, MD - 16 Jun 2016: Local Motors, the leading vehicle technology integrator and creator of the world's first 3D-printed cars, today introduced the first self-driving vehicle to integrate the advanced cognitive computing capabilities of IBM (NYSE: IBM) Watson. Starting today, Olli will be used on public roads locally in DC, and late in 2016 in Miami-Dade County and Las Vegas. "Olli offers a smart, safe and sustainable transportation solution that is long overdue," Rogers said. "Olli with Watson acts as our entry into the world of self-driving vehicles, something we've been quietly working on with our co-creative community for the past year. We are now ready to accelerate the adoption of this technology and apply it to nearly every vehicle in our current portfolio and those in the very near future. I'm thrilled to see what our open community will do with the latest in advanced vehicle technology."

What happened to the IBM Watson X Prize? The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE ... was announced on the TED Stage on Feb 17, 2016. It is a 5 million competition.... Complete rules and guidelines will be made available in May.

IBM delivers cognitive computing to healthcare and weather forecasting. Google launches a new machine learning research center. GE uses machine learning to restore a power plant in Northern Italy. Microsoft acquires one of the big contributors to big data open source software. Those are the highlights of this week's Big Data Roundup.

We get asked a lot of questions about how to start building with Watson, so we decided to compile our top 4 Frequently Asked Questions. You can use this as a guide to learn more about the technology, receive inspiration from use cases, get valuable resources, and ultimately begin building with the technology. Cognitive technology's strength lies in its ability to draw insights from unstructured data sets. Structured data is found in a spreadsheet, whereas unstructured data is text such as tweets, medical journals, etc. Today 80% of data is unstructured, so tools such as cognitive computing are becoming more important in helping humans understand what's inside that data.

If a new driverless shuttle bus makes riders nervous, IBM's Watson system is on board to make feel passengers feel less alone. And the bus' cute name – Olli – might help, too. TechRepublic reports that Maryland's Local Motors is partnering with IBM on its autonomous shuttle bus named Olli. IBM is contributing its Watson Internet of Things (IoT) for Automotive cognitive computing system. This comes as the global market for self-driving cars is expected to grow exponentially over the next few years.