With over 500 companies developing cognitive systems, we're seeing patterns emerge around the creation of cognitive systems at the business unit, business process, and application levels. By selecting a subset of these companies to compare, we can see a few of the leading business units and processes that are going cognitive. We also discover how various Watson services are combined to create to address these business needs. These topics and more were covered in the recent Emerging Cognitive Patterns webinar. A few highlights are discussed briefly below but refer to the full webinar slide deck for complete details.

California has been in a drought for almost five years now, making water an extraordinarily precious resource--one that Californian residents and governments are eager to protect. On Wednesday, California suspended its mandatory drought restrictions, saying that the state is turning over responsibility of the water restrictions to individual communities, letting them set their own restrictions based on their water budgets, with the state only stepping in if the budgets are unrealistically optimistic. But how can a community keep track of its water budget? IBM's Watson program has already beaten Jeopardy!, invented its own recipes, assisted in treating patients with chronic conditions, and is currently used by over 80,000 developers. Now, in partnership with environmental analytics company OmniEarth, Watson will help save the existence of humans on Earth--or at least in California.

IBM's Watson is pitching in to tackle California's drought. The supercomputer, which may be best known for destroying human opponents in games like Jeopardy and Go, has been enlisted by environmental consulting firm OmniEarth to track water use across California. OmniEarth announced the partnership on Friday. But for over a month, the company has been tapping into Watson's computing power to scan satellite and aerial images of California's lush valleys and barren deserts to figure out how Californians are using their dwindling water reserves. Even without OmniEarth or Watson's help, Californians are working to track and cut down their water consumption.

Machine learning is everywhere these days. It's in your email account filtering out spam and other emails you don't want to read. It's in your connected car helping the voice-controlled interface understand you. Right now, Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft are the biggest players battling to dominate the very fast-growing machine learning cloud services market. IBM further strengthened its position in the market with the recent acquisition of AlchemyAPI, a leading deep learning-based machine learning services platform.

Ally Schneider is a modern day ambassador between humanity and technology, and - with the help of cognitive system IBM Watson, she's working to bridge the gap between intelligences artificial and non. Recently, IBM Watson visited the EC to speak with various startups in our community like IQuity Labs and EvidenceCare, and also hosted the Nashville Software School that included building a facial recognition app during the 201 developer workshop. Schneider and her ecosystem team travel around the country to teach others about the innovative future of artificial intelligence and the uses and features of IBM Watson. The IBM Watson team spoke to NSS on the usefulness of the Watson's application program interfaces, service additions that allow external developers to build tools and content using Watson, too. As just one example, entrepreneurial ventures can employ the personality and sights and tones analyzer, Schneider said, which look at people's written word choices and create a personality or tone based on the writing. "When you think about cognitive computing and Watson, there's such a unique value to being able to understand unstructured data," Schneider said.

After defeating Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings in a game of Jeopardy! in 2011, IBM's Watson couldn't survive on its 77,147 in winnings. Unlike Microsoft's Cortana and Apple's Siri, Watson lacked a parent willing to let it continue living in the basement rent-free, so it got a paying job in healthcare, helping insurer Wellpoint and doctors by providing treatment advice. Since then, and following investments of more than 1 billion, Watson has become a machine-of-all-trades. Through a combination of machine learning, natural language processing, and a variety of other technologies, Watson is helping companies across a broad spectrum of businesses. Beyond healthcare, Watson earns its keep in fashion, hospitality, food, gaming, retail, financial services, and veterinary medicine.

IBM plans to launch a cloud-based version of Watson's cognitive computing technology, designed solely to zero in on cybersecurity language, as a part of a year-long research project, the company announced Tuesday. The Watson for Cyber Security platform is touted as the first technology to offer cognition of security data. Watson will pull the majority of its cognitive data from the X-Force research library: a threat intelligence platform with 20 years of security research, details on 8 million spam and phishing attacks and more than 100,000 documented vulnerabilities. "Even if the industry was able to fill the estimated 1.5 million open cybersecurity jobs by 2020, we'd still have a skills crisis in security," Marc van Zadelhoff, general manager of IBM Security said in a statement. "The volume and velocity of data in security is one of our greatest challenges in dealing with cybercrime."

One of the largest law firms in the US, Baker & Hostetler has hired Ross, according to a report at Futurism. Ross is a natural language legal assistant for lawyers, that is based on IBM Watson Artificial Intelligence. Ross can sift through mountains of legal data, to give succinct and direct answer to questions. It works like a search engine, but instead of giving a list of answers that again puts the onus of shifting through the data on the user, Ross just gives one most appropriate answer. Ross is different from other digital assistants that do this, because instead of basing the results on keyword indexing, Ross actually has cognitive capabilities.

When you get right down to it, developing vaccines is about data and luck. Scientists start with a set of variables--what drugs a virus responds to, how effectively, and for whom--and then it's a whole lot of trial and error until they stumble upon a cure. One of the most exciting possibilities in medical research right now is how technology like machine learning could help researchers rapidly process those enormous sets of data, more quickly leading to cures. This is already starting to happen: In a study published Wednesday in the journal Macromolecules, researchers from IBM and Singapore's Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology reveal a breakthrough that could help prevent deadly virus infections. With the help of IBM super computer Watson, they hope their finding will soon make its way into vaccines.

IBM is teaming up with eight North American universities to further tune its cognitive system to tackle cybersecurity problems. Watson for Cyber Security, a platform already in pre-beta, will be further trained in "learning the nuances of security research findings and discovering patterns and evidence of hidden cyber attacks and threats that could otherwise be missed". IBM will work with eight US universities from autumn onwards for a year in order to push forward the project. The universities selected are California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; Pennsylvania State University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; New York University; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC); the University of New Brunswick; the University of Ottawa; and the University of Waterloo. The project is ultimately designed to bridge the cyber-security skills gap, a perennial issue in the industry.