IBM's Watson project has always been about putting the power of data science into the hands of the masses. Today, IBM are announcing another step towards that vision, with the launch of the Watson Data Platform. The incredible potential for driving efficiency and change with Big Data and advanced analytics – as well as all the associated technologies such as machine learning, the Internet of Things, and predictive modelling – is so great, it should be available to everyone. Not just those who have spent years in college studying the fundamental mathematical and statistical systems under the hood of today's analytics toolsets. Big Data is about ideas, and empowering people to use technology to bring those ideas to life.

If you start feeling a cold or flu coming on this season, you will be able to reach out to IBM's artificial intelligence-fueled Watson to find some answers to your sniffly, coughy questions. GlaxoSmithKline, (GSK) the world's sixth-largest pharmaceutical company, is teaming up with IBM to use Watson to better connect with customers. The London-based company plans to start using Watson Ads in November, enabling people to ask questions by voice or text right through GSK's online ads. Jason Andree, senior brand manager of the Cough and Cold division of GlaxoSmithKline North America, will announce the move at the start of the IBM World of Watson conference in Las Vegas this week. The event, which focuses on changing business through cognitive computing, analytics and big data, runs from today to Thursday.

"The Geospatial Intelligence Certificate, accredited by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) provides education and training in scientific concepts, methods and key geospatial technologies, used in the solution of global problems of human security, including natural disasters, humanitarian crisis, environmental risks, military operations, political violence, public health and challenges in access to food. USGIF's purpose is to promote the geospatial intelligence tradecraft and to develop a stronger community of interest between government, industry, academia, professional organizations and individuals. USGIF is the only organization providing Higher Education accreditation in the GEOINT domain, being a world leader in this field.

IBM's Watson has upended any romantic notions of songwriting by making it a precise formula of inspiration, emotion, musical theory and trends. The AI system's new music algorithm, called "Beat," helped producer Alex da Kid create his first solo EP of four songs, the first of which, Not Easy (feat. X Ambassadors, Elle King and Wiz Khalifa), dropped on Friday. To be clear, IBM's bot didn't write the song, but rather generated "completely new musical scores" that da Kid (who produced singles by Dr. Dre, Rhianna and others) used as inspiration for the tunes. For Da Kid, the algorithms collected music cultural trends and over the last five years, including Nobel Prize speeches, Billboard song lyrics, movie synopses and more.

Alex Da Kid wanted a deeper connection with his audience. But with so many millions out there, he needed a better way to listen to all of them. Watson AlchemyLanguage API helped by analyzing five years of natural language texts including New York Times front pages, Supreme Court rulings, Getty Museum statements, the most edited Wikipedia articles, popular movie synopses and more. Once Watson had learned the most significant cultural themes, Watson Tone Analyzer read news articles, blogs and tweets to find out what people felt about them.

IBM's ground-breaking Watson artificial intelligence software is now, for the very first time, being used to create better semantic targeting for native advertising. A demo is available here: http://preview-25.ayl.io/ As part of the platform, Watson scans all the publisher pages in ADYOULIKE's global network of premium publishers and analyses them in the same way as a human mind would: looking contextually for topics, sentiment and semantics rather than just scanning for simple keywords. This allows the platform to deliver native content in-feed in the most relevant and targeted way possible. Watson looks at where, why and how the existing editorial content on each site is'talking about' subjects and ensures advertisers are dynamically delivering the best native content to fit.

Jonas Nwuke discusses how IBM Watson's cognitive computing will tackle problems that are "uniquely human" At our PSFK 2015 conference, we were thrilled to have Jonas Nwuke of the IBM Watson team as one of our speakers. You're likely to have heard of Watson as the grand champion of Jeopardy!, from pieces about its culinary capabilities, or from PSFK and IBM Waston's Good Data contest, but these are just teases of what's in store for intelligent machines and cognitive systems. With some of the recent forward steps taken by AI and cognitive computing, we wanted to look back on how these technologies are being developed, and where we can still go. "grand challenge" of 2011 served to help prove a hypothesis that humans can create systems capable of navigating ambiguous, confusing, and complex environments like language. As Jonas mentioned, the objective, then, is to build a machine that helps us focus on things that make us uniquely human--"finding inspiration, leveraging creativity, and solving problems by making meaning of the seemingly meaningless."

At the core of IBM's Watson Analytics is a powerful bull's-eye tool; it employs a powerful user query as the basis of analysis. The Data Scientist or business user is free to play with the variables in any dataset and directly visualize how the changing user inputs impact the answers. The bull's-eye also helps narrow down the user query to help get a much clearer answer. This kind of focus can be especially useful in a large dataset, where the user is likely to get lost. IBM's design philosophy behind Watson was to keep the average user sharply focused on the query.

Did you know that the origin of the term "red tape" comes from red ribbons used to tie up oodles of legal documents? I learned it in Brian O'Keefe's masterful explication of the pesky problem of red tape, which appears on the cover of the just-out issue of Fortune. This is one of the articles we now refer to as "longform." It can't be summarized in a tweet, or even an essay topping a daily newsletter about the technology industry. What I can tell you briefly is that the problem is more persistent than you think.

IBM ibm Watson is teaming up with Quest Diagnostics dgx in a significant expansion of its ongoing cancer genomic sequencing and precision medicine push. The company announced Monday it is launching a new service with lab testing giant Quest and New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center called Watson Genomics from Quest Diagnostics. "The service will make Watson for Genomics widely available to physician and patients nationwide for the first time," said IBM in a statement. IBM has already struck prominent collaborative arrangements with major cancer research centers like those at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The firm is trying to help oncologists identify the proper treatments and clinical trials for their patients' specific cancers.