The Jeopardy! Watson system in 2011 had three main abilities, as Schneider explained. First, it could understand unstructured text. "[Normally] we don't have to think about it, but we inherently understand what sentences are, and how verbs, nouns, etc. come together to produce text," Schneider said. Watson could read through human-generated content and parse it in a way that other systems haven't been able to do before. Next, Watson could come up with its own hypotheses, and then return the one with the highest confidence.

On Tuesday, IBM announced that Watson, its cognitive computing system (and former Jeopardy champion), will be spending the next year training for a new job--fighting cybercrime. Watson for Cyber Security is a cloud-based version of IBM's cognitive computing tools that will be the result of a one-year-long research project that is starting in the fall. Students and faculty from eight universities will participate in the research and train Watson to better understand how to detect potential threats. Like many other cognitive systems, Watson learns by digesting large amounts of information. Essentially, the students will train Watson "by annotating and feeding the system security reports and data," according to an IBM press release.

I was chatting with an old friend yesterday and he reminded me of a conversation we had nearly 50 years ago. I tried to explain to him what I did for living and he was trying to understand why getting computers to understand was more complicated than key word analysis. I explained about concepts underlying sentences and explained that sentences used words but that people really didn't use words in their minds except to get to the underlying ideas and that computers were having a hard time with that. Fifty years later, key words are still dominating the thoughts of people who try to get computers to deal with language. But, this time, the key word people have deceived the general public by making claims that this is thinking, that AI is here, and that, by the way we should be very afraid, or very excited, I forget which.

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.

Despite heavy investment in data management and monitoring platforms, the financial services industry still lacks real-time operational intelligence to enable better business decision-making and prevent systems and service failures and catastrophic trading errors. These outages expose institutions to undue risk and compliance violations that can cost organizations millions of dollars in financial losses and regulatory fines. They also undermine investor confidence and damage firm reputation. Modern financial markets have become more complex that ever fueled by the globalization of capital markets, including a variety of new securities, derivatives and indexes, the evolution of high-frequency trading platforms with millisecond execution windows, more stringent regulations and higher levels of interconnection among different players. This increased complexity is overwhelming legacy systems, resulting in overlooked information and missed opportunities to uncover hidden patterns, relationships and dependencies.

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.