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.

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.

What kind of person are you, really? What better way to find out than to ask someone who's not a person. As part of the NYCxDesign festival, IBM Watson painted me a portrait of who I really am deep down inside … on Twitter. IBM Watson is a computer program that parses natural language to analyze data. Different versions of Watson have gone on to become a doctor, a college teaching assistant, a world-class chef, as well as a Jeopardy!

It is no secret that much of the wisdom of the world lies in unstructured data, that is the kind that is not necessarily quantifiable and tidy. So it is in cybersecurity, and now IBM is putting Watson to work to make that knowledge more accessible. Towards that end, IBM Security has announced a new year-long research project through which it will collaborate with eight universities to help train its Watson artificial-intelligence system to tackle cybercrime. Knowledge about threats is often hidden in unstructured sources such as blogs, research reports and documentation, said Kevin Skapinetz, director of strategy for IBM Security. "Let's say tomorrow there's an article about a new type of malware, then a bunch of follow-up blogs," Skapinetz explained.