July 11, 2017 Written by: Chris O'Connor An IoT platform must connect devices, must collect data, must handle thousands of vendors, dozens of standards and must be able to scale to millions of devices sending billions of messages. To deliver true value beyond the basics, it must add cognitive, security, privacy, insight generation and close loop automation. With these capabilities and the supporting technology advancements, the IoT platform becomes an agent of transformation for a business. Organizations in the midst of, or planning for, an IoT deployment understand the complexity of finding a solution that is holistic yet customizable to their own unique requirements. A solid platform is the linchpin in connecting endpoints, capturing meaningful data, and pulling all together into a central dashboard that allows you to glean actionable insights.

In treating brain cancer, time is of the essence. A new study, in which IBM Watson took just 10 minutes to analyze a brain cancer patient's genome and suggest a treatment plan, demonstrates the potential of artificially intelligent medicine to improve patient care. But although human experts took 160 hours to make a comparable plan, the study's results weren't a total victory of machine over humans. The patient in question was a 76-year-old man who went to his doctor complaining of a headache and difficulty walking. A brain scan revealed a nasty glioblastoma tumor, which surgeons quickly operated on; the man then got three weeks of radiation therapy and started on a long course of chemotherapy.

'How do I control the lights?' is my first, rage-infused question when staying in almost any hotel room. Closely followed by'how do I shut off the air conditioning?' As yet, both questions have gone unanswered. Walls, alas, cannot talk, so I am left to fiddle with the plastic key thing that for some reason also operates the room's electricity, put on an extra layer or six, and grope around in the dark. My ineptitude in the realm of all things practical isn't confined to hotel rooms. I'd also like to be able to schedule car maintenance as and when the bleeping thing on the dashboard lets me know something's up.

You've probably seen the Watson commercials, where what looks like a sentient box interacts with celebrities like Bob Dylan, Carrie Fisher, and Serena Williams; or doctors; or a young cancer survivor. Maybe you caught the IBM artificial intelligence technology's appearance in H&R Block's Super Bowl commercial starring Jon Hamm. "It is one of the most powerful tools our species has created. It helps doctors fight disease," Hamm says. "It can predict global weather patterns. It improves education for children everywhere. And now we unleash it on your taxes."

Deliver lightening fast customer support at scale requires a lot of resources and this is why you want your end users or employee to be able to self serve as much as possible. Bots have been around for a long time, but recent advances in natural language processing drove huge adoption over the last year. They are now being used to enhance a broad set of experiences with customer service being one of the most relevant. In this article we're going to learn what does it take to save time to our customer support team. To do this we'll build a chatbot to automate answers to frequently asked questions, eventually saving precious time to your customer support operators so they can focus on more complex requests.

Machine learning is everywhere these days. Whether it's recommending your next movie on Netflix or beating Ken Jennings at Jeopardy, ML is here to stay. But how do you get in on this wave? IBM has just made their new Watson Machine Learning (WML) service generally available this week. I do have to point out that you will need to create an account with Bluemix to start playing around with the service, but there's a 30 day free trial and it's pretty fun.

Over the last couple of days, I have seen a bunch of articles on my social media feed that are based on a research report from Jefferies' James Kisner criticizing IBM Watson. I am a big fan of criticism of technology – and as folks who have known me over time can vouch, I seldom hold back what is in my mind on any topic. I strongly believe that criticism is healthy for all of us – including businesses, and without it we cannot grow. If you go through my previous blogs, you can see first hand how I throw cold water on hype. Unlike my usual posts, I cannot claim to be an impartial observer in this case.

IBM's Watson supercomputer is one of the world's best-known artificial intelligence systems. But fame, it turns out, doesn't mean fortune. A scathing report from investment bank Jefferies claims that from an earnings per share perspective "it seems unlikely to us under almost any scenario that Watson will generate meaningful earnings results over the next few years". IBM Watson made its debut as a research project in 2006 and later gained fame after beating two human champions on classic US quiz show Jeopardy!. IBM has since spent a lot of time and money promoting its flagship product, posting more than 200 press releases on Watson, according to Jefferies.

In retrospect, there was much more at stake than a mere $1 million when IBM's Watson computer faced off against two Jeopardy! The bot's victory gave Big Blue a shot at conjuring up a new line of business at the perfect possible moment. A series of advances in image and speech recognition was about to trigger a frenzy of investment and excitement about the money-making potential of artificial intelligence. Six years later, it's fair to ask whether that plan could have been better executed. IBM today is even more urgently in need of new business, with quarterly results released earlier this week showing that revenues have declined for 21 consecutive quarters.

AI may not be able to lead us just yet, but it can judge how well we lead. New findings suggest Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, may just be Silicon Valley's "most imaginative" leader, reported CNBC, citing data from job search firm Paysa. It examined their "speeches, essays, books, transcripts of interviews and other forms of communication" to generate a Personality Insights report. Cook emerged as the industry's "most imaginative" leader, followed by Amazon's Jeff Bezos. Advances in AI mean IBM's Watson can do more than just read your personality.