In 2011, people witnessed an interesting competition on the television quiz show Jeopardy. It featured the two best players in the history of the show, Ken Jennings, who had the longest unbeaten run of 74 winning appearances, and Brad Rutter, earner of the biggest prize of $3.25 million. Their opponent was a huge computer with over 750 servers and a cooling system stored at a location so as not to disturb the players. The room–sized machine was made by IBM and named after the company's founder, Thomas J. Watson. It did not smile or show emotion, but it kept on giving good answers.

Helping Wimbledon in their pursuit of greatness For 28 years IBM has been the official supplier of Information Technology and consultant to the All England Club and The Championships, Wimbledon. By analysing millions of data points and thousands of pages of unstructured text you can understand, reason and learn what it takes to pursue greatness within a sporting arena. For a business wanting to understand how to deliver a great customer experience or differentiate their services they must look beyond pure historic structured data to the vast volumes of unstructured data created every day. IBM's cognitive and cloud solutions businesses can understand and respond to their customer needs in ways never possible before. This year IBM has used these technologies to determine what makes a great Wimbledon Champion (watch video above).

Google is using machine learning to improve Google Forms in a bid to make the tool smarter and easier to use so that people have to be less hands-on with it, while also saving them more time so they can be more efficient and devote time to other equally or perhaps more important tasks. As part of the update to Google Forms, one of the improvements included is intelligent response validation, and from time to time (whenever it's possible to do so) Google Forms will make a suggestion to users to validate a response that was issued by the person filling out a Google Form based on the questions that are asked by the form's creator. Google does note however that suggestions for validation won't be there for every single response. Also in the presence of saving time for users, Google Forms will now allow you to set up pre-configured preferences for future forms that you create so you don't have to choose certain elements each time you set up a new form, such as the option for always collecting email addresses or making questions required. Another new change is cross-file sharing support.

Today's most advanced cognitive technology users offer a glimpse into the possibilities and tangible benefits of creating intelligent businesses. While scientists and engineers have been exploring cognitive and AI technologies in labs for decades, the big data explosion and recent advances in computing power have propelled them into mainstream applications. We wanted to find out exactly how businesses are applying these technologies across their organizations, and what tangible benefits they're beginning to realize. We surveyed 600 early adopters of cognitive technologies and wanted to share our learnings through an interactive visual. Did you know that 77% of organizations that already implemented cognitive and artificial intelligence technologies use them to innovate products and services, more than for any other business goal?

The potential for artificial intelligence in precision medicine is big, according to conclusions of a new study by the New York Genome Center and IBM. The results, published in the July 11 issue of Neurology Genetics, a journal of the American Academy of Neurology, showed that researchers at the New York Genome Center, Rockefeller University and other institutions – along with IBM – verified the potential of IBM Watson for Genomics to analyze complex genomic data from state-of-the-art DNA sequencing of whole genomes. "This study documents the strong potential of Watson for Genomics to help clinicians scale precision oncology more broadly," Vanessa Michelini, Watson for Genomics Innovation Leader for IBM Watson Health, said in a statement. "Clinical and research leaders in cancer genomics are making tremendous progress towards bringing precision medicine to cancer patients, but genomic data interpretation is a significant obstacle, and that's where Watson can help." The proof of concept study compared multiple techniques used to analyze genomic data from a glioblastoma patient's tumor cells and normal healthy cells, putting to work a beta version of Watson for Genomics technology to help interpret whole genome sequencing data for one patient.

IBM's Watson unit is receiving heat today in the form of a scathing equity research report from Jefferies' James Kisner. The group believes that IBM's investment into Watson will struggle to return value to shareholders. In recent years, IBM has increasingly leaned on Watson as one of its core growth units -- a unit that sits as a proxy for projecting IBM's future value. In the early days, IBM's competitive advantage was its longstanding relationships with Fortune 500 companies. IBM Watson effectively operates as a consultancy where the company engages in high-value contracts with corporates to implement Watson technology for specific business cases.

Watson started as a follow-on project to IBM DeepBlue, the computer and AI program that defeated world chess champion Gary Kasparov. DeepBlue demonstrated that a computer could defeat a human in chess, a game with well-defined rules and limited, fully visible solutions. The real world, however, is much more complicated: information often is unstructured, problems ill defined, and solutions probabilistic at best. To equip AI to deal with the real world, IBM challenged its computer and data scientists to create a program that could defeat human contestants at Jeopardy!, a quiz show requiring answers to natural language questions over broad domains of knowledge otherwise known as unstructured data. As a quick refresher, artificial intelligence can be divided into three categories, as shown above.1The

OpenText is launching an artificial intelligence platform called Magellan that hopes to use the company's knowhow with unstructured and semi-structured data and open source to compete with the likes of IBM Watson. At EnterpriseWorld, OpenText's conference in Toronto, the company outlined its artificial intelligence and machine learning platform. OpenText focuses on enterprise information management and has a portfolio that extends into content management for industries, customer experience, and data discovery. In January, OpenText completed the purchase of Dell-EMC's enterprise content unit, which includes Documentum. For the third quarter, Open Text reported revenue of $593 million, up 35 percent from a year ago.

Not many tech CEO's have the bravado to stand before an audience of their most loyal customers and promise them a game-changing a product, claiming that it will blow a ground-breaking technology like IBM Watson away. But that is exactly what OpenText CEO Mark Barrenechea did just over a year ago. Today, standing before an audience of more than 5000 gathered at Enterprise World in Toronto, Barrenechea delivered the goods. OpenText Magellan is a cognitive computing platform that provides users with machine-assisted decision making, automation, and business optimization at a price they can afford. Magellan was built to deliver actionable insights and intelligence from big data, big content, information streaming from sensors, the Internet of Things and more.

IBM's Watson computer has many talents. It discussed music with Bob Dylan, beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy! and even ran a food truck. Now, the artificial intelligence project has picked up another skill: bartending. Working with foodies and chefs from Bon Apétit magazine and the Institute of Culinary Education, IBM programmers put the software through culinary school. The project, known as "Chef Watson," generates original recipes based on ingredients a user selects, Christopher Trout writes for Engadget. "The system doesn't look at ingredients the same way chefs do," software engineer and chef Florian Pinel, who helped IBM develop Chef Watson, says in a video showcasing the cloud-based cook.