The idea that cognitive technology can transform the healthcare system in radical ways holds a special place in Matthew Howard's head. The UK Lead at IBM Watson Health has no doubts: "I consider it to be the most important development in healthcare analytics globally." And, using cognitive applications such IBM Watson to help augment the ability of the clinical scientific community, he says, is critical for meeting future life science demands. In fact, healthcare is a key strategic imperative to IBM. If you just look at some of the quotes by the company, they say very openly that Watson Health is their moon shot.

Employing IBM IBM 0.26 % 's artificial intelligence technology has become a popular move for brands seeking to make better use of data in their marketing efforts. Havas HAV 0.33 % Group this week is officially unveiling Havas Cognitive, a new practice in partnership with IBM Watson, to help clients develop tailored marketing campaigns and products. Separately, startup Equals 3 on Wednesday is launching a new software product dubbed Lucy that utilizes Watson's cognitive computing capabilities to make the media planning process more efficient for marketers and agencies. That follows earlier announcements by Turner Broadcasting, which earlier this year signed a deal to incorporate Watson into its ad sales efforts, and Kia Motors, 000270 -0.11 % which used Watson to select social media influencers for its Super Bowl ad campaign. Watson, which gained fame after beating top human competitors on "Jeopardy" five years ago, analyzes troves of data to uncover patterns that humans might miss.

What makes a cartoon caption funny? As one algorithm found: a simple readable sentence, a negation, and a pronoun--but not "he" or "she." The algorithm went on to pick the funniest captions for thousands of the New Yorker's cartoons, and in most cases, it matched the intuition of its editors. Algorithms are getting much better at understanding language, and we are becoming more aware of this through stories like that of IBM Watson winning the Jeopardy quiz. Google released the word2vec tool, and Facebook followed by publishing their speed optimized deep learning modules.

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.

Google unveiled Wednesday a significant overhaul to its voice search functionality that makes it smarter and more intuitive. The revamped software also has a new name: "Google Assistant." Google Assistant understands language more naturally than standard Google voice search. For example, if a user asks who directed the film The Revenant, that person can follow up with a query like "Show me his awards." The user doesn't have to say the director's name to get the correct answer.