As a reader of Seeking Alpha, I've seen several posts about IBM's (NYSE:IBM) Watson Artificial Intelligence technology and how Watson is an important differentiator that will drive IBM's growth in coming years. You can read such posts here, here and here. Unfortunately for IBM, these SA writer conclusions appear to me to be precisely wrong. I fear Watson is already a major failure for Big Blue. First, let's set the scene.

Watch out world, machines are beating flesh and blood opponents in a variety of different contests. There was Watson, a smarty pants question answering system developed by IBM that took on and defeated the world's best Jeopardy opponents. Then Google's DeepMind division built an artificial intelligence program called AlphaGo that became the world's top Go player. And now there's an AI that seemingly has no equal in Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. game. The AI team was led by Vlad Firoiu at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

At about lunchtime on an unseasonably warm February day, a small commercial drone hovered alongside Highlight Tower; a striking, angular glass block soaring 126m over a suburban Autobahn on the outskirts of Munich, with equally striking views. This email address is already registered. By submitting my Email address I confirm that I have read and accepted the Terms of Use and Declaration of Consent. By submitting your personal information, you agree that TechTarget and its partners may contact you regarding relevant content, products and special offers. You also agree that your personal information may be transferred and processed in the United States, and that you have read and agree to the Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy.

At about lunchtime on an unseasonably warm February day, a small commercial drone hovered alongside Highlight Tower; a striking, angular glass block soaring 126m over a suburban Autobahn on the outskirts of Munich, with equally striking views. This email address is already registered. By submitting my Email address I confirm that I have read and accepted the Terms of Use and Declaration of Consent. By submitting your personal information, you agree that TechTarget and its partners may contact you regarding relevant content, products and special offers. You also agree that your personal information may be transferred and processed in the United States, and that you have read and agree to the Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy.

If there was any doubt that IBM is committed to developing the internet of things, its opening of a new 15,000sqm headquarters in Munich surely clears it. In the pipeline for almost two years, the German HQ – IBM's first ever outside of the US – didn't come cheap, and the brand wants you to know it. "The biggest investment we've made in years" or even "decades" were phrases banded around the opening press conference, as was the $200m price tag. Inside offers up more than 25 floors of collaborative space for both IBM workers and its partners. But towering above the Munich skyline, the building also acts as a warning to the global tech industry that the IT behemoth is readying to own the Internet of Things space in the same way it has allowed Watson to near-dominate the AI conversation.

IBM surveyed more than 600 decision-makers about their cognitive initiatives and 62 percent of respondents stated that the results of their cognitive implementations exceed expectations*. Cognitive services, like those offered byIBM Watson, can help you find out how your customers feel and help you predict what they might do. With Watson, IBM is pioneering the development of models that can tell you about different and often hidden, aspects of an individual. These insights can then be used by an organization to deepen relationships, shape initiatives and drive innovation. REST APIs, like Watson Personality Insights and Watson Emotion Analysis, allow organizations to learn about an individual's: Organizations can now train apps to quickly analyze and interpret large volumes of unstructured sensory data.

IBM's Watson AI and IoT-fuelled supercomputer finally has the role it was born for, as it is now being recruited to tackle cybercrime. Since it was first presented to the world as a contestant on the gameshow Jeopardy!, IBM Watson has evolved 10-fold. From its new internet of things (IoT) headquarters in Munich, it is being used not only to develop the brains for future autonomous vehicles, but also to influence decision-making, from healthcare to smart cities. Now, similar to the Dr Watson character in the legendary Sherlock Holmes books, IBM Watson is to be recruited to solve crimes – specifically, cybercrimes. Over the past year, Watson has been trained in the language of cybersecurity, ingesting more than 1m security documents.

Evaluating queries over massive amounts of data is a major challenge in the big data era. Modern massively parallel systems, such as, Spark, organize query answering as a sequence of rounds each consisting of a distinct communication phase followed by a computation phase. The communication phase redistributes data over the available servers, while in the subsequent computation phase each server performs the actual computation on its local data. There is a growing interest in single-round algorithms for evaluating multiway joins where data is first reshuffled over the servers and then evaluated in a parallel but communication-free way. As the amount of communication induced by a reshuffling of the data is a dominating cost in such systems, we introduce a framework for reasoning about data partitioning to detect when we can avoid the data reshuffling step.

It was one of those amazing "we're living in the future" moments. In an October 2013 press release, IBM declared that MD Anderson, the cancer center that is part of the University of Texas, "is using the IBM Watson cognitive computing system for its mission to eradicate cancer." Well, now that future is past. The partnership between IBM and one of the world's top cancer research institutions is falling apart. The project is on hold, MD Anderson confirms, and has been since late last year.

It was one of those amazing "we're living in the future" moments. In an October 2013 press release, IBM declared that MD Anderson, the cancer center that is part of the University of Texas, "is using the IBM Watson cognitive computing system for its mission to eradicate cancer." Well, now that future is past. The partnership between IBM and one of the world's top cancer research institutions is falling apart. The project is on hold, MD Anderson confirms, and has been since late last year.