It's been an interesting day. The 45th President of the United States of America took office just two hours ago, and he is clearly unlike any other President that has gone before him. So just for fun, I thought I might feed his inauguration speech into Watson in real-time, in order to see what the smartest computer in the world had to say about it. Would he notice any anomalies, or insights that the professional political commentators might have missed? Might we some people respect Trump a little more if they looked at his speech more analytically than emotionally?

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

How Millennials and Baby Boomers Consume User-Generated Content [Infographic] 47% of millennials trust user-generated content, vs. 36% of their baby boomer counterparts. However, each generation shared a relative distrust of content created by brands. This infographic shows the generation gap of UGC. Survey: 60 percent of voice users want more answers and fewer search results People who use voice search -- the majority of whom prefer to do so in private vs. public -- use it because it's fast, doesn't require reading, and gives you fewer answers to sort through. What does voice search mean for the future of search marketing?

The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, a Cognitive Computing Competition, was announced on the TED Stage on Feb 17, 2016. It is a $5 million competition challenging teams from around the world to develop and demonstrate how humans can collaborate with powerful cognitive technologies to tackle some of the world's grand challenges. Every year leading up to TED2020, teams will go head-to-head at World of Watson, IBM's annual conference, competing for interim prizes and the opportunity to advance to the next year's competition. The three finalist teams will take the TED stage in 2020 to deliver jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring TED Talks demonstrating what they have achieved. Ideas will be evaluated by a panel of expert judges for technical validity and ultimately, the TED and XPRIZE communities will choose the winner based on the audacity of their mission and the awe-inspiring nature of the teams' TED Talks in 2020.

TLDR: IBM's Watson is about human augmentation, not termination

This webinar will be the final opportunity before the close of registration for potential competitors to ask any questions they have regarding prize registration. Prior to joining, please be sure to read the Competition Guidelines, available on ai.xprize.org

Five years ago IBM Watson came to the attention of the world thanks to Jeopardy. The real achievement of Watson, however, wasn't its victory over Ken Jennings, said Rob High Jr., an IBM Fellow and head of the Watson Group, during his keynote at the GPU Technology Conference. Rather it was Watson's ability to digest so much information and understand the questions thrown at it. IBM then looked around to see where else those capabilities might be useful, and the first thing that came to mind was doctors. Since then it has turned out that there are many industries that could benefit from what it calls cognitive computing.

The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE is a $5 million competition, challenging teams globally to develop and demonstrate how humans can collaborate with powerful AI technologies to tackle the world's grand challenges. The prize aims to accelerate adoption of AI technologies and spark creative, innovative, and audacious demonstrations of the technology that are truly scalable and solve societal grand challenges. To encourage innovation in any form, the competition is an open challenge in AI. Rather than set a single, universal goal for all teams, this competition will invite teams to each create their own goal and solution to a grand challenge. The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE is a four-year competition with annual milestone competitions in 2017 and 2018.

Photocopiers, PCs, and video conferencing rooms all rose from being technological novelties to standard tools of corporate life. Researchers at IBM are experimenting with an idea for another: a room where executives can go to talk over business problems with a version of Watson, the computer system that defeated two Jeopardy! An early prototype has been made in the Cognitive Environments Lab, which opened last year at IBM's Thomas J. Watson research center in Yorktown Heights, New York. It is intended to explore how software that can understand and participate in human interactions could "magnify human cognition," says Dario Gil, director for symbiotic cognitive systems at IBM research. The lab looks more or less like a normal meeting space, but with a giant display taking up one wall, and an array of microphones installed in the ceiling. Everything said in the room can be instantly transcribed, providing a detailed record of any meeting, and allowing the system to listen out for commands addressed to "Watson."

Data scientists have a lot of tools at their disposal, but not all of them are equally accessible. Aiming to put IBM's Watson AI within closer reach, analytics firm Columbus Collaboratory on Thursday released a new open-source R extension called CognizeR. R is an open-source language that's widely used by data scientists for statistical and analytics applications. Previously, data scientists would have had to exit R to tap Watson's capabilities, coding the calls to Watson's application programming interfaces (APIs) in another language, such as Java or Python. Now, CognizeR lets them tap into Watson's so-called "cognitive" artificial-intelligence services without leaving their native development environment.