David Ferrucci's official title is "IBM Fellow and Leader of the Semantic Analysis and Integration Department at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center." But to the world, he's the genius behind Watson, the question-answering supercomputer system that bested two humans in a nationally televised broadcast of the popular game show Jeopardy! On Monday, Ferrucci delivered a fantastic keynote at the ACM's 2011 Federated Computing Research Conference in San Jose, CA. Ferrucci walked the audience -- nearly 2,000 computer scientists from around the country -- through the creation of Watson, from its initial conception in 2004 to its nationally televised victory this past February. "The story goes," he began, "that an IBM vice president was dining at a restaurant" when, suddenly, everyone around him got up and rushed toward a TV.

IBM's artificial intelligence program Watson has been training to be a doctor over the last few years, applying its machine learning skills to genetics and cancer. But apparently the AI likes to cook in its spare time. In a just-announced collaboration with Bon Appetit, Watson is using the 9000 or so recipes in the magazine's database to generate new recipes based on available ingredients and a suggested cuisine style. The AI uses both the magazine's archive and its own database of flavor compounds to determine what ingredients will go well together, and comes up with surprising new combinations. For more on how this works, check out the IEEE Spectrum article about IBM's cooking initiative for Watson from last year's special issue on food and technology.

The typical ways in which patients get matched up with clinical trials aren't exactly state of the art. At hospitals, clinical coordinators painstakingly sort through patient records, looking for people that fit the requirements of a given experimental treatment; meanwhile, patients bring their own Internet research to their doctors, asking if some new drug might help them. The Mayo Clinic is now seeking to improve this process by putting IBM Watson on the job. The artificial intelligence known as IBM Watson can scan enormous troves of written information thanks to its natural language processing skills, and its machine learning programming means it quickly gets better at using that information to complete a given task. Most famously, it quickly got better at answering Jeopardy questions, and tromped the human competition in a 2011 exhibition match.

Twenty patients with an aggressive form of brain cancer will have a new doctor on their medical team: the learned geneticist known as IBM Watson. In a collaboration announced today between IBM and the New York Genome Center, IBM's Jeopardy-beating AI will analyze the genomes of those 20 patients in hopes of providing insights for their oncologists. IBM has been promoting its AI as a killer app for health care, thanks to Watson's natural language processing skills and machine learning abilities. Over the past two years Watson has been engaged in a separate project at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in which doctors are training the AI to understand the language of medicine. In that project, Watson is being taught to read patients' records and search the medical literature for relevant suggestions on treatment.

Computers that reliably understand human communications have been a staple of fiction going back decades or more. The Enterprise's computer in the 1960s vintage "Star Trek" series is as good an example as any. And truth is, that particular science-fictional ability probably would not have seemed all that remarkable to the typical person of the time. Access billions of pages of text, pictures, and video from a gadget I can fit in my pocket? Play a game with immersive graphics on a huge, high-resolution screen that hangs on the wall?

"Siri, what can you tell me about voice search marketing?" Voice search is the way of the future. Google's Beshad Behzadi said as much in an address at SMX West last March. At the same time, Amazon doubled down (almost literally) on its voice-enabled devices with two new offerings using its Alexa platform and Soundhound launched its Hound voice-search app on iOS and Android platforms. Consumers, meanwhile, are adopting voice search at an alarming pace.

IBM Watson Health has announced a joint initiative with the US Food and Drug Administration to study the use of blockchain technology to share health data to ultimately improve public health. At first, the two-year collaboration will focus on oncology data, pulling together and exchanging data from a variety of sources including that from clinical trials, genomic data, EMRs, and from miscellaneous Internet of Things data from wearables, apps and connected devices. IBM and the FDA will look at how the technology can facilitate information exchange across a spectrum of data types, including clinical trials and real world data. For example, patient-generated data from connected devices could provide clinicians with more insights into population health, potentially offering up research opportunities and ways to leverage large quantities of data into biomedical and healthcare industries. At the core of the collaboration is blockchain technology, which allows secure data sharing between organizations more freely and has been increasingly favored among industry leaders.

Illumina and IBM announced that they would be bundling IBM's Watson Genomics product with Illumina's TruSight Tumor 170, a tool used to help match very sick cancer patients with drugs that might help them. The move is the latest effort by DNA sequencing companies to try to get doctors outside major cancer centers like Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York or M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston to try to scan patients' DNA. The idea is that the DNA test results can be used to help patients who don't have any options find medicines–either approved or experimental–that might help them. So far, this is considered standard practice for late-stage non-small cell lung cancer, but not for cancers in general. Illumina says the sale of DNA sequencing machines for use in cancer represents about 10% of its annual sales, or about $240 million.

For patients with cancer, sequencing tumors can be a beneficial way to improve targeted treatments and connect people with the right drugs, but the process is complicated and many clinics haven't gotten on board yet. Illumina, the biotechnology behemoth known for its DNA sequencing machines, hopes so. The company is now working with IBM Watson to help cancer patients get access to potentially life-saving DNA tests. "Less than 5% of cancer patients have their tumors sequenced, even though it can make a big difference in selecting the right therapies," Illumina's CEO, Francis deSouza, tells Fast Company. Currently, such testing is limited to the top medical and oncology centers globally, while targeted approaches--with the exception of some forms of lung cancer--are not common practice for most cancers.

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?