IN the category "What Do You Know?", for $1 million: This four-year-old upstart the size of a small R.V. has digested 200 million pages of data about everything in existence and it means to give a couple of the world's quickest humans a run for their money at their own game. I.B.M.'s groundbreaking question-answering system, running on roughly 2,500 parallel processor cores, each able to perform up to 33 billion operations a second, is playing a pair of "Jeopardy!" Yes, the match is a grandstanding stunt, baldly calculated to capture the public's imagination. Consider the challenge: Watson will have to be ready to identify anything under the sun, answering all manner of coy, sly, slant, esoteric, ambiguous questions ranging from the "Rh factor" of Scarlett's favorite Butler or the 19th-century painter whose name means "police officer" to the rhyme-time place where Pelé stores his ball or what you get when you cross a typical day in the life of the Beatles with a crazed zombie classic. And he (forgive me) will have to buzz in fast enough and with sufficient confidence to beat Ken Jennings, the holder of the longest unbroken "Jeopardy!"

Watson, IBM Corp.'s supercomputer that famously competed on the television show "Jeopardy," is coming West. The technology giant said Thursday it planned to open a second headquarters in San Francisco early next year for the project, which represents one of the most advanced investments in artificial intelligence. The move, which includes giving developers access to Watson's technologies, will help IBM connect with data scientists and start-ups in Silicon Valley. "Since introducing the Watson development platform, thousands of people have used these technologies in new and inventive ways, and many have done so without extensive experience as a coder or data scientist," Mike Rhodin, senior vice president for IBM Watson, said in a statement. "We believe that by opening Watson to all, and continuously expanding what it can do, we are democratizing the power of data, and with it innovation."

That's a true partnership between humans and AI. Watson takes information that people produce, considers a variety of factors and provides knowledge that is then used to help a human doctor do their job better. But Watson is not a replacement for an actual doctor.

That could help them catch serious problems that are hard to see with the naked eye. A supercomputer could also act as a kind of second opinion, helping to confirm a doctor's suspicions about a somewhat unusual diagnosis. That, in turn, could cut down on redundant testing, which saves patients time, money and dangerous radiologic exposure.

The old Watson that beat Ken Jennings. Now it can fit into a desk drawer. Thanks to a business partnership among IBM, Memorial Sloan-Kettering and WellPoint, health care providers will now be able to tap Watson's expertise in deciding how to treat patients. Pricing was not disclosed, but hospitals and health care networks who sign up will be able to buy or rent Watson's advice from the cloud or their own server. Over the past two years, IBM's researchers have shrunk Watson from the size of a master bedroom to a pizza-box-sized server that can fit in any data center.

Technology company IBM is putting its supercomputer Watson to work - in a robot call centre. The artificially intelligent computer system is taking on the role of customer service manager and will be called Watson Engagement Advisor. Companies will be able to sign up to IBM's service and its customers can then ring a helpline and complain or get help from the Question Answering (QA) machine. The IBM Watson Mobile Developer Challenge invited teams to design mobile apps using Watson's, pictured, cognitive computing capabilities. The 25 finalists will now submit prototypes for judging, after which only five teams will present proposals to IBM.

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.