IBM has been researching, developing and investing in AI technology for more than 50 years. The public became aware of a major advance in 2011, when IBM Watson won the historic Jeopardy! Since that time, the company has advanced and scaled the Watson platform, and applied it to various industries, including healthcare, finance, commerce, education, security, and the Internet of Things. We are deeply committed to this technology, and believe strongly in its potential to benefit society, as well as transform our personal and professional lives. To this end, we have engaged thousands of scientists and engineers from IBM Research and Development, and partnered with our clients, academics, external experts, and even our competitors to explore all topics around AI.

Candida Vitale and the other fellows at MD Anderson's leukemia treatment center had known each other for only a few months, but they already were very tight. The nine of them shared a small office and were always hanging out on weekends. Dr. Tina Cascone demonstrates the Oncology Expert Advisor System powered by IBM Watson at the Thoracic Center at MD Anderson Hospital in Houston. She says the system provides physicians with accurate information to provide personalized cancer treatment. Rumor had it that he had finished med school in two years and had a photographic memory of thousands of journal articles and relevant clinical trials.

Personality Insights extracts and analyzes a spectrum of personality attributes to help discover actionable insights about people and entities, and in turn guides end users to highly personalized interactions. The service outputs personality characteristics that are divided into three dimensions: the Big 5, Values, and Needs. We recommend using Personality Insights with at least 1200 words of input text. The Personality Insights service lends itself to an almost limitless number of potential applications. Businesses can use the detailed personality portraits of individual customers for finer-grained customer segmentation and better-quality lead generation.

This six-part series about IBM Watson will explore how cognitive computing is impacting fields as diverse as finance, education and security. The first topic for dissection is how Watson is empowering doctors globally.

During the British summer, conversations about sport become almost ubiquitous. This year, however, one participant in those conversations was very different: IBM Watson, IBM's cognitive intelligence. The All England Lawn Tennis Club knew that 2016 would feature unusually fierce competition for attention, with the Tour de France and Euro 2016 taking place alongside Wimbledon. More than ever before, social media was going to be a vital tool in directing that conversation, and directing attention to SW19. Wimbledon's "Cognitive Command Centre" – powered by Watson's intelligence running on a hybrid, IBM-managed cloud - scanned social media for emerging news and trends.

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 declare 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, 2018, and 2019.

IBM Watson: Find out how the world's most talked about A.I. is transforming customer experiences and transforming lives

Learn how IBM Watson works and has similar thought processes to a human.

Data volumes are soaring to previously unimaginable heights. More data has been created in the past two years than in the entire history of humanity. It is predicted that, by 2020, each person on the planet will account for the creation of an average of 1.7 megabytes of new data every second. Scalable AI solutions could help address humanity's biggest challenges. Drawing meaningful insight from such vast amounts data is beyond our capabilities as humans, but perhaps not those of machines.