Big Blue is bringing a new kind of big data to digital ads. We've seen Bob Dylan talking to IBM Watson about love and loss in TV spots for months, and Big Blue now wants us to connect with the same kind of artificial intelligence--but not to discuss humanity's deepest issues. No, the idea here is more about the weather and the right kinds of spices to put in our soup. The Armonk, N.Y.-based tech giant today is announcing Watson Ads that will let consumers ask questions by voice or text and receive answers. IBM's relatively new ownership of The Weather Company's digital properties is coming into play in a serious fashion: Watson Ads will first appear on Weather.com, the Weather mobile app and the company's data-driven WeatherFX platform.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

David Kenny spoke at The Post's 2016 Transformers live journalism event May 18 in Washington, D.C. Learn more here. "We don't ask the same person to be our oncologist, our radiologist, our accountant, our chef and our dry cleaner. We have different people learn different things and the same is true with AI. "When it makes mistakes, when it's misinterpreted and gives a wrong answer, then you correct it and it learns for the next time. I think what's important is you put safeguards, that there is still an override, that those don't become decisions. In the more critical the mission, the more you need to have checks and balances just as we do on humans, right?

The idea that cognitive technology can transform the healthcare system in radical ways holds a special place in Matthew Howard's head. The UK Lead at IBM Watson Health has no doubts: "I consider it to be the most important development in healthcare analytics globally." And, using cognitive applications such IBM Watson to help augment the ability of the clinical scientific community, he says, is critical for meeting future life science demands. In fact, healthcare is a key strategic imperative to IBM. If you just look at some of the quotes by the company, they say very openly that Watson Health is their moon shot.

Employing IBM IBM 0.26 % 's artificial intelligence technology has become a popular move for brands seeking to make better use of data in their marketing efforts. Havas HAV 0.33 % Group this week is officially unveiling Havas Cognitive, a new practice in partnership with IBM Watson, to help clients develop tailored marketing campaigns and products. Separately, startup Equals 3 on Wednesday is launching a new software product dubbed Lucy that utilizes Watson's cognitive computing capabilities to make the media planning process more efficient for marketers and agencies. That follows earlier announcements by Turner Broadcasting, which earlier this year signed a deal to incorporate Watson into its ad sales efforts, and Kia Motors, 000270 -0.11 % which used Watson to select social media influencers for its Super Bowl ad campaign. Watson, which gained fame after beating top human competitors on "Jeopardy" five years ago, analyzes troves of data to uncover patterns that humans might miss.

What makes a cartoon caption funny? As one algorithm found: a simple readable sentence, a negation, and a pronoun--but not "he" or "she." The algorithm went on to pick the funniest captions for thousands of the New Yorker's cartoons, and in most cases, it matched the intuition of its editors. Algorithms are getting much better at understanding language, and we are becoming more aware of this through stories like that of IBM Watson winning the Jeopardy quiz. Google released the word2vec tool, and Facebook followed by publishing their speed optimized deep learning modules.

The Jeopardy! Watson system in 2011 had three main abilities, as Schneider explained. First, it could understand unstructured text. "[Normally] we don't have to think about it, but we inherently understand what sentences are, and how verbs, nouns, etc. come together to produce text," Schneider said. Watson could read through human-generated content and parse it in a way that other systems haven't been able to do before. Next, Watson could come up with its own hypotheses, and then return the one with the highest confidence.

On Tuesday, IBM announced that Watson, its cognitive computing system (and former Jeopardy champion), will be spending the next year training for a new job--fighting cybercrime. Watson for Cyber Security is a cloud-based version of IBM's cognitive computing tools that will be the result of a one-year-long research project that is starting in the fall. Students and faculty from eight universities will participate in the research and train Watson to better understand how to detect potential threats. Like many other cognitive systems, Watson learns by digesting large amounts of information. Essentially, the students will train Watson "by annotating and feeding the system security reports and data," according to an IBM press release.

I was chatting with an old friend yesterday and he reminded me of a conversation we had nearly 50 years ago. I tried to explain to him what I did for living and he was trying to understand why getting computers to understand was more complicated than key word analysis. I explained about concepts underlying sentences and explained that sentences used words but that people really didn't use words in their minds except to get to the underlying ideas and that computers were having a hard time with that. Fifty years later, key words are still dominating the thoughts of people who try to get computers to deal with language. But, this time, the key word people have deceived the general public by making claims that this is thinking, that AI is here, and that, by the way we should be very afraid, or very excited, I forget which.

With over 500 companies developing cognitive systems, we're seeing patterns emerge around the creation of cognitive systems at the business unit, business process, and application levels. By selecting a subset of these companies to compare, we can see a few of the leading business units and processes that are going cognitive. We also discover how various Watson services are combined to create to address these business needs. These topics and more were covered in the recent Emerging Cognitive Patterns webinar. A few highlights are discussed briefly below but refer to the full webinar slide deck for complete details.