Lucasfilm screencapWho knew Han was so self-conscious? One of IBM Watson's many talents is analyzing personality traits by looking at written text. The supercomputer assesses traits based on the popular Big Five test, which rates subjects for extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. It can also identify different tones such as fear, joy, confidence, and openness. These skills have been used to do everything from assist customer service agents in analyzing how their phone calls went to providing dating tips. We tested out Watson last week on the "Harry Potter" universe and were wowed by its conclusions.

Shares of International Business Machines (IBM) are up 3.50, or 2.4%, at 151.91, after Morgan Stanley's Katy Huberty this morning reiterated an Overweight rating on the shares, and jacked her price target to 168 from 140, while she now thinks the most bullish scenario for the company could see the stock soar to 195. A lot of that depends on sentiment turning among skeptical investors, she notes: That upside scenario to 195 is predicated on the prospect that "investors begin to recognize IBM's competitive lead in Strategic Imperatives, particularly Watson." The main contention Huberty makes is that Watson, the company's artificial intelligence service, is going to double the number of customers it has this year, and that "after aggressive hiring and an estimated 5B in data acquisitions over just the past two quarters, IBM is beginning to show a path toward revenue monetization in Watson." Huberty doesn't project any financials for Watson, but she has been keeping a list of the customers that have signed up for the service, names such as Japan's SoftBank (9984JP) and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), which give her confidence the company can make real money off of many sectors of the economy such as healthcare: From a top-down perspective, we see Watson as similar (though even more disruptive) to ERP which initially helped address human inefficiencies in business much like Watson. ERP has grown into a 150B market including software, hardware, and services and we see that as a conservative estimate for cognitive computing with IBM Watson the likely share leader.

Solutions architects are the experts on our team at understanding and implementing Watson technology. They have developed this expertise by providing technical support to our partners through multiple mediums. Through their work, they have a deep understanding and point of view about the Watson APIs, but also the cognitive landscape at large. I interviewed solutions architect, Chris Ackerson on his thoughts on Watson and cognitive computing, as well as his specific tips and resources. Where do you see the Watson APIs growing in 2016 and beyond?

For the last five years, IBM has strived to reinvent itself as a cloud computing and cognitive platform company to support its large enterprise clients as they shift their operations online, including many in travel and transportation. With most large companies today evolving into digital companies, cloud computing is a booming marketplace for the big four industry providers: IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Google, for example, stated that cloud could overtake advertising revenue in five years. Travel companies like Etihad and Lufthansa are helping drive IBM's cloud sales. The UAE carrier signed a 700 million IT deal with IBM last October, while Germany's national airline invested 1.25 billion in Big Blue in November 2014 to integrate cloud computing. Cognitive, on the other hand, is IBM's wild child savant compared to its older cloud sibling.

Angela also leaves behind her beloved companion, Eric Dunbar of Vinton and his children, Erica, Jonathan, Patrick and Kristen.She will be remembered as a beloved mother, sister, daughter, partner, and friend to countless others.Funeral services will be at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, March 30, 2016, conducted from Conner-Bowman Funeral Home with Pastor Rick Poland officiating.Arrangements by Conner-Bowman Funeral Home, 62 Va.

In two previous posts, I covered the emerging industry of cloud-based machine learning solutions. First, I covered Microsoft's Azure Machine Learning and IBM's Watson Analytics. Microsoft's Azure ML provides a graphical drag-and-drop interface for connecting preprogrammed components of a data science pipeline together. The service is similar to KNIME and seemed targeted for users who knew just enough to know what to do, but not so much that they would want to code up fresh algorithms. One value added for Microsoft's product is a smooth integration for companies which already have their data stored in Microsoft's Azure compute cloud.

"Cognitive conversations" with artificial intelligence are "the future" of customer care, IBM's CTO of Watson Europe reckons. Speaking at Computing's Big Data and Analytics Summit 2016 last week, Duncan Anderson explained how AI like IBM Watson is "not Ex Machina" - referring to the 2015 film in which human-like AIs become self-aware - but is now at the point where it can soon make considerable changes to the daily lives of people. "The practical reality of where we are is not Ex Machina - we're not building beautiful computers and spoofing humans, [but] we're solving practical problems today," he said. Anderson said Watson's growing ability to process unstructured data - "text documents, images, voice - the novel data types" - is now bringing to an end the traditional approach of putting such data "in a database clock and [doing] nothing with it". While this is nothing new, Watson's improving effectiveness at communicating what it's learning back to a user in the form of "chat" is now becoming an increasingly viable frontline tool. "If you're five years old and go into a hospital it's a scary place - it's all white and doctors are big scary old people," said Anderson.

Watson, the name for IBM's supercomputer best known for crushing '"Jeopardy!" contestants at their own game, briefly went from "smart" to "smart ass" with the help of the Urban Dictionary. According to Eric Brown, an IBM research assistant and the "brains" behind Watson, he and his 35-person team wanted to get IBM's supercomputer to sound more like a real human. In Brown's mind, what better way to learn the intricacies of informal human communication and conversation than having Watson memorize the Urban Dictionary? The Urban Dictionary, for those who don't know, is comprised of submissions from everyday people and regulated by volunteer editors, who are given an extremely small set of rules to maintain quality control. But for the most part, even with the help of human editors, the Urban Dictionary still turns out to be a rather profane place on the Web.

You may know Watson for its ability to dominate Jeopardy, but did you know it has impressive movie skills too? IBM has hinted at Watson's movie-watching capabilities, like in its commercial with film director Ridley Scott, but we've never seen it in practice. So we asked Watson to tell us what it thought of the "Harry Potter" original book series and movies -- and the results are really interesting. By analyzing written text, Watson can identify different tones such as fear, joy, confidence, and openness. It can also analyze written text to assess personality traits based on the Big Five test, one of the most common, preferred ways psychologists use to measure personality.

IBM has updated its artificial intelligence (AI) product, IBM Watson, giving it the ability to recognise images. Watson, which relies on cognitive learning to help it process the world in a human-like manner, can now'guess' what's happening in images fed to it via URLs. IBM has created a'Visual Recognition Demo' to showcase Watson's latest trick, which allows users to feed Watson an image before it tells you what it believes it sees. For example, supplying Watson with the image of a tiger throws up the result 77 per cent tiger, 26 per cent wild cat and 63 per cent cat. As well as identifying objects, people or animals in photos, Watson is also fairly adept at guessing what's going on in the background of images such as sunsets and other outdoor scenes.