IBM Watson CTO on What's Ahead for Cognitive Computing

After close to twenty years at IBM, where he began as an IBM Fellow and Chief Architect for the SOA Foundation, Rob High has developed a number of core technologies that back Big Blue's enterprise systems, including the suite of tools behind IBM WebSphere, and more recently, those that support the wide-ranging ambitions of the Watson cognitive computing platform. Although High gave the second day keynote this afternoon at the GPU Technology Conference, there was no mention of accelerated computing. Interestingly, while the talk was about software, specifically the machine learning behind Watson, there was also very little about the software underpinnings. Disappointing as this might have been for the hardware-oriented folks in the crowd hoping to understand how OpenPower Foundation-spurred efforts using GPU-backed, Power-based systems make Watson's gears turn (we can fairly assume that is the case), High did provide a summary of Watson's evolution since 2011 as well as a look ahead at what the Watson research teams are looking to next. High says he is frequently asked what about the differences between AI and cognitive computing, noting that while they aren't much different conceptually, the goal of the Watson team is far more about making humans better at what they do than recreating the human brain in machine form.