Review: IBM Watson lowers the bar to machine learning

The IBM Watson AI system drew the world's attention by winning at "Jeopardy" in February 2011 against two of the game's all-time champions, and IBM has strived to apply the Watson system to more interesting problems than a trivia quiz ever since. IBM has also extended Watson's capabilities to developers, data scientists, and even ordinary business users. Along with IBM's SPSS predictive analytics software, Watson forms the foundation of IBM's cloud offerings in machine learning and advanced analytics. IBM breaks the Watson system into five parts: machine learning, question analysis, natural language processing, feature engineering, and ontology analysis. From these parts, IBM has built out a suite of composable cloud services from which you can make your own mini-Watson for a solution to your problem.