The Supercomputer That Won Jeopardy Is Now Helping California Save Water

To get information about water use, Watson uses "visual recognition" to scan images of land parcels for valuable information, according to Pesenti. But unlike less-powerful image detection software, Watson doesn't just identify a specific object -- say, a crop field -- in an image. Instead, it combs through lots and lots of information about the image -- like the objects it contains and the colors of those objects -- and uses that information to "understand" the image as a whole. In the case of OmniEarth, researchers can use Watson not just to determine if a given parcel of land contains a crop field, but also to calculate the exact amount of water used by that parcel based on all of the information contained in the photo. What's more, Watson doesn't need to know much about water consumption to tell OmniEarth if people are using too much water.