Cognitive computing: Hello Watson on the shop floor

Cognitive computing refers to systems that learn at scale, reason with purpose and interact with humans naturally. Rather than being explicitly programmed, they learn and reason from their interactions with us and from their experiences with their environment. They are made possible by advances in a number of scientific fields over the past half-century, and are different in important ways from the information systems that preceded them. IBM has been working on the foundations of cognitive computing technology for decades, combining more than a dozen disciplines of advanced computer science with 100 years of business expertise. The birth of computing consisted of single-purpose mechanical systems that counted, using punched cards to input and store data, and to eventually instruct the machine what to do (albeit in a primitive way).