Being human - Watson boots up a new future for IBM in cloud robotics

The 2011 triumph of IBM's Watson supercomputer in US game show, Jeopardy, was the moment it became a real-world commercial venture within the enterprise services giant. The question-answering system, named in honour of IBM's first CEO, Thomas J Watson, defeated two former winners of the show, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, to clinch a 1 million prize, using onboard (rather than cloud-based) data. IBM began offering Watson as a cloud service in 2015, and since then the company has found itself at the centre of a range of new, speculative ventures. As we will explore, some of these blur the lines between classical computing, AI, and machine learning, and may point towards a networked future for humanoid robots. Duncan Anderson, IBM's European CTO of the Watson Program, picks up the story: We started to think about how we could make the Watson technology more consumable and less resource intensive.