An Idiots Guide to Cognitive Services

This year would seem to be the year of'Cognitive Computing'. The word'cognitive' relates to conscious mental activities, such as thinking, understanding, learning, and remembering. At a deeper level it comprises of such things as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning(ML), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Natural Language Processing(NLP) and a host of other things. If this is related back to the previous definition of cognitive (thinking, understanding, learning, and remembering) you can see that you can tick most of those boxes, with a big question mark over'thinking'. Why is Cognitive Computing important?