Millions of ESPN Fantasy Football players are rolling into week 13 of the NFL hoping to survive injuries and bye weeks on their way to the playoffs. But starting last season, players could also count on the trusty advice of Watson, IBM's artificial intelligence platform, in times of need. ESPN's Daniel Dopp, co-host of "The Fantasy Show with Matthew Berry" on ESPN, sat down with IBM Master Inventor Aaron Baughman at the IBM Innovation Lab in New York City to discuss Watson's foray into the arcane science of fantasy football. "It helps to have a compromise between the heart and the brain. We trained Watson on millions of fantasy football stories, blog posts and videos. We taught it to develop a scoring range for thousands of players with their upsides and their downsides. And we taught it to estimate the chances a player will exceed their upside or fall below the downside," Baughman said.

In a move aimed at reducing costs and "untangling the complexities" of today's global supply chain, IBM is now offering an "integrated supply chain suite" embedded with its Watson AI and IBM Blockchain technologies. The IBM Sterling Supply Chain Suite is designed "to help organizations make their supply chains smarter, more efficient and better able to make decisions to adjust to disruptions and opportunities in an era when globalization has made supplier networks more complex and vulnerable than ever." The new suite is also open to developers and includes IBM Sterling as well as the tech firm's recently acquired Red Hat OpenShift tech platform. The suite allows developers to create "tailored solutions" while also enabling "clients to bring in third-party data, so that all connected applications and networks can benefit from it, IBM noted. The technology suite will allow manufacturers, retailers and other types of businesses "to integrate critical data, business networks and supply chain processes while capitalizing on the benefits of technologies like Watson AI, IBM Blockchain and the Internet of Things," IBM said in a statement, adding that these "intelligent, self-correcting supply chains are designed to learn from experience, creating greater reliability, transparency and security while providing new competitive advantages." Bob Lord, senior vice president of cognitive applications and developer ecosystems at IBM, sees the launch as empowering companies -- across industries -- to be more globally competitive. "Supply chains are now mission-critical systems for all businesses to drive success and profitability," he explained. "Many organizations have risen to the top of their industries by building efficient and agile supply chains.

In today's age of growing engineering complexity, connected products and the Internet of Things (IoT) are changing the way we live and work. Engineering teams are facing pressure to quickly adapt to the pace of change in nearly every industry, with more data than ever to leverage. Enter artificial intelligence (AI) for engineering. IBM is bringing the power of IBM Watson AI to the end-to-end engineering lifecycle, delivering new innovations in requirements management for systems engineers. Embedded in IBM's engineering requirements management solution, formerly DOORS Next Generation (NG), Watson brings new features to improve requirements quality early in a project.

The most vulnerable silo in the world isn't a forgotten storage drive or an isolated repository. When the flow of information is severed between people, body or byte, they wither away. Who, then, is more siloed in communities than a person without a home? Homelessness is a crisis of isolation and a crisis of information access. Homeless people often have a multitude of needs that span across government services and programs.

At IBM Think 2019, enterprises embarking upon their AI journey were squarely focused on how to get data ready for successful AI deployments. I attended Think during my second week at IBM. Here are five notes from the event that, in combination with adopting a prescriptive approach to AI (modernize, collect, organize, analyze, infuse), will strike a winning tone for the AI era. Watson AI is coming to your cloud of preference: public, private, hybrid cloud. It will even be on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

At IBM Think 2019, enterprises embarking upon their AI journey were squarely focused on how to get data ready for successful AI deployments. I attended Think during my second week at IBM. Here are five notes from the event that, in combination with adopting a prescriptive approach to AI (modernize, collect, organize, analyze, infuse), will strike a winning tone for the AI era. Watson AI is coming to your cloud of preference: public, private, hybrid cloud. It will even be on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Cloud computing has made a lot of technology more accessible, and artificial intelligence and its underlying technologies are no exception. If you want more organizations to be able to use your technology, then make it possible for them to use it on one of the big public cloud providers -- Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Indeed, many organizations are now using the AI services that are available and have been built on those public cloud platforms -- AWS Rekognition, for instance. In an effort to broaden the distribution of its flagship artificial intelligence technology, IBM this week announced that it is making IBM Watson portable across all these public cloud services. The company unveiled the strategy this week at the IBM Think 2019 event in San Francisco.

IBM Corp announced on Tuesday that some of its Watson artificial intelligence services will now work on rival cloud computing providers as it seeks to win over customers that want greater flexibility in how they store and analyse data. The announcement builds on IBM's moves to position its services as compatible with nearly any form of computer infrastructure a customer wants to operate. Other efforts include a pending acquisition of open-source software company Red Hat for $34 billion. With the change, companies will be able to use Watson AI tools such as Watson Assistant, which can help them develop conversational services such as a virtual customer service agent, in mobile apps hosted on Amazon.com "With most large organizations storing data across hybrid cloud environments, they need the freedom and choice to apply AI to their data wherever it is stored," Rob Thomas, general manager of IBM Data and AI, said in a news release on Tuesday as it opened "Think," its annual conference in San Francisco to showcase new technology.

BIG BLUE IBM has used its Watson artificial intelligence (AI) tech to develop a new algorithm for multi-face tracking. The system uses AI to track multiple individuals across scenes, despite changing camera angles, lighting, and appearances. Collaborating with Professor Ying Hung of the Department of Statistics and Biostatistics in Rutgers University, IBM Watson researcher Chung-Ching Lin led a team of scientists to develop the technology, using a method to spot different individuals in a video sequence. The system is also able to recognise if people leave and then re-enter the video, even if they look very different. To create this innovation in AI, Lin explained that the team first made'tracklets' for the people present in the source material.

Qoints has launched an influencer marketing tool that uses the artificial intelligence of IBM's Watson to unearth the best influencers for your brand. The Qoints AI Social Discovery tool is a self-service tool that helps marketers deal with the problem of finding the right influencers for marketing campaigns. Locating the right micro influencers (those with 5,000 to 50,000 followers) is key to making influencer marketing effective and affordable. But it's a tedious process to manually search for the right influencers. Demand for influencers is growing, as they've been shown to generate higher levels of trust, engagement and purchase intent from their followers (in comparison to celebrity influencers), according to Toronto-based Qoints.