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IBM & Cognitive In The News
- Forbes: Why Open Beats Closed, September 2016
- TechCrunch: IBM and MIT partner up to create AI that understands sight and sound the way we do, September 2016
- Boston Globe: MIT and IBM form to teach computers recognize sound, images, September 2016
- The Stack: IBM and MIT collaborate to advance AI machine vision, September 2016
- TechCrunch: The White House requested input on artificial intelligence, and IBM’s response is a great AI 101, August 2016
- InformationWeek: IBM: AI Should Stand For 'Augmented Intelligence' August 2016
- Economist Special Section on AI: From not working to neural networking; Frankenstein's paper clips, June 2016
- Washington Post: Everything you think you know about AI is wrong, June 2016
- Bloomberg TV: Forward Thinking: March of the Machines, June 2016
- TIME & Fortune: IBM Researcher: Fears Over Artificial Intelligence are ‘Overblown’, May 2016
- IBM Announcement: IBM and the University of Illinois to Pioneer Next-Generation Cognitive Computing Systems, April 2016
- CNNi: IBM Watson and the future of artificial intelligence, March 2016
- IBM Think blog: Extending Game-Based AI Research into the Wild, March 2016
- TIME: IBM’s Top Researcher: A Win for Computer is a Win for Humans, March 2016
- CBC (Canada): Watson and the Rise of Cognitive Computing, January 2016
- Financial Times video: Robots in the workplace, January 2016
- IBM Announcement: IBM Research and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Pioneer Next-Generation Cognitive Environments for Business Decision Making
Watson: The first cognitive system
The first cognitive system was Watson, which debuted in a televised Jeopardy! challenge where it bested the show’s two greatest champions. The challenge for Watson was to answer questions posed in every nuance of natural language, such as puns, synonyms and homonyms, slang, and jargon.
Watson was not connected to the Internet for the match. It only knew what it had amassed through years of persistent interaction and learning from a large set of unstructured knowledge. Using machine learning, statistical analysis and natural language processing to find and understand the clues in the questions, Watson then compared possible answers, by ranking its confidence in their accuracy, and responded – all in about three seconds.
Newer generations of Watson are currently being trained in oncology diagnosis for healthcare professionals, and in customer service as a support representative. IBM Research continues to push the boundaries of Watson by developing new interfaces that will allow humans and computers to interact more naturally.
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