Cognitive Computing and Big Data Analytics

CHAPTER 9 IBM’s Watson as a Cognitive System

One of the best ways to understand the potential for cognitive computing is to take a look at one of the early implementations of a cognitive system. IBM developed Watson as one of its new foundational offerings intended to help customers build a different type of system based on the ingestion of new content. IBM’s design focus for Watson was to create solutions based on aggregating data leveraging techniques ranging from machine learning to Natural Language Processing (NLP) and advanced analytics. Watson solutions include a set of foundational services combined with industry-focused best practices and data. The accuracy of results from a cognitive system continuously improves through an iterative training process that combines the knowledge of subject matter experts with a corpus of domain specific data. One of the important capabilities that allows for this machine/human interaction is the ability to leverage NLP to understand the context of a combination of a variety of unstructured and structured data sources. In addition, a cognitive system is not constrained to applications that are deterministic in nature, but can manage probabilistic systems that change and evolve as they are used.

Watson Defined

Watson is a cognitive system that combines capabilities in NLP, analytics, and machine learning techniques. Watson gains insights and gets smarter with each user interaction and each time that new information is ingested. By combining ...