Cognitive Computing and Big Data Analytics

CHAPTER 13 Emerging Cognitive Computing Areas

Cognitive computing is beginning to have an impact on a number of different industries. Initially, cognitive computing is starting to transform the healthcare industry, as discussed in Chapter 12, “Building a Cognitive Healthcare Application.” Cognitive computing applications are already:

• Making and enabling new discoveries about patterns of symptoms that indicate specific diseases based on the power to read more research and case files than any individual physician
• Explaining the results of findings to medical students to help them refine their own diagnostic abilities
• Democratizing specialized knowledge and making it available to practitioners, who would rarely, if ever, see certain symptoms or conditions

All these capabilities that help drive the adoption of cognitive computing in healthcare will have the same potential in other industries. For example, finding patterns for disease diagnosis and making treatment recommendations are special cases of the general problem of identifying faults and remedies in complex systems. This capability to diagnose problems has applications in industries such as manufacturing—machine maintenance and repair from household appliances to oil rig apparatus, and even call centers for problem resolution. Evidence-based explanations that help to train new professionals can be used in any field where a large or complex body of knowledge is codified. Finally, almost every profession has the potential ...