Cognitive Computing and Big Data Analytics

Introduction

With huge advancements in technology in the last 30 years, the ability to gain insights and actions from data hasn’t changed much. In general, applications are still designed to perform predetermined functions or automate business processes, so their designers must plan for every usage scenario and code the logic accordingly. They don’t adapt to changes in the data or learn from their experiences. Computers are faster and cheaper, but not much smarter. Of course, people are not much smarter than they were 30 years ago either. That is about to change, for humans and machines. A new generation of an information system is emerging that departs from the old model of computing as process automation to provide a collaborative platform for discovery. The first wave of these systems is already augmenting human cognition in a variety of fields. Acting as partners or collaborators for their human users, these systems may derive meaning from volumes of natural language text and generate and evaluate hypotheses in seconds based on analysis of more data than a person could absorb in a lifetime. That is the promise of cognitive computing.

Human Intelligence + Machine Intelligence

Traditional applications are good at automating well-defined processes. From inventory management to weather forecasting, when speed is the critical factor in success and the processes are known in advance, the traditional approach of defining requirements, coding the logic, and running an application ...