IBM Watson is a cognitive system capable of understanding language, generating responses, and learning from interactions. The document discusses how Watson analyzes large amounts of data to find patterns and meaning without human guidance. It can reason about concepts, form hypotheses, understand different types of inputs like images and audio, and interact with humans more naturally over time as it continues learning. The document provides examples of Watson capabilities like visual recognition, sentiment analysis of text, and translation between languages. It notes that since competing on Jeopardy!, Watson has expanded from its original question answering system into a family of APIs that developers can use to build cognitive applications.

1. © 2016 IBM Corporation
Leading in the Cognitive Age
Beth T. Smith, GM Technology, IBM Watson
July 19, 2016
IBM Watson

2. IBM Watson and the Era of Cognitive Business
© 2016 International Business Machines Corporation
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3. Today’s world is data
rich but insights poor
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4. Data Explosion is Driving the Need for Cognitive Computing
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5. Watson Finds Knowledge in Noisy Data at Enormous Scale
“Listens to signals” for a domain.
Obtains patterns (meaning) from the signals:
–detects and scores the strength of the signal features;
–learns which features are meaningful.
Determines confidence by analyzing supporting evidence.
Uses trained machine learning:
–previously trained against data that represents domain ground truth.
Elevates and amplifies human cognition:
–Engagement, exploration, discovery, enforcement, decision support, …
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6. Watson: A Cognitive System
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REASON
They can reason, grasp
underlying concepts,
form hypotheses, and
infer and extract ideas.
UNDERSTAND
Cognitive systems
understand imagery,
language and other
unstructured data like
humans do.
LEARN
With each data point,
interaction and outcome,
they develop and
sharpen expertise, so
they never stop
learning.
INTERACT
With abilities to see,
talk and hear, cognitive
systems interact with
humans in a natural
way.

7. Watson transcribes audio from videos, analyzes the results,
extracts various concepts, and recommends related videos
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8. Watson analyzes images to understand their content without
any accompanying descriptive text
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9. Watson gains Insight into a person by Analyzing their Writing
(Signal) (Meaning)
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10. Watson generates synthesized audio with appropriate
cadence and intonation
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11. Meaning and Natural Interaction: Difference Between a Search Engine & Watson
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12. Watson: A Cognitive System
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REASON
They can reason, grasp
underlying concepts,
form hypotheses, and
infer and extract ideas.
UNDERSTAND
Cognitive systems
understand imagery,
language and other
unstructured data like
humans do.
LEARN
With each data point,
interaction and outcome,
they develop and
sharpen expertise, so
they never stop learning.
INTERACT
With abilities to see,
talk and hear, cognitive
systems interact with
humans in a natural way.

13. The portfolio of Watson capabilities…
Watson that competed on Jeopardy! in 2011
was comprised of what is now a single API—
Q&A—built on five underlying technologies.
Relationship
Extraction
Questions
&
Answers
Language
Detection
Personality
Insights
Keyword
Extraction
Image Link
Extraction
Feed
Detection
Visual
Recognition
Concept
Expansion
Concept
Insights
Dialog Sentiment
Analysis
Text to
Speech
Tradeoff
Analytics
Natural
Language
Classifier
Author
Extraction
Speech to
Text
Retrieve
&
Rank
Watson
News
Language
Translation
Entity
Extraction
Tone
Analyzer
Concept
Tagging
Taxonomy
Text
Extraction
Message
Resonance
Image
Tagging
Face
Detection
Answer
Generation
Usage
Insights
Fusion
Q&A
Video
Augmentation
Decision
Optimization
Knowledge
Graph
Risk
Stratification
Policy
Identification
Emotion
Analysis
Decision
Support
Criteria
Classification
Knowledge
Canvas
Easy
Adaptation
Knowledge
Studio
Service
Statistical
Dialog
Q&A
Qualification
Factoid
Pipeline
Case
Evaluation
•Natural Language
Processing
•Machine Learning
•Question Analysis
•Feature
Engineering
•Ontology Analysis
Since then, Watson has grown
to a family of APIs.
With more functions and APIs
are being added every year.
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14. Starter Kits
Explore App Gallery
Access code from GitHub
Demos
Interact live with Watson APIs
View videos
Watson Developer Cloud
Experiment with Watson APIs
Build cognitive apps
Access resources
Get Started Today with Watson
www.ibm.com/watson/watson-cloud.html
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© 2016 IBM Corporation