Going far beyond Jeopardy, IBM’s favorite child is rounding up friends to make intelligent apps proliferate, in healthcare and other fields.
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Watson, IBM’s “cognitive computing system,” commenced as a brainiac game show contestant, easily beating its opponents on Jeopardy and attracting international attention while doing so. Since Watson’s 2011 debut, “he” has moved directly to bigger and higher things: working to cure cancer, changing the style data is utilized in healthcare, and reworking the medical school learning experience.
Now, Watson’s resources can be open to developers worldwide with the hot IBM Watson Developers Cloud, and healthcare sticks out as one of the most main applications of the technology.
The cloud-hosted marketplace will allow application providers to develop Watson-powered apps. The marketplace will include a developer toolkit, educational materials, and access to Watson’s API. IBM will also be launching a Watson Content Store, a cloud-hosted network where app providers can connect to third-party content providers.
“It’s the day i used to be expecting since we started commercializing Watson,” said John Gordon, VP of Watson Solutions at IBM. “We’re bringing the ability of Watson to the innovators of the area. It is beyond what we’d ever do by ourselves.”
[ What’s going to Watson’s “children” be like? Read Beyond Watson: 3 Techs That Rely upon Artificial Intelligence. ]
IBM used Jeopardy as a jumping off point, said Steven Gold, VP of Watson Solutions. Watson has since partnered with multiple healthcare organizations, including Memorial Sloan-Kettering and WellPoint, and have been used for various kinds of cancer research and predictive analytics.
Watson is more accessible than ever. He has shrunk from the dimensions of a big bedroom to the dimensions of a pizza box. His dialogue and interactive capabilities had been refined, and with the recent cloud ecosystem, the chances keep growing.
(Source: IBM)
Partners are already building apps, which IBM plans to get to market in early 2014, Gordon said.
Those partners include MD Buyline, which developed a system that gives access to a research assistant to assist clinical and monetary users to make real-time, informed decisions about medical device purchases. There’s also Welltok, which developed a system that rewards patients for undertaking healthy behaviors. Fluid Retail developed a Watson-powered expert personal shopper.
“The goal is to construct and grow this to a completely-public, self-service development environment,” Gordon said. “Those with content and developers can come together in an innovative community to drive solutions.”
For now, the cloud is restricted to IBM’s chosen partners, but that network will expand through the years, Gordon said.
The first group to construct a Watson app were eight interns, who had 13 weeks to construct an app. IBM used their experiences to simplify the method and adapt it for early adopters.
IBM’s darling is changing the manner artificial intelligence works — but does he ever make mistakes?
“Each day,” Gold said. “Watson is a humble genius within the sense that he never assumes he’s right. He believes there’s probably multiple answer for any particular question and uses evidence and context to weight the arrogance inside the response.”
Commercializing Watson was a learning experience for IBM, Gordon said. The corporate is learning what it takes to construct Watson solutions right into a commercial environment across multiple industries.
“Watson is changing the way in which we will interact,” Gordon said. “He’s beginning a transformative era in computing. Here’s going to be the dominant sort of computing sooner or later. Cognitive computing changes our experience with how we interact with solutions available in the market.”
Though the net exchange of medical records is central to the government’s Meaningful Use program, the hassle to make such transactions routine has just begun. Also inside the Barriers to Health Information Exchange issue of InformationWeek Healthcare: Why cloud startups favor Direct Protocol as an easier alternative to centralized HIEs. (Free registration required.)
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