IBM reports that the company is putting Watson to work: “Watson’s cognitive capabilities were designed to take on the real-world challenges of Big Data across a range of industries. From the outset, the aim was to put Watson to work first in healthcare and finance. Both industries confront deluges of unstructured data every day, and both industries have a compelling need to act on information quickly… While the Jeopardy! challenge demonstrated Watson’s ability to provide a single correct answer with confidence, IBM envisions the underlying technology moving toward a broader range of applications and industries to provide evidence-based decision support over large volumes of variable content.”

It continues, “Watson’s goal is to consider not simply queries but entire problem scenarios, to engage interactively to improve the accuracy of its answers and to present explanations that support its output. While healthcare is the first industry Watson has been put to use in, the technology will be adapted and made scalable for other domains such as tech support and contact centers. Watson’s architecture will be advanced to handle real-world challenges found in several business domains, where it will undergo training and a continuous learning process, enabling it to bring value to the enterprise while continuing to get smarter over time.”

Read more here.

Chris Welty will lead a presentation on Watson at SemTechBiz NY in October. The full program can be viewed here, and registration is currently open here.

Image: Courtesy IBM