Back in 2010 in an article in Time Magazine, IBM reported that they were working on creating a new computer system that would be so advanced that it could compete against humans on the TV show Jeopardy. The following year it did exactly that. Competing against two former champions and with no access to the internet, it beat them both. This super computer was named Watson, after IBM’s founder Thomas J. Watson.
IBM Watson is a supercomputer that combines Artificial Intelligence with advanced analytics to create a highly sophisticated question answering machine. It has access to an enormous wealth of information. It can retrieve data from 90 servers, which have in total over 200 million pages on information. It can then process this data against over 6 million logic tools. This gives Watson incredible cognitive abilities allowing it to answer questions at the same level as a highly intelligent human. IBM hopes that its machine learning protocols will allow it to one day surpass humans.
Industries where Watson is in use
Legal
In 2016 BakertHostetler law firm developed a legal expert system based on Watson to work with it bankruptcy team. The system had the ability to answer BakertHostetler’s lawyer’s question by accessing and analysing over a billion pages of information. It could then translate that data from legalese into natural language and provide the law firm with answers in as little as 3 seconds.
Customer Service
The mobile operator Orange Spain has been using a Virtual Assistant based on Watson, called Djingo since 2016. Through its mobile app and on platforms such as Whatsapp, Djingo can provide customers with information and send pictures such as graphs of data usage. It can also activate services such as roaming data and voicemail. In 2020 Orange predicts that it will complete 7 million customer interactions within the year, which is 20% of their total interactions.
Healthcare
In 2013 Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center developed an expert system based on Watson that was used to recommend treatment plans for patients suffering from lung cancer. They use similar expert systems in Cleveland Clinic, Maine Centre for Cancer Medicine, and Westmed Medical Tools. In 2018 Apollo, India’s largest specialist healthcare systems have implemented systems based on Watson for Oncology and Genomics.
The future of Watson
While Watson has only been adopted in a few key industries so far it has limitless potential and could be used for a wide range of applications. Its ability to provide advanced analytics on massive amounts of data for surpass any previous supercomputer.
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