IBM Watson is a cognitive computing platform originally developed by IBM to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy. Watson was built on the company’s DeepQA project, and its advanced question answering (QA) capabilities are now being utilized by IBM and enterprise customers in a variety of applications.
Watson is named after IBM’s first CEO Thomas J. Watson, and the Watson platform was developed to take in questions that are expressed in natural language and then utilize algorithms, artificial intelligence and a wealth of data (Big Data) to fully understand the questions and return as precise an answer as possible to the question.
IBM has provided Watson with millions of documents, including encyclopedias, dictionaries, literary works, databases, taxonomies, newswire articles and other reference material to form its knowledge base.
IBM Watson’s Presence Expands to Emerging Technologies
Today IBM Watson technology has expanded to a wide variety of commercial applications, including driving new Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities with Blockchain, security, cloud and other technologies to gain insights from the billions of sensors embedded in machines, appliances, cars, and even hospitals.
IBM is also applying Watson to embodied cognition, where it is deploying Watson’s artificial intelligence (AI) into the physical word, including utilizing Watson in robots, avatars and spaces.
