Watson is an IBM supercomputer that combines artificial intelligence and sophisticated analytical software.
This IBM supercomputer is built upon a new foundation called cognitive computing which is a system that learns from interactions not only online but also with humans, files and its environment.
Not only Watson processes at a rate of 80 teraflops (trillion floating -point operations per second) but it also accesses more than 90 servers with a combined data store of more than 200 million pages of information.
Thus, to preprocess all this volume of information, Watson builds indices and other metadata to make the content more useful and efficient to work with.
Watson´s renown is still linked to its success on the American question/answer TV game show called Jeopardy.
On this TV show, what made Watson particularly advanced, even compared with the Deep Blue IBM´s chess-playing computer, that won the world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, was its abilities to find answers from ambiguous clues.
The applications for the Watson’s cognitive computing technology are almost endless. This device can perform text mining and complex analytics on huge volumes of unstructured data which can support a search engine with capabilities far superior to any previously existing.
Watson has already applications in many fields such as on Education, Business, Finances, Marketing, Supply Chain , Talent (music, cooking and design), Work and Internet of Things and Health.
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/50847.wss
http://research.ibm.com/cognitive-computing/watson/index.shtml#fbid=m2bYNg_7UG1
Click to access The-Era-of-Cognitive-Systems-An-Inside-Look-at-IBM-Watson-and-How-it-Works_.pdf
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/IBM-Watson-supercomputer
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