Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing

In the last decade, the availability of massive amounts of new data, and the development of new machine learning technologies, have augmented reasoning systems to give rise to a new class of computing systems. These "Cognitive Systems" learn from data, reason from models, and interact naturally with us, to perform complex tasks better than either humans or machines can do by themselves. In essence, cognitive systems help us perform like the best by penetrating the complexity of big data and leverage the power of models. One of the first cognitive systems, called Watson, demonstrated through a Jeopardy! exhibition match, that it was capable of answering complex factoid questions as effectively as the world's champions. Follow-on cognitive systems perform other tasks, such as discovery, reasoning, and multi-modal understanding in a variety of domains, such as healthcare, insurance, and education. We believe such cognitive systems will transform every industry and our everyday life for the better. In this talk, I will give an overview of the applications, the underlying capabilities, and some of the key challenges, of cognitive systems.