Watson has already won a major TV game show, is looking for a cure for cancer and has ambitious gastronomy ambitions including devising a recipe for chocolate-beef burritos.
The IBM supercomputer is becoming a jack of all trades for the US tech giant — including in its new role as a business consultant and analyst for various industries by using massive Internet databases.
Watson, which gained fame in 2011 for defeating human opponents on the Jeopardy quiz show, has been reaching into its computing power since then for an array of other services.
IBM has developed a Watson Engagement Advisor application to counsel members of the military and their families how to smartly manage shifting to life after the service.
In the oil and gas sector, IBM has worked with the British tech group Arria to integrate Watson’s capabilities to help improve management of leaks in refineries.
“You can lose a billion dollars through leaks. It’s bad for revenues, it’s bad for the environment, it’s bad for the security,” Arria chief technical officer Robert Dale said.
In health care, IBM in the past week expanded its partnerships in cancer research to 14 US treatment centers to help developed personalized care based on genetics for cases that are difficult to treat.
IBM has worked with health insurers to use big data to improve patient care and has joined with Johnson & Johnson and the medical device maker Medtronic to monitor patients with diabetes and to manage post-operative treatments.
Watson is also in banking: working with financial firms to help advisors compare investment offerings.
“The applicability of the technology is unlimited, anywhere where large amounts of information exist, the technology can be applied,” IBM’s Watson division senior vice president Mike Rhodin said.
“We are at a point in human history where we generate more data than we can consume,” he said at a New York event to encourage new applications for the supercomputer.
IBM sees so much potential in Watson that it announced plans last year to invest US$1 billion in the division, and nearly 20 business sectors have joined the effort.
Watson has teamed with Elemental Path, maker of “smart toys,” such as a dinosaur that can tell stories and answer questions from children.
“It has the brain of Watson, the spirit of a dinosaur, and efficient answers ... to the most awkward questions,” Elemental Path cofounder JP Benini said.
Watson is also getting considerable attention in the kitchen. It uses data analytics to blend flavors and come up with new combinations.
“Watson gives us ingredients to make a dish, selected to pair well together,” James Briscione of the Institute of Culinary Education said.
Briscione said that “Chef Watson” uses a flavor pairing theory based on chemical compounds, a creative way to mix computing and cuisine that produced a bacon-mushroom dessert served at the New York event.
For the culinary minded, Watson allows chefs to indicate a particular dish, such as a salad or burrito, and Watson offers new suggestions like the chocolate-beef burrito recipe it has crafted.
The computer has in its memory thousands of recipes from Bon Appetit magazine, and it also knows the chemical properties of foods. If Watson suggests marrying strawberries with mushrooms, it is because the two foods share a chemical bond.
“Every dish we put together is a combination of ingredients that nobody has ever seen before,” Briscione said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained