Beyond Jeopardy!, What is Watson Up To Now?

ByWayne Caswell Updated:
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IBM Watson plays Jeopardy! and wins.By Dr. Martin Kohn, Chief Medical Scientist for IBM Research

Two years ago, IBM’s Watson computer shocked the world when it beat two past grand champions on the TV quiz show Jeopardy!

Watson isn’t playing around anymore.

Watson and the technological leaps forward that made it so revolutionary — the ability to understand human speech, make sense of huge amounts of complex information in split seconds, rank answers based on probability, and learn from its mistakes — are being put to work.

In health care, Watson is helping doctors tailor medical treatment to every patient’s situation in a time when the amount of medical information is doubling every five years. We are working with Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Wellpoint, a private health insurance company, by immersing Watson in the complexities of cancer treatment and the explosion of genetic research, which has set the stage to transform care practices for many cancer patients by providing highly specialized and personalized treatments. The goal is to make Watson a highly proficient physician’s assistant.

Dr. Larry Norton, a world-renowned oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering who is helping to train Watson, said, “This is more than a machine. Computer science is going to evolve rapidly and medicine will evolve with it. This is co-evolution. We’ll help each other.”

Medicine is not alone in benefiting from Watson.

In finance, government, and customer care, Watson is beginning to tackle big, thorny challenges. By giving retailers the tools they need to respond to today’s highly informed, hyper-involved consumers who expect personalized responses — quickly and correctly — to their questions. Or enabling banks to improve and simplify the banking experience, so customers can make the right decisions for their specific situation right now in this ever more complex, fast moving financial world.

In the process, Watson is ushering in a new age of computing — the era of cognitive computing that will transform industries and society. Cognitive systems will be designed to deal with modern complexity in a similar way the human brain does — with its speed and adaptability — and to work with us more the way the way that we work.

And not a minute too soon. Our information-driven world faces real problems. Society has become one massive data feed, with information flowing in from corporate networks, supply chains, Twitter, Facebook and texts. We’re more informed than ever, and also more overwhelmed. Meanwhile, our existing computing architecture is about to barrel straight into a wall in terms of speed, performance and storage.

We need smarter, more efficient information systems that can sense, learn, and predict in order to help us analyze and think. We can’t afford to rely solely on computers that must be programmed in advance for nearly every situation they encounter. To get the most out of the avalanche of big data, we need cognitive systems that can learn or react the way we do.

Since Jeopardy!, Watson has become 240 percent faster and 75 percent smaller. Watson can now run on a single server, which is the size of four stacked pizza boxes, onsite or through the cloud. And that’s why organizations can start bringing Watson into their operations as an assistant, to help sift through the information they’re collecting, learn from that data and how it’s been applied in the past, and provide specific suggestions quickly and efficiently. Collecting data is relatively easy. Using it effectively and learning from it is a challenge.

We’re just beginning to get a taste of what Watson can help us do. Organizations are eager to try this new approach out because we all know that if we can use the data we’re amassing we can transform how we do business, get healthier and improve our environment.

Learn more about Watson in Healthcare here.

About the Author

Martin Kohn, MD, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, is currently Chief Medical Scientist for IBM Research. During a 30-year career in clinical practice, Dr. Kohn has specialized in emergency medicine. He is certified by the American Board of Emergency Medicine, and has practiced in New York, Ohio and California. He is the author of numerous articles published on clinical subjects and has devoted his career to improving health care and clinical processes.

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One Comment

  1. IBM TRIES TO SELL WATSON HEALTH AGAIN (Axios, 1/5/2022) Here’s my response:

    Sell Watson for 25 cents on the dollar? What a waste!

    Impatience – I spent 30 years at IBM and saw many other examples of the company investing in promising markets only to exit later, essentially giving that market to its competition.

    Relational Database – IBM invented it and the SQL language before Oracle took that over.

    Personal Computers – IBM’s open architecture essentially created the PC market, resulting in dozens or hundreds of clones. But IBM forgot what made it great (innovation) and later started asking retailers like BestBuy what new features their next generation PCs should have. That meant they were getting the same advice as their clone competition and signaling the end of their ability to innovate.

    ThinkPad – The company sold IBM PC Division but kept the ThinkPad brand, which included features coming out of IBM Research, including the TrackPoint pointing device and accelerometers that sense a PC falling and retracting disc arms to prevent contact with the disc surface upon impact with the ground. Then, of course, IBM sold ThinkPad to Lenovo, which continues as a major PC brand in the enterprise space that IBM coveted and once owned.

    OS/2 – IBM spent millions developing this multitasking PC operating system and millions more to introduce OS/2 Warp for the consumer market. It realized corporate workers wanted to use the same operating system at home and work and would buy their home PC preloaded with Windows preinstalled. Yes, IBM also abandoned OS/2.

    Consumer Division – After much prodding from sales teams close to the customer and understanding their needs, IBM created an entire division to delight the biggest influencer of corporate IT – the end user. That included an entry into the emerging Smart Home market with IBM Home Director. But even though the company had developed leading-edge technology, they sold it off and later Consumer Division too.

    Research – Over and over I saw IBM waste millions or billions developing innovative technologies that often came from IBM Research before those strategic investments were later squandered by corporate bean counters. They apparently saw cutting expenses as the quickest way to raise profits, rather than developing new products and markets. Gone then was basic research that companies like IBM and AT&T were known for, and new research projects had to be tied to specific products.

    As a retired IBM technologist and market strategist receiving a pension, I hate to be too critical, but it seems well deserved. IBM Watson (and its artificial intelligence base) is just the latest example. It makes me truly sad and also makes me fear for the future of our nation. That’s because I see the same mindset in other big corporations that have lost their way.

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