Watson, the Jeopardy-winning supercomputer
developed by IBM, could become a cloud-based service that people can
consult on a wide range of issues, the company announced last week.
"Watson is going to be an advisor and an assistant to all kinds of
professional decision-makers, starting in healthcare and then moving
beyond. We're already looking at a role for Watson in financial services
and in other applications," says John Gordon, Watson Solutions
Marketing Manager at IBM in New York.
Watson is a
modular supercomputer made up of at least 90 servers with 16,000
gigabytes of RAM, giving its smart learning software plenty of working
memory for interpeting the meaning of the natural-language questions
asked of it. And as New Scientist revealed a month ago,
Watson's ability to sift through and make sense of hundreds of
evidence-based, peer-reviewed cancer research papers and clinical
guidelines is already proving to be a powerful diagnostic aid to
oncologists, in trials at least.
In addition
to improving Watson's machine-learning capabilities to increase the
range of options the system gives clinicians - including nuancing these
to cater for patient preferences, such as choosing chemotherapy that
does not cause hair loss, for instance - the race is now on at IBM to
make the system far more widely available.
"We want
broad exposure for Watson. We want physicians all over the planet to be
able to use it," says Gordon. "And we are now looking at ways of
delivering Watson as a service to make sure that it is something that is
very accessible and which doesn't require a significant level of
technology investment by the user.
"We hope to
expand Watson's scope by delivering it as a cloud-based service. We
have a number of other application areas under consideration."
Whatever
applications IBM settles on, with the cloud already making computer
storage available to us in ways similar to utilities like gas and
electricity, it will be fascinating to see if artificial intelligence is
the next commodity it delivers.
Image by IBM/AP/Press Association Images
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