While it’s usually Sherlock doing the sleuthing with Watson in tow, now it’s Watson’s turn to fight crime, and simultaneously be a doctor, a journalist, and a financial analyst all at once. For the past year, IBM has been teaching its Watson supercomputer how to fight cybercrime, and now they’re making it available for commercial use. In this new job, Watson’s main role is to help security teams whittle down the list of false leads on security threats, which are a big drain on security teams’ time and which help to hide actual security vulnerabilities. Because of its ability to crunch so much data at once, Watson is quite adept at this newfound use, and is currently being beta-tested at the University of New Brunswick and a number of companies.
Watson’s original claim to fame was when it defeated two of the greatest Jeopardy! champions of all time, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Indeed, playing Jeopardy! was what Watson was originally designed for, to show off the capabilities of IBM’s artificial intelligence. In fact, for the game during which Watson beat Jennings and Rutter, Watson was running on 90 IBM servers with a total of 16 terabytes of RAM, and all the information Watson could draw from during the game was stored within that RAM. It couldn’t be stored on hard drives because it would then be too slow to compete with the human contestants.
Since then, Watson has found use in commercial applications, such as the medical insurance field, where it helps determine health care costs and influence medical decision-making for lung cancer patients. It does this by going down to the genetic level and analyzing which mutations could have caused the cancer, and from there determining what the best course of action might be. Watson is also getting its feet wet in the Internet of Things field, analyzing vast amounts of data coming from smartphones, wearables, and other sensors. From all this data, Watson can come up with insights into customer behaviour that could be useful in marketing, or aggregate sensor data to help engineers come up with better designs for things.
So, it’s a doctor, a cybercop, and a fancy calculator, all in one. And perhaps most impressive of all, it’s physical size has shrunk by about 90 percent since it was first created – from those 90 servers that originally played against Jennings and Rutter that could fill a whole room, Watson is now about the size of three stacked pizza boxes. Just another step closer to the robot revolution…
Leave a Reply