Watson Summit 2017: One Billion People in Contact with the Supercomputer Watson

IBM’s cognitive platform Watson will reach one billion people by the end of this year, including 200 million users across various industries (retail, travel, insurance, banking, and public services) and 200 million patients in healthcare systems worldwide. IBM will transform every aspect of life and work with Watson by enhancing human intelligence rather than replacing people, it was emphasized at the IBM Watson Summit held in Opatija, the first event of its kind and the second IBM regional conference.

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The supercomputer Watson is used to enhance expertise and make better and faster decisions in various fields, from healthcare, finance, law, trade, education, etc. As Michael Paier, IBM’s General Manager for Southeast Europe, stated at the conference opening. The cognitive systems market is growing, and the analytical firm IDC predicts that by 2018, 75 percent of all users will regularly use services based on cognitive computing. By 2020, spending on cognitive solutions will exceed $40 billion.

Watson is an advanced supercomputer developed at IBM, a system that uses questions and answers instead of classic document searches, and as Antonio Muttoni, IBM’s CEO for Central and Eastern Europe, pointed out, it is present in 45 countries and is trained in eight languages in addition to English. Watson has significant applications in healthcare, particularly oncology, where doctors receive an assistant that can help them make better decisions. – Every day, 1.2 million terabytes of new data are created, but only 15 percent of clients manage to utilize that data. Additionally, 80 percent of that data is unstructured. Cognitive systems enhance human intelligence, enable quick and informed decisions, and Watson is at the core of our cognitive technology – Muttoni emphasized, adding that for the first time, senior management states that technology is the main ‘game changer’ in business.

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Michael Paier, IBM’s General Manager for Southeast Europe, emphasized that in healthcare, 50 percent more data is created each year. – Why is IBM betting on cognitive? Because we want to improve the way we live and work and because we pay a high price for not knowing everything we can learn from the pile of data surrounding us – said Paier. Watson is capable of reading and classifying millions of unstructured data in a short time. Specifically, 22 million structured and unstructured pages in ten minutes.

How the cognitive era looks in practice was demonstrated through numerous examples by speakers from various fields. The Weather Company, a company acquired by IBM, is one of the largest global platforms for the Internet of Things that implements weather data into various businesses and helps in making optimal business decisions quickly. Craig West, Head of Sales for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), pointed out that we all make a series of decisions daily based on weather forecasts, and therefore the analysis of that data is extremely important, especially for sectors like agriculture, trade, energy, insurance, etc. The Weather Company provides real-time data and analytics, thanks to which costs in certain industries and situations can be halved, and weather (un)favorable conditions can be turned into an advantage. For example, hail costs car insurers a billion dollars annually, and the hyper-local forecast provided by the Weather Company can accurately determine where and when hail will fall over an area of 500 square meters. West emphasized that they process 20 terabytes of data daily and make 26 billion individual forecasts.

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The conference also presented the first implementation of Watson Analytics in the region, at the Croatian Atlantic Group. The largest domestic telecom HT also chose IBM as a partner in the digital transformation of its business. Security in an Internet-connected environment was also one of the topics at the Watson Summit in Opatija, with the main star being security expert Bruce Schneier, author of several bestsellers on security and cryptography and advisor to IBM Resilient. Schneier warned that today all devices, from modems, refrigerators to cars, have become computers and consequently have security issues and vulnerabilities. In this context, Watson is also used to address the problem of slower responses to hacking attacks.