IBM's Watson Group is just about 18 months old now.
This past April the Group held its inaugural World of Watson event in the Duggal Greenhouse in Brooklyn to showcase Watson, its partners, the earliest production applications, and an impressive overall ecosystem of developers and startups.
Here are a few highlights of the event…
Commitments:
IBM CEO Virginia Rometty added a degree of precision on IBM’s big bet on Watson in this early part of its journey, stating that: "In the future, every decision that mankind makes… is going to be informed by a cognitive system like Watson".
Ecosystem:
IBM Watson has attracted interest across over 20 industries in 30 countries with over 250 integration partners developing Watson based applications, with many more in the pipeline.
Skill Creation:
IBM is engaged with over 100 universities to teach Watson programing and skills necessary to advance cognitive computing in science and business.
Accessibility:
IBM has made its IBM Watson technology available as a development platform in the cloud, enabling a worldwide community of software application providers to build a new generation of cognitive applications.
APIs:
IBM has acquire three firms to bolster bolstered and extended the IBM Watson Developer Services: AlchemyAPI, for natural language processing and image identification, Cognea, for dialog capabilities as well as evaluating and developing personality traits and personas, and Blekko for search, web crawling, and indexing applications.
Data and Content:
IBM announced that they are adding content contributors including Morningstar and the Associated Press. By aggregating news and blog content from over 75,000 sources, users will be able gather signals and insights from an ever deepening and broadening reservoir of data and content.
IBM Watson In Financial Services
IBM has pointed the Watson platform and it's ecosystem of developers, apps, and ISVs at opportunities that has become central to digital strategies in the financial markets, namely the data analytics and cloud services delivering next generation client engagements and services, infrastructure optimisation, and risk management capabilities.
An expanding set of ecosystem partners, which includes over 30,000 developers, now represents a cognitive analytics market coming to life on the Watson platform in 18 short months.
With Watson, IBM is creating connections between people, data, and cognitive computing with new advisory, discovery, and engagement application. For example:
Watson Engagement Advisor:
USAA, after being trained with content and human experiences to answer a set of policy and relationship questions received through digital channels from its members.
DBS wealth advisory solution powered by IBM Watson:
Changing the nature of the wealth advisory services at Development Bank of Singapore by providing machine assisted investment lifecycle management from the identification and visualization of long-tail market trends.
An early view of Watson for Regulatory Compliance:
Transforming regulatory burdens into business opportunities for forward thinking institutions looking to monetize their investments into ingesting, tracking and understanding the morass of policies and regulations.
M2M ITO Self-Serve:
Crushbank utilises IBM Watson to ingest, arrange, and analyze technical documentation and other data used to automate IT help desk.
Conduct Risk:
Nuro is a cognitive enterprise-grade group messaging platform design for employees and trusted external parties.
Data Security as a Data Science:
SparkCognition provides a cloud-based security intelligence and threat advisory service using Watson Developer Cloud services.
Deloitte Consulting/IBM RCCS:
Targeting a next generation in the automation of risk and regulatory compliance.
By Michael Versace - Research Director, Global Risk, IDC Financial Insights
This post was originally published on IDC Community