IBM makes big data elementary, Watson 

IBM has, for many years, been heavily involved in research in areas such as autonomics, semantic analysis and cognitive computing services, and has been working on applying these technologies to the building of applications and services that exploit big data.

This week some of the first results have been launched by the company, in the form of three new services that will be delivered over the cloud.

The company has pulled together those research and development efforts into a new team, known as the IBM Watson Group.This has been given the task of accelerating the development of a new class of cognitive computing services, software and applications that can analyse, improve by learning, and discover answers and insights to complex questions from massive amounts of disparate data.

The first of the new services is Watson Discovery Advisor. This is designed to accelerate and strengthen research and development projects in industries such as pharmaceutical, publishing and biotechnology. The second, Watson Analytics, delivers visualised big data insights, based on questions posed in natural language by any business user and the third is Watson Explorer, which helps users across an enterprise uncover and share data-driven insights more easily and move into big data initiatives faster.

”Watson is the solution to today’s influx of information, delivered from the cloud and ready to be the ultimate advisor for faster, more accurate decisions,” said Michael Rhodin, Senior Vice President, IBM Watson Group. “By bringing a new generation of Watson-powered services to the marketplace, IBM is transforming industries and professions. These new cognitive computing innovations are designed to augment users’ knowledge, be it the researcher exploring genetic data to create new therapies or a business executive who needs evidence-based insights to make a crucial decision.”

One of the big problems facing many large organisations, especially in areas such as pharmaceuticals, is the high cost and long timelines of research. Reducing these is the primary target for the Watson Discovery Advisor. The new service will help R&D-centric industries do more with their R&D investments, with the goal of achieving more in less time, by reducing the time researchers need to formulate conclusions that can advance their work.

It exploits Watson’s cognitive intelligence tools to rapidly read huge quantities of research documents determining their context and synthesizing the results, helping users pinpoint connections within the data that can strengthen and accelerate their work.

The service can uncover new perspectives from relevant data sources that could easily be overlooked, given the enormous volume of information available. By enabling users to explore data from related domains in a more comprehensive capacity, the Watson Discovery Advisor aims to open up unexpected insights and new ways of thinking to industry researchers.

IBM worked with leading businesses in industries such as publishing, pharmaceutical, biotechnology and higher education, to understand how Watson could be applied to help transform how research is conducted. The IBM Watson Group will initially market Watson Discovery Advisor to clients in the medical, pharmaceutical and publishing industries. Long term, however, the solution could be useful to any professional experts, including analysts who possess deep subject matter expertise and seek to augment their knowledge.

IBM Watson Analytics is targeting the important area of human understanding of the results of bug data analytics. This is where the old adage of `a picture is worth a thousand words’ can be extended to include the phrase `and several million numbers’.

It allows users to explore Big Data insights through visual representations so that business users can extract meaning and business value from the data without the need for advanced analytics training. It removes common impediments in the data discovery process, enabling business users to quickly and independently uncover new insights in their data. Guided by sophisticated analytics and a natural language interface, Watson Analytics automatically prepares the data, surfaces the most important relationships and presents the results in an easy to interpret interactive visual format.

It then becomes possible to share findings with others, asking for input. Through social collaboration, each business user could view and interact with data-driven insights, and even add additional data to spark new discoveries.

The Watson Group’s  Watson Explorer is aimed at helping users across an enterprise uncover and share data-driven insights more easily, while helping organisations launch big data initiatives faster.

It provides a unified view of all of a user's information and overlays that with data discovery, navigation and search capabilities that are secure, unified and span a broad range of applications, data sources and data formats – both inside and outside an enterprise.

It also provides users with a framework for developing information-rich applications that deliver a comprehensive, contextually-relevant view of any topic for business users, data scientists and a variety of targeted business functions.

IBM sees the new Watson services providing its customers and partners with tools and capabilities to tap into all relevant data – regardless of source or type – and run analytics to gain fresh insights securely and in real-time, across any aspect of an enterprise, including revenue generation, marketing, finance, risk and operations.