Interesting article from IBM’s Systems Magazine.

“The applications for cognitive systems with this degree of complexity are virtually limitless. From weather warnings to medicine, e-commerce to banking, cognitive computers will utilize their senses to integrate the vast amounts of available big data, informing experts and augmenting decisions in increasingly complex situations. “For example, a cognitive computing system monitoring the world’s water supply could contain a network of sensors and actuators that constantly record and report metrics such as temperature, pressure, wave height, acoustics and ocean tide, and issue tsunami warnings based on its decision making,” Kanevsky says.

IBM furthermore predicts that in the near future, cognitive systems will enable consumers to touch fabrics through their mobile devices via electrical impulses, analyze x-rays and medical images to assist doctors in diagnoses, detect vibrations and predict natural events like earthquakes, smell biomarkers and indicate when people are getting sick, and even develop a personalized taste palate that can create recipes based on individual dietary requirements and flavor preferences.

If this all sounds far-fetched, consider Watson, the famous (and first) cognitive computer system developed in IBM’s DeepQA research team. Watson first entered popular consciousness by famously beating two former “Jeopardy!” champions in 2011, utilizing natural language processing and memory storage of 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content. For the past year and a half, Watson has been involved with Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the health insurance company WellPoint, studiously consuming medicinal literature, employing its vast memory to augment physicians’ abilities to diagnose and deliver care to their patients.”

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