Now Supercomputers Have Found Their Way To The Cloud

Remember awhile back when IBM came out with a supercomputer, named Watson, which competed against past winners on Jeopardy and won? Well, IBM has been doing a lot with Watson since then by applying him to certain industries to boost productivity. According to Geeks Are Sexy, “It’s already been used for projects such as improving automated customer help systems, figuring out the best options for hospitals trying to buy medicines and equipment, and helping tailor lifestyle and health advice to individuals.”

Other uses have been suggested and could possibly be integrated with Watson, such as deciphering ones medical condition from a list of given symptoms. Also, taking over that painstaking task of troubleshooting technical problems with computers.

However, the big news now is that IBM has migrated Mr.Watson to “the cloud” where he is free to run his complex functions at high speeds. What’s particularly interesting is that Watson will become a type of PaaS (remember the differences from our last post?). This means that he will be available to the public as a cloud-based development platform, but that isn’t IBM’s main goal. IBM has put Watson in “the cloud” to encourage new ideas of how society can use a supercomputer like Watson. They’re hoping for the next great idea to come along so that Watson can facilitate it with his blinding fast human-like reasoning. IBM has made it readily available and using Watson for development isn’t hard because according to IBM, “using Watson will be relatively simple and developers won’t need to have a working knowledge of how machine learning works. They will, however, need to provide suitable “training data” to be able to go and use Watson for real.”

So far, the next great idea hasn’t found its way to Watson’s development cloud, but it’s only a matter of time before some genius finds a way to leverage the power of an artificial brain for the greater good. This author’s suggestion would be to have Watson give Siri some pointers; she’s nowhere near ready for Jeopardy.