IBM Watson: where and how are the capabilities of the supercomputer now used?

On Habré already wrote that IBM Watson learned to make recipes , received medical education , and tested himself as a sales assistant . Of course, all these were only test projects that served both for training the IBM Watson system and for testing the capabilities of the supercomputer.

And not so long ago, IBM Corporation opened the resources of the Watson supercomputer for third-party developers. As a result, it was planned to get a variety of projects, where the capabilities of IBM Watson are fully used. Some ideas have already been implemented, and below are examples of the most interesting projects.
')

Personalized brain cancer treatment

In the New York Genome Research Center , a lot of work is being done on the personalized treatment of one of the most dangerous types of human brain cancer, glioblastoma .

Cancer is a complex disease, the treatment of which is complicated by two major obstacles. First, it may happen that in search of an effective treatment method, patients will have to try different options, losing time. Secondly, oncologists simply do not have time to get acquainted with the avalanche of data on cancer of even a certain type, not to mention additional data on unusual types of the disease, and, moreover, data on the genome of a particular patient.

A doctor can be a very capable specialist, but the human brain is simply not capable of containing all the information that can help a particular patient.

Opportunities supercomputer "sharpened" to work with Big Data, a huge unstructured arrays of information. In this case, it is an analysis of hundreds of thousands of medical certificates (about 600 thousand), as well as data on the patient's genome. Plus, the system analyzes biomedical literature and data on relevant drugs.

With the help of IBM Watson, doctors obtain the necessary information after analyzing terabytes and terabytes of data by the system, and use this information for personalized patient care. IBM Watson “learns” on each of the cases, getting more and more new data that can help to treat other patients.

With the help of IBM Watson, each patient is offered a personalized course of treatment that focuses on the factors that led to the development of a cancer in a particular person, taking into account his genome. This allows you to increase the chances of a successful recovery, and each new case further increases this probability .

Work with zoos

No, the IBM Watson system cannot yet monitor and care for animals in zoos. And in this case, we are talking about forecasts for the work of the zoo using IBM solutions for working with Big data and analytics tools, including visitors' preferences, inventory purchases, food for animals, maintenance of the zoo and hiring of labor.

Before the start of work, the Point Defiance zoo / aquarium’s management work was based on assumptions about how many visitors would come to the zoo on any given day. Of course, forecasts made even by an experienced person, an employee of this sphere, can be very far from reality, because a person cannot take into account more than a certain number of factors.

Now, forecasts from IBM take into account the number of checkers of potential and current visitors on social networks, references to the zoo's name on various resources, weather forecasts and much more. This information helps anticipate the needs of visitors and make more effective business decisions.

“Thanks to the analytics, we were able to change our work in almost all departments,” - Donna Powell,
commercial director of the zoo and aquarium Point Defiance. And these changes are quite noticeable (pdf):

• The growth in ticket sales after starting work was 700%;
• Reduction of annual staff costs due to more forward-looking data-based planning - 10% (ie, minus 10 percent);
• 3 times more new loyalty program participants due to the rapid creation and implementation of targeted marketing campaigns;

In general, the capabilities of IBM Watson allow the system to work for the benefit of the banking sector, and in the music industry, as well as in the design and manufacture of electronics. About this a little later will be published another article.