IBM is spending $1 billion to give Watson its own New York City–based business division as it seeks commercial applications for its Jeopardy-winning supercomputer in healthcare and other fields. But will medical companies truly find a compelling use for Watson, especially when the Wall Street Journal and others are questioning the platform's ability to solve real-world problems after it famously trumped human opponents in "Jeopardy"?
Officials at Armonk, NY–based IBM are insisting that the diagnosis on Watson's usefulness is positive. This week, they unveiled three new, cloud-based Watson services: Watson Discovery Advisor to provide super information discovery for industries including biotechnology; Watson Analytics, to provide big data insights based on natural language questions posed by a business user; and IBM Watson Explorer, which allows users across an enterprise uncover and share Watson-produced insights more quickly.
All three services are being developed and offered by the new IBM Watson Group, which the AP reports will grow from its initial 27 employees to 2000 housed in new digs being created on the edge of the East Village in the heart of Silicon Alley. IBM also plans to provide $100 million in venture capital to entrepreneurs developing Watson-related applications.
Now delivered from the cloud, Watson is now 24 times faster and smarter, even as it has gone from the size of a master bedroom to three stacked pizza boxes, according to IBM.
"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," Michael Rhodin, senior vice president of the IBM Watson Group, said in a news release.
"This will change the face of healthcare. This is a new era of machine-human collaboration," IBM CEO Virginia Rometty said Thursday, according to CNN.
Courtney DiNardo, MD, uses IBM's Watson cognitive system in October 2013 while consulting with patient Rich Ware at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Photo provided by IBM.
A project with Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Wellpoint showed some promise last year when it came to Watson helping with cancer diagnosis. The Wall Street Journal reports that early version of the Watson tool could be used on patients later this year if it passes tests.
A Watson-based leukemia treatment advisor could be used later this year at University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, part of one of the largest projects so far for the supercomputer. But WSJ reports that the project faced serious hurdles last year involving a problem that medical device designers know all too well:
"The project initially ran awry because IBM's engineers and Anderson's doctors didn't understand each other. IBM's developers worked elsewhere and only visited Houston every few weeks to talk to doctors."
In addition, the technology platform was slow to learn about WellPoint's policies, Elizabeth Bigham, a vice president at the firm, told The Wall Street Journal.
Overall, Watson had brought in less than $100 million in revenue as of October 2013, even though IBM goal is to have it producing $1 billion a year by 2018 and $10 billion a year by 2023, according to WSJ.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek sums up Watson's issues in one sentence: "What if we built a super-smart artificial brain and no one cared?"
Klaus-Peter Adlassnig, a computer scientist at the Medical University of Vienna, tells Bloomberg that Watson is essentially a really good search engine, which would help it diagnose conditions, although in a literal-minded manner.
