![]() That's what Watson offers, at least for that particular application type. What if you didn't need to move through the preliminary steps of building that network? What if you could jump to the end? Suddenly that moat dries up. ![]() The fewer people and it might be way off base and turn off your early users. Think Amazon and Netflix - part of their competitive advantage is that recommendation network effect built by their users. ![]() Why is that important? Well, building a proper recommendation engine when it depends on a network of people is hard. Thus, if a person wanted to get from where they are to somewhere else in that feature space, Watson provided a map, more or less. It showed what 'shape' a user was in a feature space, the overall shape of the full feature space, and where that user was in that space. In short, it cut out the 'similar person' middleman. In contrast with regular recommendation engines which require other users to feed it data on preferences and then try to match you with similar users, the project we were working on had Watson build a feature space on its own (something it is very, very good at) then match a user profile within that space. We were basically using it as a recommendation engine. I've helped IBM explore some consumer applications around Watson. It may be super cool technology, but IBM has done an impressive job of completely obfuscating its nature and capabilities with sales speak gobbledygook. Yeah it sounds good, but what is it doing? Keeping patients warm? Writing publications for researchers? Churning through raw experimental data? Rationing healthcare (er, making treatment decisions) with sophisticated mathematics? Generating a quick summary of new research papers for treaters? I have no idea. The above post saying "it helps with cancer research and patient care" is the perfect example of this. I click "What is Watson?" and get this page which says "IBM Watson is a technology platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to reveal insights from large amounts of unstructured data" which is great but that could describe anything from Siri to Google to Yelp to Microsoft Word and Excel. The first link I get on google when I type in "watson" is titled "IBM Watson - The platform for cognitive business" which is pretty meaningless. Most press and IBM originated information about Watson reads like vague sales collateral or PR puff. I think that is what the above poster is asking and the root of the original inquiry.
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