Transitioning from conventional to cognitive computing

Currently, the world of computing is undergoing a massive shift, turning into a new plane altogether, of machine learning technology. This is the new necessity due to the massive rise in data, its complexity, and the availability of more and more computing power.

This new computing paradigm is all about finding patterns in data so complex that its problems were so far deemed to be unsolvable by computers—problems that are trivial to humans, even children, such as natural language understanding and playing games, such as chess and Go. A new kind of algorithm was needed to understand data the way a biological neural network does. This new algorithm or solution is computing, which is known as cognitive computing.

IBM realized the potential in machine learning even before it went mainstream, and created Watson, a set of tools that we, the developers, can use in our applications to incorporate cognitive computing without the manual implementation of that technology.