“Since blowing away the competition on television’s Jeopardy! quiz show in 2011, IBM’s Watson cognitive computing platform has been studying medicine at the IBM R&D center in Haifa,” David Shamah reports for ZDNet. “‘Watson went to medical school, and now it’s set to graduate,’ said Dr Aya Soffer, director of big data and cognitive analytics at the Israel facility. ‘We’ve had it study the medical literature, and now it’s ready to apply its natural language processing skills to real-life applications.'”
“Just in time, too. Last week, IBM announced the launch of Watson Health Cloud to ‘provide a secure and open platform for physicians, researchers, insurers, and companies focused on health and wellness solutions,'” Shamah reports. “The platform will be used by health companies Johnson and Johnson and Medtronic, as well as by Apple. The Mac maker has its own platform and hopes to become a top health company itself. It has established a new business unit, called Watson Health Cloud, to administer the big data apps that will use Watson’s intelligent analysis and understanding of medical data.”
“said Soffer, ‘Watson has a collection of APIs and SDKs that can be popped into apps, running on IBM’s Bluemix platform as a service. The APIs will query the servers for the relevant data, and the Watson technology will put it into context, providing responses with insight and intelligent analysis,'” Shamah reports. “Given IBM’s new partnership with Apple, some of those APIs are likely to end up integrated into apps that will be used with devices like the Apple Watch, to enable apps to put into context the data it collects.”
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MacDailyNews Take: In related news, Hew Haw’s Doc Campbell gets ready for Android Gear, or whatever the hell they call that mess.