IBM Opens Up Its Watson Supercomputer To Researchers 28
An anonymous reader writes IBM has announced the "Watson Discovery Advisor" a cloud-based tool that will let researchers comb through massive troves of data, looking for insights and connections. The company says it's a major expansion in capabilities for the Watson Group, which IBM seeded with a $1 billion investment. "Scientific discovery takes us to a different level as a learning system," said Steve Gold, vice president of the Watson Group. "Watson can provide insights into the information independent of the question. The ability to connect the dots opens up a new world of possibilities."
Re:Supercomputer? (Score:2, Interesting)
Itsatrap!
If any company slaps a Watson front-end onto their data, then they'll be paying for access to their own data. So the technology won't really matter, the question is no longer "is this watson thing worth the money?", but rather "how much is access to our data worth?".
After a while Watson becomes the gatekeeper to the companies data, and IBM is there forever.
I also wonder who owns the business rules that Watson resolves? You get your staff to use Watson to query the data set and Watson resolves your business model from these interactions. Who owns that business knowledge?
If you cancel Watson cloud, does the rules you taught it get wiped?
Good results in protein research (Score:4, Interesting)
In related news: [theregister.co.uk]
“To put this in perspective with p53, there are over 70,000 papers published on this protein. Even if I’m reading five papers a day, it could take me nearly 38 years to completely understand all of the research already available today on this protein. Watson has demonstrated the potential to accelerate the rate and the quality of breakthrough discoveries."
Using [Watson], Lichtarge’s team identified proteins that modify p53, which is a key protein related to many cancers. Cancer researchers usually only find around one new protein to work on a year, but the Watson collaboration discovered six potential proteins to target for new research, according to IBM.