Jason Leonard, Cognitive Systems at IBM
Hi, my name is Jason Leonard, I'm the Asia Pacific director of the Watson business unit for IBM. Watson is the cognitive computing system was developed five years ago now, and won the Jeopardy game show.
Watson?
What is purple?
Correct.
If you're wondering what cognitive computing's all about, it's a form of artificial intelligence, or we refer to it as augmented intelligence, because it's augmenting the decision-making capability and expertise that professional workers have today.
How does it do that? Well, it's got a form of machine learning built into it.
So, whereas in the past computers have been all about relational databases, cognitive computing is about unstructured data, data that is inherently messy or ambiguous, for example, text-based information, videos, voice recordings, that kind of thing.
So, Watson in the legal world is now starting to be used for things like finding precedence by reading through all of the previous rulings that have happened, perhaps over the previous years, or even decades into the past. It's being used in a wide variety of other industries though, any place where expertise is required. So, apart from just reading, it needs to be able to learn from the expert.
Perhaps the most famous example so far has been in the world of oncology.
Watson is reading all of the clinical trials, it's reading the latest information from the pharmaceutical companies, and so on and so forth, but all of that information is useless unless it was paired up with an oncologist who taught Watson how to interpret all of that information for when the next patient comes in.
In the world of law, we expect that a lawyer will give it that kind of expertise to know how to interpret all the various rulings that have happened in the past.
I hope to see you at the conference on Wednesday the 9th of November, at eleven-thirty, where I'll be on a panel hosted by Katie Miller to talk about Robo-advisors, Robo-legal, and the limits of artificial intelligence in the legal world.
If you can't make the conference, you can always go to IBMWatson.com to learn more about the fascinating world of cognitive computing.
