Category Archives: Watson

Big Data, Enterprise IT, IBM, News & Analysis, Shaun Gregory, Watson

Woodside to deploy IBM Watson to improve oil & gas operations

Woodside will use Watson to improve employee training and oil & gas operations

Woodside will use Watson to improve employee training and oil & gas operations

Australian oil and gas firm Woodside will deploy IBM’s Watson-as-a-Service in order to improve operations and employee training, the companies announced this week.

The energy firm plans to use the cloud-based cognitive compute service to help train engineers and operations specialists on fabricating and managing oil and gas infrastructure and facilities.

The company said the cognitive advisory service it plans to use, ‘Lessons Learned’, will help improve operational processes and outcomes and include over thirty years of collective knowledge and experience operating oil and gas assets.

Woodside Senior vice president strategy, science and technology Shaun Gregory said the move is a part of a broader strategy to use data more intelligently at the firm.

“We are bringing a new toolkit to the company in the form of evidence based predictive data science that will bring down costs and increase efficiencies across our organization,” Gregory said.

“Data science, underpinned by an exponentially increasing volume and variety of data and the rapidly decreasing cost of computing, is likely to be a major disruptive technology in our industry over the next decade. Our plan is to turn all of this data into a predictive tool where every part of our organisation will be able to make decisions based on informed and accurate insights.”

Kerry Purcell, managing director, IBM Australia and New Zealand said: “Here in Australia IBM Watson is transforming how banks, universities, government and now oil and gas companies capitalise on data, helping them discover completely new insights and deliver new value.”

Funding, IBM, News & Analysis, Sellpoints, Stephen Gold, Watson, WayBlazer

IBM backs WayBlazer, Sellpoints to show its commitment to Watson

IBM is investing in companies that use the Watson cloud service

IBM is investing in companies that use the Watson cloud service

IBM announced this week it has invested in two companies, WayBlazer and Sellpoints, which are using cognitive computing to enhance their travel planning and shopping applications. The move seems intended to show IBM’s commitment to Watson-as-a-service, the company’s cloud-based cognitive computing service which launched last year.

WayBlazer, a travel planning and shopping service, uses IBM’s Watson cloud service to help personalise holidays and create personalised travel recommendations for each customer from a slew of social and financial data.

Sellpoint uses Watson to do much the same thing, but for large retail and manufacturing firms looking to bolster their ecommerce sites without having to invest loads by way of internal development resource.

IBM said the investments in WayBlazer and Sellpoint were part of a $5m series A and $7.5m series C funding round, respectively, but the company declined to disclose the financial terms of its involvement.

“IBM is committed to helping our partners accelerate the development and delivery of Watson enabled apps into market where we see endless opportunities for cognitive computing to transform entire industries,” said Stephen Gold, vice president, IBM Watson.  “WayBlazer and Sellpoints are terrific examples of how cognitive computing technology can be used to help organizations redefine customer engagement and drive much deeper, meaningful and relevant consumer experiences.”

Brian O’Keefe, chief executive officer of Sellpoints said: “With the natural language and cognitive computing capabilities of Watson, we’re able to deliver a more personalized, relevant and enjoyable experience, and drive a much deeper level of engagement with customers.”

IBM said the investments were part of the $100m it committed to Watson last year. But it hasn’t always made it clear that it was pursuing direct investments into companies willing to use its technology, which could be an expensive proposition in the long run. The company continues to be relatively quiet on the financial performance of the Watson unit.

Analytics, Apple, Big Data, Healthcare, IBM, John E. Kelly III, Mike Rhodin, News & Analysis, Vendor, Watson

IBM goes after healthcare with acquisitions, Apple HealthKit partnership, new business unit

IBM is pushing hard to bring Watson to the healthcare sector

IBM is pushing hard to bring Watson to the healthcare sector

IBM announced a slew of moves aimed at strengthening its presence in the healthcare sector including two strategic acquisitions, a HealthKit-focused partnership with Apple, and the creation of a new Watson and cloud-centric healthcare business unit.

IBM announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Explorys, which deploys cognitive cloud-based analytics on datasets derived from numerous and diverse financial, operational and medical record systems, and Phytel, which provides cloud-based software that helps healthcare providers and care teams coordinate activities across medical facilities by automating certain aspects of patient care.

The company said the acquisitions would bolster IBM’s efforts to sell advanced analytics and cognitive computing to primary care providers, large hospital systems and physician networks.

“As healthcare providers, health plans and life sciences companies face a deluge of data, they need a secure, reliable and dynamic way to share that data for new insight to deliver quality, effective healthcare for the individual,” said Mike Rhodin, senior vice president, IBM Watson. “To address this opportunity, IBM is building a holistic platform to enable the aggregation and discovery of health data to share it with those who can make a difference.”

That ‘holistic platform’ is being developed by the recently announced Watson Health unit, which as the name suggests will put IBM’s cognitive compute cloud service Watson at the heart of a number of healthcare-focused cloud storage and analytics solutions. The unit has also developed the Watson Health Cloud platform, which allows the medical data it collects to be anonymized, shared and combined with a constantly-growing aggregated set of clinical, research and social health data.

“All this data can be overwhelming for providers and patients alike, but it also presents an unprecedented opportunity to transform the ways in which we manage our health,” said John E. Kelly III, IBM senior vice president, solutions portfolio and research. “We need better ways to tap into and analyze all of this information in real-time to benefit patients and to improve wellness globally.”

Lastly, IBM announced an expanded partnership with Apple that will see IBM offer its Watson Health Cloud platform as a storage and analytics service for HealthKit data aggregated from iOS devices, and open the platform up for health and fitness app developers as well as medical researchers.

Many of IBM’s core technologies, which have since found their way into Watson (i.e. NLP, proprietary algorithms, etc.) are already in use by a number of pioneering medical facilities globally, so it makes sense for IBM to pitch its cognitive compute capabilities to the healthcare sector – particularly in the US, where facilities are legally incentivised to use new technologies to reduce the cost of patient care while keeping quality of service high. Commercial deals around Watson have so far been scarce, but it’s clear the company is keen to do what it can to create a market for cloud-based cognitive computing.

AWS, BlueMix, hackathon, IBM, NASA, Watson

IBM, NASA team on cloud, open data app code-a-thon

NASA is teaming up with IBM to host a code-a-thon for developers interested in supporting space exploration through apps

NASA is teaming up with IBM to host a code-a-thon for developers interested in supporting space exploration through apps

IBM and NASA are partnering on the space agency’s Space App Challenge, which will see participating developers build applications that help solve space exploration challenges.

The goal is to get developers building applications that can be used to solve space exploration-related challenges using cloud-based services and publicly available data sets. Some initial applications include a system that uses data aggregators and analytics to help NASA tracks asteroids, and an app that uses senor data streams to guide movement for robots.

As part of the deal IBM will be offering up its Bluemix platform-as-a-service and Watson analytics for developers participating with the three-day code-a-thon, which is being coordinated by the space agency online; more than 10,000 developers are expected to participate across 136 cities.

The company also plans to allocate IBM staff to offer best-practice development tutorials for handling some of its cloud and big data technologies.

NASA is making available datasets from over 200 data sources including services and tools supplied through real-life NASA missions and technology.

“The NASA International Space Apps Challenge is at the forefront of innovation, providing real-world examples of how technology can be used to by the best and brightest developers in the world to solve some of the most daunting challenges facing our civilization,” said Sandy Carter, general manager, cloud ecosystem and developers, IBM.

“Using the IBM Cloud, IBM is making it easier for developers to solve NASA challenges by helping them leverage and make sense of data in ways that wouldn’t have been possible even just a few years ago,” Carter said.

The space agency has previously partnered with other cloud provider on similar initiatives. Last year NASA partnered with Amazon Web Service to host terabytes worth of climate and earth sciences satellite data to promote community-driven research and innovation using its data.