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| Rob High, chief technology officer (CTO) at Watson, speaks in a keynote during the International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence held in southern Seoul, Wednesday. The IBM executive said Watson's cognitive computing will bring dramatic changes to everyday lives for human begins within 10 years in such areas as mobile devices and vehicles. / Yonhap |
By Lee MIn-hyung
International Business Machines (IBM) is seeking to draw public attention lost to the Google-developed artificial intelligence (AI) program AlphaGo which has been in the limelight over the last few days with its battle with world go champion Lee Se-dol.
As Google has its DeepMind unit which has been leading the AI drive, IBM, the world's dominant mainframe computer manufacturer, also has its AI supercomputer, Watson.
Watson chief technology officer (CTO) Rob High, who visited Korea, Wednesday, a day after the final go match, said the Watson project is all about how to use the technologies for resolution of problems in the real world.
"Relative to the progresses we have made with our cognitive computing and making a comparison to Google in respect to that progress, it is a bit like apples and oranges," High said in a keynote speech during the International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence held in southern Seoul. "If you think about individual technology, it is about how we combine these technologies and apply them in solving real problems."
Commenting on the AlphaGo match, he said it "came at great timing."
"I think it was auspicious for our industry to advance into artificial intelligence," he said. "It was a very interesting demonstration of how artificial intelligence could be applied to decision-making."
During the speech, he said the AI drive will change the fundamental landscape of information and communication technology, adding that AI will penetrate into every aspect of human interactions in areas such as mobile devices and vehicles.
IBM offers 32 distinctive cognitive computing services under four categories ― including language, data insight, speech and vision. In particular, he said Watson will play a central role in analyzing enormous amounts of big data which the company expects will reach up to 44 zettabytes in 2020.
Amid the growing awareness of AI businesses, IBM created a new division, the "Watson Group," in January 2014, pledging to make an annual investment of more than $1 billion (1.19 trillion won) to speed up its leadership in cognitive computing.
In particular, the company has identified health cloud businesses as a core growth area for Watson Group. The U.S.-based technology giant has since formed partnerships with Apple, Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic to provide data collecting systems that are compatible with healthcare products.
The Watson executive said the company‘s health systems will play a pivotal role in helping doctors better manage medical data, thereby reducing management time and costs significantly in the near future.
Last year, the company also launched the Watson-based cognitive computing platform Watson Zone in what it calls a move to create a Watson ecosystem where thousands of developers across the world have so far created more than 7,000 applications.
