Watson, a supercomputer designed by electronics developer IBM, may now be put to work, assisting scientists in making new discoveries. The new system is designed to boast both analysis, as well as inspire new research.
The Watson Discovery Advisor is designed to recognize patterns in different types of data, assisting researchers in the discovery of underlying causes behind effects. Theories could be inspired by the new system, and represented in pictures, as steps toward validation.
Original research collected by users is compared to current scientific articles and studies in order to keep experiments up-to-date. Watson constantly updates its knowledge when new discoveries are published.
"Watson Discovery Advisor is a powerful tool that not only understands nuances in human language, but also has the ability to understand the language across industries... [The] Watson Discovery Advisor can reduce the time researchers need... bringing new levels of speed and precision to research and development, from months to days and days to just hours," an IBM spokesperson said.
Watson has already played a part in making significant advances in medical research. Baylor College of Medicine researchers quickly carried out years worth of studies in the understanding proteins related to cancer. An average of one protein each year is identified for further study in cancer research. Watson found six likely candidates for follow-up study.
Johnson and Johnson has opened up its extensive data records detailing prescription drugs. This type of data can take months for an average research team to collect. Watson allows investigators to proceed directly to testing and surveys to determine drug effectiveness.
Watson may be best-known for an appearance the system made on a popular television game show.
"When IBM's original Watson computer competed and won on the TV quiz show Jeopardy, it demonstrated to an audience of millions how a computer could understand the rules of a game and quickly retrieve facts from a vast storehouse of information," Michael Rhodin wrote for IBM.
Since that time, Watson has been adapted with several improvements, allowing it to assist in new research and data collection. In 2013 alone, the 1,000 largest pharmaceutical research companies spent over $600 billion dollars on research alone. This new system, which operates through cloud computing, could save vast sums of money and considerably speed research studies.
The protein and cancer research conducted with Watson surveyed 70,000 scientific articles as part of the investigation. Watson has even created recipes on its own, including blackberry-cherry cobbler and ribs spiced with fennel.
A video announcing the IBM Watson Discovery Advisor is available on the IBMWatsonSolutions YouTube channel.
