Watson Goes to School

IBM has launched a partnership with seven American technical universities to encourage the development of mobile applications that make use of the cognitive powers of Watson, IBM’s famous supercomputer known for beating all competitors at Jeopardy. Participating universities include Carnegie Mellon, New York University, Ohio State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, University of California at Berkeley, University of Michigan, and the University of Texas at Austin.

According to the press release, “Enrolled students will form a business team and together they will have access to their Watson instance via the Watson Developer Cloud. As a classroom, they will select an industry to focus on, such as retail, travel, or healthcare, and then will work as a team to ingest relevant data into Watson and train it. Ultimately, the students will break into teams and develop prototype apps and a business plan based on their Watson industry of choice.

“For example, in the retail domain questions can focus on: ‘How can Watson be applied to personalize consumer shopping experience?’ In the travel industry: ‘What changes would be applied to help consumers target their next vacation based on their experiences and interests?’”