IBM Watson Services - understanding various cognitive services provided by IBM Bluemix

• Watson Services are readily available on Bluemix, referral link http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/services-catalog.html
• Watson APIs is adaptable, interactive and contextual in the way they provide information. Instead of simply returning prepared responses, these APIs provide answers based on what they know to be correct, relying on information they’ve acquired over time
• Overview of cognitive services in Bluemix
  • User Modeling: The IBM Watson User Modeling service uses linguistic analytics to extract cognitive and social characteristics, including Big Five, Values, and Needs, from communications that the user makes available, such as email, text messages, tweets, forum posts, and more. By deriving cognitive and social preferences, the service helps users to understand, connect to, and communicate with other people on a more personalized level. 
    • Watson User Modeling offers another dimension of the "360 Degree View" of a customer or other entity and starts to paint a picture of a person not just through their data but their personality and personal preferences.
    • Demo/test link: http://watson-um-demo.mybluemix.net/?reset=true
      • Input: Text (such as social media, emails, blogs, or other communication) written by one individual
      • Output: A tree of cognitive and social characteristics in JSON format and a visualization of those characteristics using HTML and SVG
  • Concept Expansion: Maps colloquial terms to more commonly understood phrases. This cognitive service learns by example, taking the concept set you already know and learning from it to reveal additional yet similar terminology that you may not have known existed.
    • Concept Expansion could identify that 'The Big Apple' refers to New York City and that 'getting in touch' means communicating by email, letter or phone.
    • Input: The starting point word, a few terms that are examples of that word, and a data set to analyze
    • Output: A ranked list of terms with contextually similarly to the starting point word based on analysis of the data set
  • Language Identification: Identifies the language in which text is written
  • Machine Translation: Globalize on the fly. Translate text from one language to another
  • Message Resonance: Communicate with people with a style and words that suits them. The Message Resonance service analyzes draft content and scores how well it is likely to be received by a specific target audience. This analysis is based on content that has been written by the target audience itself, such as fans of a specific sports team
    • The Watson Message Resonance service analyzes the popularity of a given word within a specific community. By using this ranking system, it is possible to recommend most resonant words to use when crafting messages targeted at specific audiences.
    • Input: Term to evaluate and the audience/community to measure against
    • Output: A score ranking how well the term will be received by the intended audience/community. Higher resonance means the message has a higher likelihood of being viewed and shared.
  • Question and Answer: Direct responses to user inquiries fueled by primary document sources. Interprets and answers user questions directly based on primary data sources (brochures, web pages, manuals, records, etc.) that have been selected and gathered in a body of data or 'corpus'.
    • Input: User questions
    • Output: List of candidate passages, Confidence scores, Links to supporting evidence from the corpus
  • Relationship Extraction: Intelligently finds relationships between sentence components (nouns, verbs, subjects, objects, etc.)The service maps the relationships between the components in a sentence, so that users or analytics engines can more easily understand the meaning of individual sentences and documents.The Watson Relationship Extraction service makes sense of large unstructured data sets. It enables browsing of large collections of data via predefined sets of concepts and relations among them.
    • Input: Text news articles
    • Output: Entities from the text and relationships between those entities in xml format
  • Visual Rendering: Graphical representations of data analysis for easier understanding. Render interactive data visualizations that can range from common business charts to more advanced layouts. Visualizations can be easily modified to match user needs, visual styling, and types of data being analyzed.
    • This service is an SDK that can be used to visualize any numeric data.

Adding Cognitive Computing Capabilities to Applications

Application development has been maturing from a simple standalone application to a more distributed, cloud based, automated etc., applications. Now is the time to add one more interesting Cognitive Computing abilities to applications to make them smarter by delivering predictive capabilities. 

If I take an example and explain... We had standalone accounting applications, installed on a standalone computer, helping users to manage expenses, income, etc., The next level is an accounting application client server architecture that stores all of the information in a central repository, transforming to lighter & faster clients, the same application could be shared across hundreds of users. Then came (accounting) applications with cloud technologies where the application could be shared across millions of users across the globe. 

Now is the time for applications use all the data, past user interactions stored by millions of users and perform cognitive computing to predict  and provide suggestions to the users. 

I am sure this sounds very futuristic and a programmer would start thinking how to implement such feature rich applications. Well, it is expected to 'use a wheel rather than re-inventing it'. Similarly, there are predefined services that could be leveraged by application developers. 

IBM provides Watson Services that could be readily integrated into cloud applications on the IBM Bluemix platform. For more information, please visit the following link.

 http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/services-catalog.html