International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) has launched a computer system called Watson Discovery Advisor that is capable of processing large amounts of information and identifying patterns in them.

Watson was formerly on Jeopardy where it won the game. However, it is now being applied to scientific endeavors.

Like Us on Facebook

Instead of simply coming up with answers which it once did, Watson goes ahead and tests the hypotheses presented by the information.

Rob Merkel, health care and life sciences leader at IBM, said that Watson did not only get to an answer, but also to gain insight in certain problems.

Watson can compute in four dimensions. First of all, Watson is capable of perception. It can read and see different sets of information.

Next, it has the ability to relate. When it takes in data, Watson is already thinking of what people could be interested in inquiring, while also offering deeper questions to advance their study.

Then Watson can also reason, exploring all possible ideas and hypotheses at the same time before coming up with an answer.

The final dimension of Watson's computing dimensions is machine learning. The more information Watson learns, the better the answers and questions get over time.

A current example for the use of Watson is how scientists are feeding it quite a number of scientific papers. Watson will then read them in a fraction of the time it takes humans to, and return useful information to the researchers.

Scientists from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston are using the technology to identify certain proteins that can modify the cancer preventing protein, p53.

Pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson are using the system to read and understand trial outcomes. This will help determine how effective certain drugs are in the market. These kinds of tests usually take close to three years to complete.

More and more researchers and scientists will be able to use Watson as its service will be made available through the cloud.

TagsWatson