In Cognitive Computing, Content is King

Friday, October 2 — 12:15pm-1:45pm

John Wolpert
Product Development,
IBM Watson Ecosystem

Working with cognitive, smart content is not the same as working with data, even "big" data. IBM Watson is about "big language" and combining structured and unstructured data together in ever-more sophisticated ways. That requires huge amounts of content that is then ingested and massively conflated with annotators and other metadata in order to transform the raw data into something cognitive computing can work with. This goes way, way beyond Hadoop. And some of that cognitive metadata can be as valuable as the original information. Imagine being able to make money not simply on selling information but on selling insights based on that information, sometimes without even having to expose the original data. There is a lot to be done to build a global cognitive content framework or a platform for Cognitive Content as a Service (cCaaS). It will take all of us working together.

About

John Wolpert leads product development for IBM's Watson Ecosystem, with responsibility for setting the development roadmap, curating and ensuring the quality of available services, and keeping the organization focused sharply on the user. He also crafts and tells the Watson story to partners, leaders and audiences worldwide, using that regular contact with people outside IBM to gain insights for innovating and improving the end-­to-­end Ecosystem experience. He works out of the IBM Bluemix Garage incubator in San Francisco, where he has access to dozens of startups every day.