General manager Shirley Yu-Tsui of IBM Korea, believes Korean firms could become more competitive in the local market as well as in the global market with the values created with the help of IBM’s cognitive computing systems.

“In the new era of computing, you really need to come up with the cognitive system that really learns from itself to make some sense or extract insights out of unstructured data,” Yu-Tsui said at a recent press conference.

With the insight, CEOs can make decisions, create and deliver value for customers, she added.

Citing data analysis done with the cognitive computer Watson on more than 4,000 global business leaders, the general manager said linking technology to customers are now the key to business success.

By staying open to the values and thoughts of the consumers, and taking the lead in integrating virtual business with actual user experience, the cognitive computing system acts more as a companion, rather than a chunk of metal, according to IBM.

The main aim of cognitive computing is to make computers behave, think and interact in the way humans do.

One example of this computing technology dates back to 2008. Since then, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a research lab under the U.S. Department of Energy, has been using a cognitive system in building a smart grid that can balance the power supply and demand.

Cognitive computing can also be harnessed by retail businesses that hope to provide products at a low price by adopting efficient logistics and merchandising systems.

Retailers can gather information on their clients by interviewing them through smart applications, aggregating and analyzing the data, and applying the results to their business strategies. For example, a fashion retailer can roll out the latest items ahead of competitors.

Just how effective cognitive computing can be first came into the spotlight when Watson, built by IBM, scored a victory against two champions of the U.S. quiz show “Jeopardy!” in 2008.

“In the era of cognitive computing, how a computer naturally interacts with humans will be one of the most important parts,” according to David McQueeney, vice president of IBM Research who also attended the conference. 

As a leading cognitive system developer, IBM hopes to build more computers that act more like intelligent companions to help people make better decisions in their daily lives and business environment.

“Helping doctors diagnose the cause of a disease and giving the best marketing strategies for businesses are some of what IBM’s cognitive computing system can do,” said McQueeney.

IBM’s cognitive computing, which processes natural languages, evolves as it learns from data provided by humans, who also give the system training with a series of questions to teach it how to use the data.

It also collaborates with the users by acting as a decision support system to help them make better decisions.

The ability of the system to answer open-ended and complex questions, which was not possible for programmable computers, is a breakthrough and is what really opened the door to the era of the cognitive system, McQueeney said.

Cognitive computing technology can be applied to a wide variety of devices from large mainframe systems to personal computers and wearable devices, according to the vice president.

The computer system builder seeks cooperation with not only individual firms, but also developers.

IBM’s recent announcement to launch a cloud service based on Watson is expected to allow easy access to the system for other mobile applications and service developers for commercial purposes.

“We opened up the Watson capability to develop an ecosystem in which people could use the techniques and develop applications on their own,” he said.

Watson can provide even better answers than what people can find on Google, McQueeney said.

“We can actually answer much deeper questions because we don’t just know what words are there, but we know what ideas are there,” he added.

He further explained when Watson indexes writings, it actually tries to parse all sentences, identify all the famous people and geographical references, and understand relationships between elements of sentences.

However, the two technologies, he said, are complementary in terms of how they can be used.

By Kim Young-won (wone0102@heraldcorp.com)