IBM Accelerates Data Optimization with New Watson Discovery Capabilities

LAS VEGAS, March 20, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM InterConnect - IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new and expanded capabilities that enhance IBM Watson's data analysis and discovery capabilities on the IBM Cloud. By expanding Watson Discovery Service with new functionality and introducing Watson Company Profiler, an experimental platform solution built with Watson Discovery, IBM is further empowering developers and enterprise users with best-in-class offerings to quickly and easily source insights from massive amounts of data.   

IBM Enriches Watson Discovery Service with New Beta Functionality
In April, IBM will roll out new beta functionality in the Watson Discovery Service. The functionality will enable relevancy training and passage retrieval capabilities to find better answers, adding to the service's existing ability to identify useful patterns and insights in large datasets. Many data scientists spend as much as 80 percent of their time on "data janitor" work – collecting, cleaning and organizing data sets. With the Watson Discovery Service, IBM is giving users the power to unlock value in data without having to spend unnecessary resources on complex data pipeline engineering and data wrangling challenges.

Today, developers go through many cumbersome steps to create solutions that can extract insights from unstructured data, often requiring developers to integrate multiple services to achieve the desired result. The Watson Discovery Service packages core Watson AI capabilities with simple tooling and APIs that enable developers to quickly upload, enrich, and index large collections of your private data and use this with NLP-enriched public data provided out of the box with Watson Discovery.

"To date, we've only explored a tiny fraction of the world's existing data. Watson represents a new partnership between technology and people, to revolutionize the way we discover things and make better decisions – all at incredible speed and scale," said Beth Smith, general manager, IBM Watson AI. "With the advanced discovery capabilities of the Watson platform, IBM is shining a light on dark data by unlocking patterns, trends, and relationships in data that were previously invisible."

With the newest beta capabilities, developers can improve end user experience by displaying answers that are within passages without any additional configuration or special processing. Additionally, developers can take advantage of the relevancy training module to further customize responses using a machine learning model.

Using the full power of the Watson Discovery Service, industry professionals are able to do the following:

• A legal research team can quickly extract relevant details from dense legal briefs, past legal proceedings and other lengthy documents to provide consolidated specific insights for a legal proceeding rather than identify documents that mention a key word or term.
• A marketer could gain real-time insight into brand perception, monitoring both social media and news sources for discussions around relevant topics, assess the results to quickly identify a trend and act to address a customer issue in real time.
• A customer service department manager can find insights on customer pain points, reduce customer churn and improve agent productivity without having to sift through individual customer call transcripts, social media and forum data content, and other internal content sources.

Rocket Fuel, a predictive marketing platform, has been applying the NLP-enriched news content function of Watson Discovery Service to help their digital marketing clients target advertisements in the right context, in real time. By using Watson Discovery Service, Rocket Fuel can analyze and annotate 300,000 English language news articles each day, and scan the top 10,000 sources every 7 minutes to provide immediate trend analysis. Clients can then use Rocket Fuel's interactive user interface to quickly hone in on new brand-related keywords that appear in news stories and control whether to increase, decrease, ignore or stop serving ads alongside these keywords as they appear in online news stories. For example, an automotive brand may wish to increase its advertising on pages with the keyword "J.D. Power"; conversely, it may wish to pause a campaign when the keyword "recall" appears.  

"Our company's fundamental value is in using Artificial Intelligence to enable brands to make smarter, faster decisions with their online marketing," said Randy Wootton, CEO, Rocket Fuel. "Given the exponential rate of digital information being generated and consumed, it's increasingly challenging for marketers to keep track of their digital presence and identify where and when to place ads for maximum impact. That's why Watson Discovery Service is such a game-changer for our clients. Rocket Fuel's Predictive Marketing Platform is now responsive, in real-time, to sentiment in breaking news headlines. Rocket Fuel clients can use Watson Discovery Service to control their association with specific keywords and optimize media spend automatically based on the positive or negative sentiment impact. This means better performance, improved brand safety, and deeper intelligence for our business."

IBM Introduces Experimental Solution, "Watson Company Profiler"
Additionally, IBM will soon release an experimental platform solution called Watson Company Profiler, a pre-built cognitive discovery solution that will enable company intelligence and analysis for business users. Built using Watson Discovery Service, Watson Company Profiler accesses Dun & Bradstreet's commercial database of 265 million business records and sifts through 30,000 global data sources to identify relevant insights about a company. Surfacing publicly available data, like content from news outlets, social media, journals or annual reports, as well as Dun & Bradstreet proprietary data, Watson Company Profiler can help businesses glean meaningful insights.

To better understand how Watson Company Profiler will be used, consider the job of a financial services leader looking to strengthen her/his company's capabilities. This person will use Watson Company Profiler to acquire market intelligence needed to better understand competitive landscape, product positioning and potentially to identify new targets for a merger or acquisition. 

To learn more about Watson Company Profiler or to sign up for release updates, visit the Watson Company Profiler landing page.

The expanded Watson Discovery Service capabilities and upcoming roll out of Watson Company Profiler demonstrate IBM's commitment to providing developers and businesses with the tools and features to execute on their vision and, in turn, bring to market a new class of cognitive innovations to transform how businesses make decisions.

About IBM Watson: Pioneering a New Era of Computing
Watson represents a new era in computing called cognitive computing, where systems understand the world in a way more similar to humans: through senses, learning, and experience. Watson continuously learns from previous interactions, gaining in value and knowledge over time. With the help of Watson, organizations are harnessing the power of cognitive computing to transform industries, help professionals do their jobs better, and solve important challenges. As part of IBM's strategy to accelerate the growth of cognitive computing, Watson is open to the world, allowing a growing community of developers, students, entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts to easily tap into the most advanced and diverse cognitive computing platform available today. Watson solutions are being built, used and deployed in more than 45 countries and across 20 different industries.

For more information on the Watson Discovery Service, visit: Ibm.biz/WatsonDiscovery. For more on IBM Watson, visit: https://www.ibm.com/Watson. Join the conversation at #ibmwatson.

InterConnect is IBM's cloud and cognitive conference where more than 20,000 developers, clients and partners are being introduced to the latest advancements in cloud computing through 2,000 sessions, labs and certifications. IBM is positioning both enterprise and startup clients for success with a complete portfolio of cloud services and marquee partnerships, supporting a wide range of applications including: big data, analytics, blockchain and cognitive computing. For more information, visit: https://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/. Engage in the conversation through @IBMCloud and #ibminterconnect.

Contact:
Gabrielle Gugliocciello
IBM Media Relations
[email protected]

SOURCE IBM