Watson Mobile Apps Contest - And the winner is... all of us!

As we have seen here in Explora!, IBM Watson launched in 2007, ushered in a new era in computing, the "Cognitive Computing". Watson is much more than a computer, it is the centerpiece of an IBM strategy to develop computational systems with cognitive ability.

"The concept of "Cognitive Computing" is a huge change for computer science. The idea is that these new systems will have the ability to learn, to draw conclusions, to improve every day based on the information they have access. It's a huge challenge for science and demand not only great ability, but also the development of highly sophisticated algorithms, related to the field of Artificial Intelligence."

To foster the development of new applications for Watson in February this year, IBM launched a competition, IBM Watson Mobile Developer Challenge. Mobile applications should use the cognitive capabilities of the IBM Watson to analyze, gain insights and learn, manipulating large amounts of information. There were hundreds of entries and, three months later, IBM selected 25 competitors who could use Watson to develop and test their applications. After this period, 5 teams will be selected. Of them, three teams will have access to APIs and support Watson of consultants from IBM Interactive, for 90 days to assist in the development of the final product.

The 25 finalists proposed applications with different objectives, as one directed to the media industry, one for the world of fashion, education, finance, fitness, human resources and more. See below some of the most interesting, in my opinion, of course.

1. Smarter Cities - Inteliwise - The idea is to have a Virtual Officer, which could connect all citizens with various municipal councils, such as public safety, health and education. The main motivator is the fact that there is an expectation that approximately 70% of the population will live in cities by the year 2050. Every interaction will create more knowledge and with the help of all the analytical capacity of Watson, all this knowledge will be "recycled" and placed available to the population.
   
2. Education - Fang - Friendly Anthopomorphic Networked Genome (fang), aims to transform the educational system in applying cognitive techniques in the process. The idea is that all learning is monitored and individualized to offer possibilities to follow all the details of the development of each student. With the application, you can have a view of any number of process components such as the number of words that a student had contact, their main difficulties and at the end of the day, point out what the key areas where a student may develop more easily, developing their skills and helping in the formation of top professionals.
   
   
   
3. Healthcare - GenieMD - One of the main applications of Watson has been in the medical field and a finalist applications has exactly this industry as a target. The GenieMD aims to offer a unique service to its users, building a smart environment with holistic health information. The idea is that using all the cognitive ability of Watson, will allow new knowledge to be generated based on the information of each person and what they can contribute so that each can handle more efficiently your health, together with their physicians and clinicians.

Want to know the 25 applications? Visit the hot site created especially for the contest and see why Watson and the Cognitive Computing can change the world as we know it for the better.