Watson Developers Cloud Service

"It does not require that you understand anything about machine learning other than the need to provide training data," Rob High, IBM's CTO for Watson, said in a recent interview about the new platform.

IBM's famous Jeopardy!-champ-destroying Watson system is now available as a cloud service. Developers who want to incorporate Watson's ability to understand natural language and provide answers need only have their applications make a REST API call to IBM's new Watson Developers Cloud. Besides making money from it, IBM primarily aims at creating a large community of developers in the world of cognitive computing.

IBM has also recently launched a university partnership that focuses on numerous aspects of cognitive computing including the field of deep learning that is driving significant advances in computer vision, text analyses and natural language processing.

The real beauty of these types of systems is not just in the intelligence of computers, but also in what effect they throw on the thought-processes of those making use of them.