Tokyo, Japan- On Thursday, July 30, IBM's super intelligent computing technology Watson is learning the Japanese language. Watson's Senior Vice President Mike Rhodin has said that the company is partnering with some Japanese firms to integrate the language into Watson. The technology has already acquired French, Portuguese and Spanish. It already knows English and is set to learn Arabic soon.
In a New York Times report, Rhodin said that Watson is effective for organizing large amounts of data. In the fields that Watson has worked in, most of this data is unstructured. Being a cloud technology allows Watson to handle the task efficiently.
In Japan, the U.S.-based IBM mostly has business clients. The technology has worked with the world-renowned Tokyo University, storing and studying information on the gene mutation to find a cure for cancer and other illnesses. The team behind Watson also announced on Thursday that it is working with Softbank Corp., a telecommunications and robotics group in Japan. Softbank will bring Watson to startups in the country.
The Senior Vice President said that information is booming in the world today. To keep track with all the data the everyday world feeds, a technology like Watson is needed to enable the handling of massive amounts of information.
"Our current tools are incapable of dealing with all of this information," Rhodin stressed as he pointed out how important filtering information is. "We are looking for the signal in all the noise."
Watson's database contains over 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content, from sources such as academic journals and Twitter. The computer, programmed with artificial intelligence, can answer questions directed to it in natural languages. Business units under the technology's name have specialised in healthcare research and analysis.
The computer is named after IBM's first CEO, Thomas J. Watson. Proving its intelligence, the computer joined and won the game show Jeopardy in 2011, copping the $1 million prize.
