Chris O’Connor of IBM titles his latest article “Reimagining the future with the Cognitive Internet of Things (IoT).” In the article he talks about how bringing IBM Watson into the world of IoT will allow businesses to better harness the data and extract insights.  He writes, “Despite the great strides we have seen in IoT technology and applications, the Internet of Things has much room for growth. Much of the dark data and edge data created by the Internet of Things holds great value—if it can be deciphered and put to use.”  Businesses feel overwhelmed by the thought of putting into place systems that can unlock the insights of IoT data but perhaps a little “reimagining” as Mr. O’Connor puts it is just what is needed.

His solution for IoT, Cognitive Computing, “To bring ambitious IoT applications into being, we need powerful, sophisticated ways of processing an increasingly large and varied flow of IoT data. In short, we need the Internet of Things to be smarter than it is, and we need to get ever more value from the data it produces. Using cognitive computing systems that learn at scale, reason purposefully and interact naturally with humans, we can begin exploiting IoT data to an unprecedented degree.” Enter Ibm Watson.

Again Watson pops up in another place and another use as we close out 2015. It certainly has come a long way since Jeopardy. IBM applies Watson’s capabilities to IoT and will offer a number of application programming interfaces (APIs) to help businesses manage ever increasing data loads. APIs will include:

• Natural Language Processsing
• Machine Learning
• Video and Image Analytics
• Text Analytics

Mr. O’Connor closes, “Watson Internet of Things gives enterprises a way to tap into the flood of IoT data, then use that data to answer previously unasked questions and make intelligent business decisions.”