Communications of the ACM
IBM Predicts Cognitive Systems as New Computing Wave
IBM's Watson computer, which beat two leading "Jeopardy" champs in 2011, embodies cognitive computing.
Credit: Investor's Business Daily
IBM expects cognitive computing systems to usher in a new era of computing by being capable of learning and adapting through their mimicry of human senses. Some of the technology to enable cognitive computing already exists, but more needs to be created, says IBM's Bernie Meyerson.
Meyerson predicts that Moore's Law will have ended its usefulness within three or four more semiconductor generations, and cognitive computers will step in to fill the void. "These machines will perform better because they learn, they adapt, they sense — and by doing that you don't program it so much as you can teach the system to learn," Meyerson says.
At the heart of cognitive computing is providing the machine with richer input to inform its decision making. In terms of mimicking the sense of hearing, a cognitive system would not only hear the actual sound, but also understand the underlying meaning, such as by detecting stress in a child's voice that might give it clues to interpret the cause of the distress. Meyerson says a similar mechanism would apply to the cognitive machine's sense of sight, where it can learn from seeing one image to recognize similar images.
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