IBM has announced the winners of their Watson Mobile Developer Challenge, a competition which invited developers to design apps using the cognitive processing abilities of IBM’s Supercomputer Watson. Teams from 18 industries and more than 43 countries submitted upwards of 400 business concepts for the challenge. This was narrowed down to a list of 25 final ideas; the teams behind these ideas then had access to Watson to build and test their apps. After these tests, three winners were selected.
“These bright and enterprising developers have discovered novel ways to apply Watson that can have valuable business benefits,” said Mike Rhodin, senior vice president of the IBM Watson Group, in the Smarter Planet blog. “Their ideas, along with many others we received, confirm our belief that putting Watson into the hands of entrepreneurs will make cognitive systems the computing standard of the future.”
The three winning concepts are:
- GenieMD- A dashboard for you health; Genie MD uses personal data to give users an overview of their health and wellbeing. It also gives relevant and personalised health recommendations, gives caregivers greater access to information and enables better communication between Doctors and patients.
- Majestyk Apps- Their system F.A.N.G (Friendly Anthropomorphised Networked Genome) provides an “adaptive educational relationship” between parents and children. For children, it’s a cognitive, cuddly companion, which uses Watson to see up contextualised and interactive educational scenarios. For parents and teachers, it’s a dashboard which allows them to explore their childrens’ development and interests.
- Red Ant- App which uses customer demographics, personal shopping history and wish lists to provide customised selling points, unique to the user on-screen.
Some have speculated whether or not offering access to only a handful of development teams is the right approach for Watson, and whether making it more available would lead to accelerated revenues and rates of development. An IBM spokesperson responded to these suggestions, stating “For now, the application process helps ensure the use case is in line with Watson’s capabilities. As understanding of cognitive grows, which is happening at an accelerated pace, this will not be necessary.”
Read more here.
(Photo credit: IBM)
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