IBM’s Watson Discovery Advisor is now available as a Cognitive Cloud Computing platform and will enable researchers to analyze big data in more ways than one. Released last week, the service will “accelerate the pace of scientific breakthroughs by discovering previously unknown connections in Big Data.”
“We’re entering an extraordinary age of data-driven discovery,” explains Mike Rhodin, a senior vice president of IBM Watson Group. “Today’s announcement is a natural extension of Watson’s cognitive computing capability. We’re empowering researchers with a powerful tool which will help increase the impact of investments organizations make in R&D, leading to significant breakthroughs.”
Essentially, the Watson Discovery Advisor reduces time it takes to test hypotheses and formulate conclusions that can move the research forward. Potentially reducing test times from months to hours, the Watson Discovery Advisor will provide much-valued pace and precision improvements in the research and development sector.
As an IBM press release enunciates, biologists and data scientists from Baylor College of Medicine and IBM worked together, and within a matter of weeks, using a toolkit based on Watson technology, accurately identified proteins that modify p53, an important protein related to many cancers.
Dr. Olivier Lichtarge, the principal investigator and professor of molecular and human genetics, biochemistry and molecular biology at Baylor College of Medicine notes about the finding, “On average, a scientist might read between one and five research papers on a good day. To put this in perspective with p53, there are over 70,000 papers published on this protein. Even if I’m reading five papers a day, it could take me nearly 38 years to completely understand all of the research already available today on this protein. Watson has demonstrated the potential to accelerate the rate and the quality of breakthrough discoveries. ”
Watson Discovery Advisor’s capacity to understand scientific parlance makes it a uniquely powerful tool for researchers in life sciences and other industries where new discoveries are significant every step of the way.
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(Image credit: IBM)
