Cognitive computing can transform businesses and society

“AI is at the intersection of our ambitions, it will allow us to reason over large amounts of data and convert that into intelligence” (S.Nadella)

Every day an infinite amount of unstructured data is being generated and stored by organizations across industries. To make sense of that data and apply it into effective decision making, companies increasingly lean on solutions based on an Artificial Intelligence (AI) approach.

A particularly interesting area of AI is the Cognitive computing. The Cognitive computing can drive the transformation of the modern business environment.

What is cognitive computing ?

According Wikipedia Cognitive computing (CC) describes technology platforms that, broadly speaking, are based on the scientific disciplines of artificial intelligence and signal processing. These platforms encompass machine learning, reasoning, natural language processing, speech and vision, human–computer interaction, dialog and narrative generation, among other technologies. The CC s algorithms learns from interactions with us and from their experiences with their environment.

Where can cognitive computing be applied in businesses ?

Cognitive computing can be applied to extract meaningful insights from major sources of unstructured data. For example in Customer Support scenarios there are many situation where there is a question and answer (Q&A) requirement that would require users to interact and ask questions posed in the natural language. This might include complex customer engagement scenarios that require deeper understanding and insights beyond question and answer responses provided by traditional programmable customer response system.

Other examples there are in healthcare industry with the application of cognitive services can help to clinical data analysis. A great example of modern intelligence capabilities in healthcare is the InnerEye project, it uses machine learning for medical imaging analysis to do things like quantify the size of tumors and identify which areas are most aggressive which are time consuming and difficult for health professionals to do.

The shopping is going to look a lot more analytical in the near future and add the Computer Vision and the Face Recognition to track emotions and engagement. In next months the emotion tracking meets retail, in nutshell the emotion captures on your facial expressions, the face’s emotions, can be turns that data into actionable items for a retailer.

Moreover the cognitive computing can be used for humanitarian purposes, for example to give a first aid to migrants in need. Using photographs taken from the coast or from a helicopter, coastguards can leverage real-time estimation about the number of people arriving by boat. Face recognition allows to identify the number of migrants arriving in boats.

In the Public Safety sector the Situational Awareness solutions will change complete our concept of public security. The visual processing will locate and track individuals/vehicle/items of interest across a number of real-time video streams (e.g., “man with blue pants and stripped shirt”), the audio processing, leverage an array of microphones to detect, will recognize and locate the origin of sounds in a neighborhood (e.g., gun shot, crash). The predictive analysis will create actionable public safety forecasts based on police logs, statistical trends and criminality models (e.g., high likelihood of a bank robbery in specific neighborhood after interception of large drug shipment)

These are only few examples about how the Cognitive computing is changing business and society, but the number of scenarios where to apply the Cognitive computing it is a very huge number.

Advantages of a Modern Cloud-Based Analytics Platform

Assuming you have all the right ingredients to adopt a Cognitive computing approach to out scenarios, you still need to have the right technology platform in place.

A modern cloud environment will make it super easy to collect data, analyze, experiment and quickly put things into production with a targeted set of customers. This sort of capability is becoming a must-have for data-driven organizations, large and small. A modern platform like Azure provides the right foundation for your organization to successfully transform your business through the power of data and analytics.

To use the Cognitive computing and the other services you will need a Microsoft Account, all the APIs will have a free trial plan. As paid offerings become available for each API you will be directed to the Azure portal to complete the purchase.

Enjoy !

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