Human mind is a wonderful system. It is fascinating to watch how it evolves from an innocent baby brain to an expert mind over years. It is interesting to see how it can dwell into twilight zone of confusion and ambiguity, yet strike the right balance in taking an effective decision. It is amazing to observe how it reasons, develops arguments, innovates new ideas, and creates beautiful things.
On the other hand, one of the mankind’s greatest inventions is computer. It has made our life so much easy by taking care of repetitive, monotonous jobs. Without any complain, it crunches enormous amount of numbers, inordinate amount of data – to help us, to feed the civilization.
Man and machine are complementing each other – and would continue to do so in future. But is that enough?
We are living in the days of big data. Numerous literatures are discussing how the traditional computing mechanisms become helpless in front of unstructured data, which is about 80% of the total information available. Human mind is good at processing it – but its fatigue prone nature would not allow to handle the sheer volume of information we are bombarded with.
So what is the solution?
The answer is a new paradigm of computing – cognitive computing. It is about having a tireless machine that can learn, resolve ambiguity, take evidence-based decisions, discover patterns and ideas, and interact in natural language.
Healthcare industry is one of the first industries that has embraced cognitive computing. It is already being used to help in treating cancer patients, to advice consumers on wellness and so on. And in near future many more exciting problems are supposed to be addressed by cognitive computing. Learn more by clicking here.
Our forthcoming executive report (available early September) from Institute for Business Value (IBV) sets out how healthcare executives plan to exploit the potential of cognitive computing. To pre-order your copy please contact Sandipan Sarkar, IBV Cognitive Computing Leader at sandipan.sarkar@in.ibm.com.