Humans are unbelievably efficient in terms of how they interact with their environment compared to a computer. And that is why there is this interest in changing the architectural premise of how a computer runs.
IBD: Is Watson a cognitive computer?
Meyerson: Yes. Watson is the embodiment of cognitive computing. For example, it can be taught not only to recognize the right and probable answer to a medical diagnostic issue such as a cancer, but it can also learn from uncertain data, even if you have conflicting data. Watson, because it is probabilistic, might not know the exact answer, but if the odds favor or point to one answer it will assign a high probability to the correct answer.
With cognitive computing, it's about providing the computer a richer set of data to make decisions. The idea behind cognitive machines is that you don't program them, you teach them. You should, in theory, be able to have a physician sit down and say these 300 things I am about to show on these images are an aneurysm and I want you to find the others I may have missed. Watson looks at a vast amount of data and extracts the coincidences to understanding what you are looking at.
IBD: How does sight come into play with cognitive computing?
Meyerson: If you only stream an image in terms of bits of data, say an MRI image, that is incredibly inefficient because the computer has to crawl through all this data and try to reassemble an image. What if you take it up several levels so that the system understands what it is looking at? It can look at a brain scan while receiving input from a physician. The computer can learn to recognize an aneurysm based on the characteristics of many different aneurysms the physician has pointed out.
So you literally have trained the computer by saying "look at this image, this is what an aneurysm looks like." The computer can then find other images for you. It learns from the input. That is a radical departure from today, where a picture is treated as a collection of bits, not as a collection of things within an image.
IBD: And how does sound come into play?