Q.How does COGNITIVE TECHNOLOGY merge with blockchain and how deep it goes working hand in hand?
A. Putting cognitive analytics on top of a blockchain provides the capability to look for emerging patterns and trends. There are opportunities to detect fraud, discrepancies and root cause analysis to create a trusted source of data that form the core of business processes. Cognitive analytics and blockchain are not really tightly mixed. Cognitive analytics is about studying patterns from data that has been “vetted” by the blockchain. More importantly, the data in the blockchain ledger can be structured or unstructured, requiring cognitive technology for analysis. The source of information could come from a manufacturing sector, a traditional business system, or a variety of other areas.
Q.What are the differences in the way these two technologies look at data?
A.Blockchain looks at a massive amount of fairly organised information. The cognitive layer tries to understand the data layer formed by the blockchain and it builds the indices that are necessary to answer questions in natural language. This is the way cognitive systems understand, reason, and learn. Now, with data in the blockchain from many other data sources, applications can be built on top to literally interrogate the system using natural language, just like how people talk to each other.
Q.How does Cognitive analytics work under the hood?
A.Watson’s cognitive analytics help in gathering a range of potential answers from questions that are being raised. The hypothesis Watson forms allows it to come back with a set of answers and give a confidence level for that answer. A person can look at the set of answers and select the one to pursue. Under the hood of Watson, a lot of evidence is used to come up with the confidence level. Since it learns as it goes, it not only avoids the recursively searching through thousands of documents that a search engine would do. It also shows how the argument has been built and supported.
Q.What opportunities lie ahead in these technologies for consumer electronics?
A.Let us start with products that people use. All the products need service at some point and if you count the number, there would be supporting hundreds of thousands of products. Each product may have a manual that is thicker than your average book. If a problem arises with the product, instead of going to the manual, the cognitive system empowers the service person to interrogate the data and pin point to the exact cause and solution to the problem. The more questions that the system encounters, the more it would come back with appropriate answers, gaining knowledge and confidence through the learning experience. It’s kind of like how IBM Watson worked on Jeopardy.
