IBM announced Watson Discovery Advisor, a cloud service that uses the technology of the Watson artificial intelligence system devoted to research. The purpose is to assist researchers in testing their hypotheses and draw conclusions to accelerate their work. Watson’s ability to analyze massive amounts of data will find patterns and connections very quickly.

In recent years, IBM is developing the Watson system to use it in different fields. This artificial intelligence is designed to learn and interact with humans. For that reason, a little over a year ago, the company launched Watson Engagement Advisor, another service that uses Watson, in this case for customer service.

The Watson system can understand the nuances of a natural language, Watson Discovery Advisor can understand the language of science. Already at the beginning of 2013 test were carried out using Watson at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in decisions regarding the treatment of lung cancer. Now this artificial intelligence will be used to help scientific innovation.

The possibilities are a lot. Medicine is just one of the areas where Watson Discovery Advisor’s potential can be used. Pharmaceutical research is a field in which the investments are estimated at $600 billion a year but developments are very slow. Today, drug development has become very slow because it’s very sophisticated so new treatments can take 10-15 years to reach their commercial phase. Watson could radically change this situation.

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For human researchers, it’s become impossible to read all the scientific material available because every day new articles are published in their field. An artificial intelligence system such as Watson Discovery Advisor was also designed to examine those massive amounts of information to find those relevant to a specific research.

The analysis of large amounts of data can be extremely useful in other fields as well, such as finance and law, in which having the relevant information contained in large volumes of documents can allow to do close much better deals. Even governments could use Watson for the analysis of national security thanks to the analysis of large amounts of data from intelligence and other sources.

IBM has already been working with various companies and even some hospital to test the capabilities of Watson Discovery Advisor with positive results. The potential is really huge and in a few years the results may be such as to change the world. It’s no exaggeration if we only think of the possibilities to accelerate development in the medical / biological and technological fields.

IBM Watson Solutions created a video that briefly illustrates Watson Discovery Advisor.