IBM Watson Ushers in a New Era of Data-Driven Accelerated Science Discoveries including faster progress versus cancer and other disease

IBM today announced significant advances in Watson’s cognitive computing capabilities that are enabling researchers to accelerate the pace of scientific breakthroughs by discovering previously unknown connections in Big Data.

- Next Milestone in Cognitive Computing is Accelerating Scientific and Industrial Research
- Baylor College of Medicine Speeds Understanding of the Biology of Diseases
- Johnson and Johnson, Sanofi and New York Genome Center Launch Life Science Research Projects

Available now as a cloud service, IBM’s Watson Discovery Advisor is designed to scale and accelerate discoveries by research teams. It reduces the time needed to test hypotheses and formulate conclusions that can advance their work — from months to days and days to just hours — bringing new levels of speed and precision to research and development.

Building on Watson’s ability to understand nuances in natural language, Watson Discovery Advisor can understand the language of science, such as how chemical compounds interact, making it a uniquely powerful tool for researchers in life sciences and other industries.

Researchers and scientists from leading academic, pharmaceutical and other commercial research centers have begun deploying IBM’s new Watson Discovery Advisor to rapidly analyze and test hypotheses using data in millions of scientific papers available in public databases. A new scientific research paper is published nearly every 30 seconds, which equals more than a million annually (Source: CiteSeerx). According to the National Institutes of Health, a typical researcher reads about 23 scientific papers per month, which translates to nearly 300 per year, making it humanly impossible to keep up with the ever-growing body of scientific material available.

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