Cognitive Cloud Computing the next big frontier

The next wave that hits hard in the incessant churn of digital news is cognitive computing. Basically, cognitive solutions are based on simulating human reasoning using computer systems. In my opinion, it is an incredible, surprising, and real technology. Consequently, its application in business models is also real and, thanks to its deployment in the cloud, very easy to incorporate.

A first look at technology

The developments of cognitive technologies are linked to others such as Big Data, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, etc., and they are used, above all, to respond to various needs:

Unstructured information processing

Examples of this type of information are images, audio files, emails, instant messages, posts on social networks, texts in documents, etc. It is estimated that they will account for about 80% of the information we will have access to.

Also read: Distributed Cloud

Immediacy

If unstructured data is going to contain most of the answers buried in the ocean of data, and consumers increasingly want more immediate answers, the way to consult must be different. More and more “natural” relationship, using our own language (verbal and non-verbal) to interrogate technology, and obtain those immediate answers.

It involves going from a technology you program to a technology you work with; It implies changing the search for information by programming keywords or synonyms, by recognizing the context and even the ambiguity of the language used to make said query.

Asking a cognitive system (using our own natural language) makes the system evaluate a hypothesis, returning an answer associated with a level of reliability. For example, we can query a cognitive system about how many men and how many women appear in a certain image.

A first look at cognitive business

Although the main applications are being oriented to the medical world, these are not the only possible ones. Continuing with the example of medicine, the system first learns from experts in a certain subject by relating that knowledge to sources of unstructured information: diagnostic images, medical texts, and studies, genetic studies, etc. Neither the human mind would be able to go through the enormous amount of information available, nor would a programmed system be able to relate and reason the connections between all that data. However, a cognitive system joins both worlds to analyze, learn and reason the quick response, consulting an ocean of data. This technology is helping medicine to advance exponentially in the care and preservation of life and, fortunately, we can also apply it to other areas. Thanks to these applications, results like these are being obtained:

Quick response to human interaction

Thanks to the appearance of personal assistant applications such as Jibo or Google Home. Can you imagine something else? Imagine a cognitive assistant that responds to your customers 24/7 based on tone, type of language, facial expression, etc. to personalize and adapt the answer according to the context of the question, with immediate answers to any question, even outside working hours, eliminating the telephone wait and on all digital channels (web, app, ..)

Help in knowledge management

Cognitive technology supports the identification of patterns or correlation of data from the multiple sources that we have internally, and even with the possibility of expanding this search to external sources of information (public or private). It allows you to integrate applications programmed with cognitive APIs, offer a quick response as part of other processes, and consult answers to technical problems, asking both your internal KB’s / MDBs and those of third parties, using your own express form yourself. Knowledge is power.

Cognitive Cloud Technology

Cognitive computing takes advantage of another of the digital waves: the cloud. This allows us to access these services in API mode. These APIs are integrated into our applications to work together, asking from the application and obtaining answers from the cognitive systems. They are already available in pay-per-use and these are some examples:

• Image recognition
• Emotion recognition
• Tone analyzer
• Personality type analysis
• Image moderation
• Text moderation
• Reading a text

These APIs are already available so that we can test and investigate them and, above all, ask ourselves what parts of our service delivery models and/or product sales can benefit from their transformation into cognitive businesses.