IBM to open experience centre in S'pore

Singapore

AMERICAN tech giant IBM is opening a Watson Client Experience Center in Singapore. It will be one of five countries aside from the US that is able to fully harness Watson, its celebrated cognitive technology and cloud-computing platform. Watson, which debuted in 2011 as a "thinking machine" and proceeded to defeat two human champions on television quiz show Jeopardy!, uses hypothesis generation, natural language processing and evidence-based learning to create an analytical tool that can be said to think for itself.

"It can sift through and understand massive amounts of Big Data at unprecedented speeds to help professionals understand data quickly and easily . . . which means organisations can use that data to make better decisions," an IBM spokesman told The Business Times. The Experience Center in Singapore - like the four others in Dublin, London, Melbourne and Sao Paulo - will provide the support and skills needed to fully adopt the Watson cognitive platform, and meet local client and partner needs.