IBM Brings Watson to Africa for Project Lucy
Using cognitive systems to tackle a continent’s grand challenges
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IBM & Cognitive In The News
- Forbes: Why Open Beats Closed, September 2016
- TechCrunch: IBM and MIT partner up to create AI that understands sight and sound the way we do, September 2016
- Boston Globe: MIT and IBM form to teach computers recognize sound, images, September 2016
- The Stack: IBM and MIT collaborate to advance AI machine vision, September 2016
- TechCrunch: The White House requested input on artificial intelligence, and IBM’s response is a great AI 101, August 2016
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InformationWeek: IBM: AI Should Stand For 'Augmented Intelligence' August 2016
- Economist Special Section on AI: From not working to neural networking; Frankenstein's paper clips, June 2016
- Washington Post: Everything you think you know about AI is wrong, June 2016
- Bloomberg TV: Forward Thinking: March of the Machines, June 2016
- TIME & Fortune: IBM Researcher: Fears Over Artificial Intelligence are ‘Overblown’, May 2016
- IBM Announcement: IBM and the University of Illinois to Pioneer Next-Generation Cognitive Computing Systems, April 2016
- CNNi: IBM Watson and the future of artificial intelligence, March 2016
- IBM Think blog: Extending Game-Based AI Research into the Wild, March 2016
- TIME: IBM’s Top Researcher: A Win for Computer is a Win for Humans, March 2016
- CBC (Canada): Watson and the Rise of Cognitive Computing, January 2016
- Financial Times video: Robots in the workplace, January 2016
- IBM Announcement: IBM Research and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Pioneer Next-Generation Cognitive Environments for Business Decision Making
Lucy is the name given to the earliest known human descendant, whose remains were discovered in Africa 40 years ago. Today, IBM Watson, the first cognitive computing system, is coming to Africa as part of a 10-year, $100 million initiative to address the fast-growing continent's greatest business and societal challenges. With "Project Lucy", IBM researchers in Africa, together with their business and academic partners, will use Watson and related cognitive technologies to learn and discover insights from Big Data and develop commercially viable solutions to Africa’s grand challenges in healthcare, education, water and sanitation, human mobility and agriculture.
“In the past decade, Africa has been a tremendous growth story, yet the continent’s challenges, stemming from population growth, water scarcity, disease, low agricultural yield and other factors are impediments to inclusive economic growth,” said Kamal Bhattacharya, director, IBM Research – Africa.
“With the ability to learn from emerging patterns and discover new correlations, Watson’s cognitive capabilities hold enormous potential in Africa — helping it to achieve in the next two decades what today’s developed markets have achieved over two centuries.”