Symbiotic Cognitive Computing

ardy! winning against the two best players of all time, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings (Ferrucci et al. 2010). Since this demonstration, IBM has expanded its research program in artificial intelligence (AI), including the areas of natural language processing and machine learning (Kelly and Hamm 2013). Ultimately, IBM sees the opportunity to develop cognitive computing — a unified and universal platform for computational intelligence (Modha et al. 2011). But how might cognitive computing work in real environments — and in concert with people? In 2013, our group within IBM Research started to explore how to embed cognitive computing in physical environments. We built a Cognitive Environments Laboratory (CEL) (see figure 1) as a living lab to explore how people and cognitive computing come together. Our effort focuses not only on the physical and computational substrate, but also on the users’ experience. We envision a fluid and natural interaction that extends through time across multiple environments (office, meeting room, living room, car, mobile). In this view, cognitive computing systems are always on and available to engage with people in the environment. The system appears to follow individual users, or groups of users, as they change environments, seamlessly connecting the users to available input and output devices and extending their reach beyond their own cognitive and sensory abilities. We call this symbiotic cognitive computing: computation that takes place when people and intelligent agents come together in a physical space to interact with one another. The intelligent agents use a computational substrate of “cogs” for visual object recognition, natural language parsing, probabilistic decision support, and other functions. The term cog is from Articles