IBM’s Watson, a supercomputer designed for artificial intelligence, isn’t just good at answering Jeopardy questions — it’s also smart at diagnostic medicine and creating new recipes.

A new report from the New York Times today shows that IBM is looking to bring Watson’s powerful abilities to more industries in order to give the company an edge in the “big data” field. Watson has already had some success as a diagnostic assistant at a few medical centers around the country, including the Cleveland Clinic. Now IBM is looking to use its powerhouse elsewhere.

New Watson projects will include helping people come up with recipes, assisting in the development of new pharmaceutical drugs, and predicting when industrial machines will need maintenance.

Watson could be helpful to so many industries because it is able to sift through crazy amounts of data and make intelligent decisions about what to do with that information. Watson can look through Web pages, social networks, medical images, patent filings, and more to find what it needs.

IBM’s footprint in big data will only grow larger if it succeeds with placing Watson in commercial spaces. The company claims it is already doing data and analytics work for more than 10,000 customers. It employs 400 mathematicians and 9,000 analytics experts to do its bidding.

If IBM continues its investments it big data, it predicts that revenue generated in the area will hit $16 billion by 2015. Watson specifically isn’t making the company big money yet, but IBM believes they will pay off down the road.

Check out the video below to see Watson diagnose a patient and suggest treatment options.

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What do ATM machines, the Universal Barcode system and a fact-finding computer that won jeopardy have in common?

According to an IBM spokesperson, these inventions began with a patent secured by the company’s scientists. For the 20th consecutive year, the computer services company has held its ground as the king of patents — it acquired 6,478 in 2012.

This is in no small part due to increasing contributions from research teams abroad. Nearly 30 percent of IBM’s patients were produced by researchers outside of the U.S., an eight percent jump from 2010. Israel, Japan, Canada, and Germany are among the company’s most productive countries.

According to Efrat Kasznik, president of Silicon Valley based IP consulting firm Foresight Valuation Group, IBM has a lot of patents for three main reasons: it has been around for a long time, it invests billions of dollars annually in R&D, and it has an elaborate incentive system for its researchers to file for patents.

This year, IBM’s patent count exceeded the combined totals of Accenture, Amazon, Apple, EMC, HP, Intel, Oracle, and Symantec. On the top 10 list (see below), Asian technology giants like Samsung and Hon Hai are buying up thousands of patents. “This trend has major implications for US companies [with] foreign companies are entering the US patent market,” said Kasznik.

Racking up patents is a smart strategy. It yields about $1 billion per year in licensing revenue and reduces the risk of being sued as the company moves into new territory, such as analytics and “big data.”

Big data is a buzzword used to describe the growing volume, complexity, and variety of data companies are accumulating. With global research firm Gartner projecting that big data will help drive IT spending to $3.8 trillion in 2014, it’s no surprise that IBM is making moves in this space.

According to IBM, 300 of the patents secured this year would foster innovation in the emerging big data analytics market. The company has made a name for itself in the field with its machine learning patented invention, which was implemented in “The Watson system”, a smart question-answering computer. In October, Watson hit the headlines for securing a place at medical school, where it was fed test questions from the United States Medical Licensing Exam. As VentureBeat reported, Watson is currently being positioned as a smarter successor to Apple’s Siri.

Since 1993, the company has received nearly 67,000 patents. It currently boasts a team of about 8,000 scientists residing in 35 countries.

“Most concretely, our 2012 patent record and the two decades of leadership it extends are a testament to thousands of brilliant IBM inventors — the living embodiments of our devotion to innovation that matters, for our clients, for our company, and for the world,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM’s chairman and CEO in a statement.

According to IFI Patent Services, the top patent-acquirers in 2012 are as follows:

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Business owners, chief information officers, and even chief executives are looking at storage with new eyes. They see that storage is a critical component of managing data, “internet-of-things,” Big Data, cloud services, and analytics.  Smarter storage is necessary for businesses to stay ahead as data continues to explode. For example, research firm IDC estimates that online content will total 2.7 zettabytes in 2012, up 48 percent from 2011.

In fact, 57 percent of IT decision makers from a 2011 IBM survey stated their organization needs a new storage approach to manage future growth.

As we move forward in 2012 and storage becomes a key business driver, we’ll see new breakthroughs in storage research and business models coming from industries like entertainment and healthcare.

With these new storage challenges and opportunities there will be five storage trends that organizations can take immediate action to address as they emerge in 2012.

1) Storage breakthroughs will nip the “Digital Dark Age” in the bud

Since the early 1990’s, an increasing proportion of data that people create and use has been in the form of digital data. That’s brought unprecedented flexibility and fluidity to the sharing of information.

Yet, digital storage can in many ways be more perishable than paper. Disks corrode, bits “rot” and hardware becomes obsolete. This presents a real concern of a possible “Digital Dark Age” where digital storage techniques and formats created today may not be viable in the future as the technology we use today becomes antiquated.

We’ve seen this happen before. Take the floppy disk for example: It was a storage tool that was so ubiquitous people still click on images of this enduring icon to “save” their digital work. Yet most Millennials have never seen it in person.

New research shows storage mediums can be vastly denser than they are today. New form factors such as solid state disks will help us provide more stable longer-term preservation of data, and the promise of “the cloud” allows access to data anywhere, anytime.

Recently, IBM researchers combined the benefits of magnetic hard drives and solid-state memory to overcome challenges of growing memory demand and shrinking devices. Called Racetrack memory, this breakthrough could lead to a new type of data-centric computing that allows massive amounts of stored information to be accessed in less than a billionth of a second.

This storage research breaks previous theoretical limits to data storage, ensuring our digital universe will always be preserved.

2) Data curation will provide structure in midst of the data deluge

Once we have the capability to preserve our digital universe, we will need a way to make it useful. We need to take the next step past data preservation to data curation.

Data curation is the active and ongoing management of data through its life cycle. This smarter data categorization adds value to data that will help glean new opportunities, improve the sharing of information and preserve data for later re-use.

Social media is a great example of the power of curated data. Sites like FaceBook, Google+, and Pinterest compile our digital lives and give their users a platform to organize their content.

However, there’s also a lot of work involved in selecting, appraising and organizing data to make it accessible and interpretable. The key is bringing data sets together, organizing them and linking them to related documents and tools. If data can be stored in a way that provides context, organizations can find new and useful ways to use that data.

3) Storage analytics will open new business insights

With data curation allowing organizations a platform to better utilize their data, analytics will help turn that data into intelligence and, ultimately, knowledge.

With the information that historical trend analytics and infrastructure analytics provides, you can index and search in a more intelligent way than ever before. By doing analytics on stored data, in backup and archive, you can draw business insight from that data, no matter where it exists.

The application of IBM Watson technology for healthcare provides a good example. Watson collects data from many sources and is able to analyze the meaning and context. By processing vast amounts of information and using analytics, it can suggest options targeted to a patient’s circumstances, can assist decision makers, such as physicians and nurses, in identifying the most likely diagnosis and treatment options for their patients.

Through intelligent storage and data retrieval systems, we can learn more with the information we have today to improve service to customers or open new revenue streams by leveraging data in new ways.

4) Storage becomes a celebrity as new business needs push it into the spotlight

As our digital and data-driven universe expands, certain industries are able to reach new levels of innovation by having the capacity to house, organize and instantaneously access information.

For example, Hollywood is known for its big budget blockbusters, but the big storage demands required by new formats such as digital, CGI, 3D and high definition are affecting not just the bottom line, but studios’ ability to produce these types of movies. Data sets for movies have become so large that they’re at the petabyte level.

Filmmakers are beginning to trade in film reels for SSDs as just one day’s worth of filming can generate hundreds of terabytes of data. The popularity of these data-intensive formats means studios are looking for new storage technologies that can handle the demand.

The healthcare industry may even be facing an even bigger data problem than the entertainment business. Take a look at the Institute University of Leipzig, in Germany, which has a major genetic study called LIFE to examine disease in populations. LIFE is cataloging genetic profiles of several thousand patients to pinpoint gene mutations and specific proteins. This process alone generates multiple terabytes of data.

Even one 300-bed hospital may generate 30 terabytes of data per year. Those figures will only grow with higher-resolution medical imaging, and new tools or services such as making electronic healthcare records available online.

5) Data hoarders will need an intervention

In this era of Big Data, more is always better, right? Not so – especially when every byte of data costs money to store and protect.

Businesses are turning into data hoarders and spending too much time and money collecting useless or bad data, potentially leading to misguided business decisions. This practice can be changed with simple policy decisions. Companies can also implement existing capabilities in smarter storage technologies. Still, many companies are hesitant to delete any data due to the fear of needing specific data down the line for business analytics or compliance purposes.

Part of the solution starts with eliminating the copies. Nearly 75 percent of the data that exists today is a copy. By deleting and disabling redundant information, organizations are investing in data quality and availability for content that matters to the business.

Consider the effect of unneeded data, costing money by replicating throughout an organization’s information systems. This outdated data can also potentially be accessed for fraud.

Raising the quality of data is not costly—not getting it right is.

Steve Wojtowecz is Vice President of Storage Software Development for IBM. Steve has enjoyed a 20-year career with IBM in various management roles that has included all areas of software design, development, strategy, marketing, sales, support and services. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Management Information Systems from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.

Top photo: Shutterstock/Kovalchuk Oleksandr

That means a patient could walk into a hospital and tell the computer about what is bothering them — whether it’s leg pain or a cough or a sore throat — and Watson can quickly process that information and spit out a diagnosis that has the highest probability of being correct. For most cases, that would save hospitals a lot of time because the computer could plow through the large number of cases hospitals regularly contend with that require simple treatments.

Watson was able to diagnose an eye problem with a fictional victim that had a 73 percent chance of being correct, according to a report by the Associated Press. Watson was able to improve the chance that its diagnosis was correct as it was given more symptoms and more clues about the patient’s condition and eventually arrived at a diagnosis of Lyme disease. Watson can also pull information from blogs and other media sources to create a more accurate diagnosis.

Watson is best known for crushing the puny likes of Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a series of games. It’s an advanced supercomputer that does a very good job of understanding human language and searching for correct answers. But the supercomputer was no match for former physicist and New Jersey congressman Rush Holt, who beat the computer by edging it out in a few areas that required clever use of language and rhymes like “Hoover’s Maneuvers.”

At its core, Watson is a computer that uses a series of complex search algorithms and some heavy-duty processing firepower to determine an answer that has the highest probability of being correct. But while it has a good bit of “buzzer mojo” that contributed to its wins over Jeopardy! champions Jennings and Rutter, it still hasn’t cracked the code for perfect natural language processing — something that comes easily to humans but can be incredibly difficult for computers.

IBM said it would be at least two years before the supercomputer made it to hospitals as an official product and said it didn’t have any kind of price tags for hospitals just yet.