International Business Machines Corp on Wednesday launched a computer system that can quickly identify patterns in massive amounts of data, an ability that IBM said should hasten breakthroughs in science and medical research.<\/p>\n
The computer system, Watson Discovery Advisor, understands chemical compound interaction and human language and can visually map out connections in data, the company said in a statement.<\/p>\n
IBM will make the service available through the cloud. Some researchers and scientists have already been using Watson Discovery Advisor to sift through the sludge of scientific papers published daily.<\/p>\n
Johnson & Johnson is teaching the system to read and understand trial outcomes published in journals to speed up studies of effectiveness of drugs.<\/p>\n
Sanofi, a French pharmaceutical company is working with Watson to identify alternate uses for existing drugs.<\/p>\n
“On average, a scientist might read between one and five research papers on a good day,\u201d said Dr. Olivier Lichtarge, investigator and professor of molecular and human genetics, biochemistry and molecular biology at Baylor College of Medicine.<\/p>\n
He used Watson to automatically analyze 70,000 articles on a particular protein, a process which could have taken him nearly 38 years.<\/p>\n
\u201cWatson has demonstrated the potential to accelerate the rate and the quality of breakthrough discoveries,” he said.<\/p>\n
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