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Sesame Street is getting a new neighbor. Over the next three years, IBM Watson will work with Sesame Workshop, Sesame Street’s non-profit education group, to help create cognitive learning tools for preschoolers – that is, programs and products that teach and learn from children as their knowledge grows.  With Sesame Workshop’s expertise and Watson’s natural language processing, pattern recognition and other cognitive abilities, soon we’ll have access to teaching aids that adapt lessons based on the individual likes, dislikes and engagement level of each child. It’s a friendship that even Oscar the Grouch is happy about.

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No? How about strawberry, hazelnut and avocado then? Bet you’ve never seen these unusual flavor combos at your local doughnut shop. Neither had we until we put the apron on Chef Watson. With its help, you can create your own unique doughnut flavors too. There’s no better time to try than National Doughnut Day, so fire up that fry-daddy and get cooking.

A new Watson-powered dating app from IBM-partner Connectidy just might be the best thing to happen to your love life. To find a truly deep connection, Watson first analyzes your social media accounts to learn how extroverted, agreeable, conscientious, open or neurotic you may be and matches you with someone who shares compatible personality traits. Then when it comes time to talk to a match, Watson’s tone analyzer can help up your game – or at least make it a little less awkward. It’ll read as you type with real time feedback to make sure your messages are making the right impression. After that, you’re on your own.

Your heart races double-time. Your eyes widen. You’re lost in a Class IV rapid of doubt. It’s the “add to cart” moment. Shopping online can be overwhelming and you could use some expert advice to guide you. Like when you need to know if a mountaineer grade sleeping bag is necessary for a June music festival. Or if a water-resistant jacket is more practical for Yosemite than a waterproof one. That’s why IBM Watson has partnered with Fluid, Inc. Together they are learning to understand product and review data to help online retailers like The North Face pair in-stock inventory with what’s in store for your upcoming adventures. Just take a deep breath, and proceed to checkout.

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Draft day is coming. Hundreds of college standouts are ready for the big leagues. But which ones are ready for the Toronto Raptors? To give Toronto’s scouts and coaches an edge in sorting through next season’s prospects, they’ll team up with IBM Watson, the cognitive computing powerhouse. Watson can combine social sentiment from fans, players’ medical records, game films, stats and more to better understand each prospect and assist Toronto’s experts as they pick the best players for their upcoming roster.  

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Toasted oats? Nuts? Honey? Dried fruits? Chocolate? What’s in your perfect granola mix? Granola-purveyor Bear Naked wants to know. So much so that they’ve asked IBM Chef Watson to help find out what it takes to get you to the bottom of your breakfast bowl. On Bear Naked’s website, you can custom-make granola blends with a dash of Watson’s cognitive culinary know-how. First you choose honey, chocolate or cashew as a base. Then Chef Watson makes personalized recommendations from over 50 ingredients based on its understanding of food pairings. Chocolate granola with jalapeños, pepitas and red sea salt actually sounds delicious…to someone.

Make your own Bear Naked blend with Watson →

Super small yet perfectly poised to outthink chip technology as we know it: Patent No. 8977583 is a highly efficient chip that’s not only built to resemble the brain, but to behave in ways like one too. It all happens through (wait for it) neuromorphic and synaptronic computation – in other words, the actions of a million artificial nerve cells. With this tiny chip, we’ll be able to cram more cognition and processing power into small devices like phones, hearing aids and watches to make them think better, faster and on-the-fly like humans. 

See what else we’ve patented in our record 23rd year →

Attention all monolingual wanderlusters: IBM Patent No. 9015032 is here to make overseas travel a whole lot easier. This cognitive language recognition system helps travelers maneuver through airports where their native tongue isn’t spoken. How? First by identifying the languages it “hears” from microphones placed throughout the airport, then by translating flight info into these languages for display and PA announcements. Could this mean the end of mad gate dashes from airport bars worldwide? Probably not. Or should we say, probablement pas, osoraku arimasen, wahrscheinlich nicht, probablemente…. 

See what else we’ve patented in our record 23rd year →

In today’s cognitive era, machines can listen and talk back to us. But can they understand the emotional nuances of our conversations? You betcha – with IBM’s Patent No. 9117446. This system detects and assigns emotion to text in TTS (text to speech) applications, so machines can read and express emotion in response to what we say, how we say it, our facial expressions and body language. And we don’t have to wait an age to see it at work. ­Emotion-detecting robots are already serving customers in banks and coffee shops, and keeping nursing home residents entertained – with each robot able to converse with humans and express themselves on an emotional level. So the next time you say you love technology, it might just love you back. 

See what else we’ve patented in our record 23rd year →

179 Performances. 130,000 Visitors. 10 Days. The annual Roskilde Festival in Denmark is a lot to handle. Keeping people safe, fed, hydrated, sheltered, entertained and informed is like running a small city. Behind the scenes, students of Copenhagen Business School (CBS) are working with festival organizers to manage it all with IBM Analytics. Every piece of data from things visitors buy, to places where they spend their time, is fed to IBM Watson, to help CBS create the most efficient plan for the world’s shortest-living city. And the more Watson learns, the better the “city” runs. We hear that this year Roskilde’s best dancer gets to be mayor.

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Simon Wheatcroft is a determined ultra marathon runner. And he just happens to be blind. To compensate for what he can’t see, Simon trains using the Runkeeper app, running on IBM Cloud.  The app streams his location to the cloud where it’s analyzed every second, along with the data of over 120,000 other runners. Through his headphones the app provides audio cues about his speed and distance to help him determine when and where to turn, avoid obstacles and know how far he has to go. The IBM Cloud is helping Simon to do something amazing. We just hope he can hear it over the sound of the world cheering him on. 

Only things with a heartbeat have blood coursing through their veins, right? Not so fast. Mad scientists at IBM’s lab in Zurich have begun creating a new experimental substance called electronic blood. Pumped through plastic veins, this blue-hued electrochemical liquid could ward off one of the major worries haunting computer systems today – how to cram in more chips and graphics cards without overheating and energy transfer troubles. Eat your heart out, Dr. Frankenstein!

Happy Halloween all you geeks and goblins!

Valentine’s Day without chocolate? Say it isn’t so… ! Not long ago, disease ridden cacao crops made this heart-breaking scenario as a real possibility. Thankfully, due to some “research-love” in the field genomics, the world’s chocolate-lovers can breathe a collective sigh of relief. In 2008, IBMers and candy-makers at Mars Inc. launched a program to sequence, assemble and ultimately identify disease-resistant genomes in cacao plants. The result: healthier beans for farmers and a healthier chocolate supply for everyone. We ❤ ❤ ❤ research.

Keeping your eye on the ball isn’t as easy as it sounds for opponents of Australian tennis player Samuel Groth. Especially when they know that on May 9, 2012 he put all of his 6-foot-4 frame and muscle behind a serve that reached a record-breaking 163.4 mph (263 km/h) – that’s as fast as a locomotive travelling at top-speed.

Word to the wise: Don’t blink when Samuel steps up to the baseline.

Discover other great tennis stats

Spanish. Check. Portuguese. Check. Japanese? You got it. Cognitive polyglot IBM Watson is now taking on one of the ultimate linguistic challenges by adding Japanese to its repertoire. IBM and Tokyo-based SoftBank are teaching Watson to get a grasp of the thousands of kanji, 46 katakana and 46 hiragana characters, not to mention the almost endless contextual nuances Japanese presents. Once fluent, Watson will be able to understand, speak and think in Japanese, so it can analyze questions in the country’s mother tongue.

We’re using it to help diagnose our ills. To turn our bodies into game controllers. To translate our speech into real time. And even create self-driving cars. Everything we do, AI is helping us do it better. By helping us be better doctors, teachers, pilots and judges, augmented intelligence is actually making us smarter. And most surprisingly, making us redefine who we are and what it means to be human. Read more about how AI is bringing sci-fi dreams to life and making us better humanoids→

What if you could tell your smartphone that you’re taking a “mancation” to Austin with three buddies, then have it recommend Formula 1 racing, Austin City Limits Music Festival, table 7 by the window at Habernero Mexican Cafe? You’d be pretty stoked, right? Hold that thought. The founder of Kayak is launching an AI-powered concierge that gives personalized travel recommendations based on your interests. Read up on how AI is helping make your time off from work more unforgettable →

Supercomputing power that once filled a room now fits in a postage stamp-sized chip. Just as amazing is what these chips can do. Take SyNAPSE, IBM’s tiny new neurosynaptic chip. By emulating our brain’s computing efficiency, these little wonders mean big gains for small sensor-equipped devices. Like a tumbleweed-like robot that can roll around disaster zones on search and rescue missions, or glasses that give the blind a new way to navigate their surroundings. Lots of good things come in this small package…just remember where you put it.

53 years ago this week, electronic “golf-balls” began bouncing their way across the letterheads of corporate America. The IBM Selectric typewriter revolutionized mid-century office memos as typists could now use different fonts and clock up to 90 words a minute–40 more than anything else before it. Good thing white correction fluid was already invented.

Since when did carbon-carbon bonds get so pretty? This nanographene molecule, synthesized in Toulouse, France, shows us the beauty of ‘bond-order discrimination.’  This splendor in chroma is achieved by atomic force microscopy using a carbon monoxide functionalized tip. Luckily, like any work of art, you don’t have to understand it to enjoy it.

When this vintage ad ran in the early 60s, “DNA’ was on the tip of every biochemists’ tongue. They were all abuzz about its relationship with cell proteins and their molecular chains and patterns. Using a computer, pioneering IBMers in math and biochemistry began applying mathematical logic to huge amounts of data to piece together the sequence of atoms in the protein chain. It was Big Data analysis before it was BIG.

No, it’s not a contestant from the classic TV game show. It’s an IBM computer that uses algorithmic computation to identify a song’s musical period—Baroque, Classical or Romantic— in only three notes. And when applied to speech patterns, the same technology can be used as an early warning system for Parkinson’s disease and certain kinds of psychiatric disorders. Read on →

Forget the garlic. Put away your crucifix. IBMers in Zurich are working on a way to protect you from a 21st Century’s demon called ‘Vampire Energy‘—the power used while you leave your gadgets and appliances turned off and plugged in. By developing a transistor that regulates energy usage, this innovation aims to cut your devices’ power consumption by as much as 90%. This could save U.S. households billions in power costs. A scary good trick, and an even better treat.
Muah-ha-ha-ha! Happy Halloween, everyone.

Out of the way gas-guzzlers. It’s estimated you’ll be sharing the road with 3 million electric vehicles by 2017. IBMer energy specialists are already preparing for the world adoption of EVs with a cloud-based electric vehicle charging system innovation. By putting electric cars in direct communication with the power grid, each plug-in seamlessly accesses vehicle I.Ds., battery storage info, energy transaction plans and payment details. Amazing to think that soon we’ll be watching the price-per-Kwh instead of the price-per-gallon. Explore more stories →

Don’t you just love it when a bartender knows what you want before you do? That’s what’s in store for those at SXSW right now. On Friday, IBM unveiled a Cognitive Cocktail Bar where bartenders use Watson’s cognitive capabilities to create the perfect drink for guests. How? First, Watson learns about bar patrons from data stored in their wristbands – info such as conference activity, personal preferences, interests and social media accounts. Then Watson analyzes this data to recommend a bespoke cocktail concoction. With Watson’s help, maybe some day every bar will know your name.

Not at SXSW? You can still experience your own cognitive drink concoctions through the IBM Watson Twist app.

“Benoit once told me that the best tasting bagels are those with a fractal distribution of holes. If the bagels are cooked at the right temperature, the carbon dioxide generated by the yeast forms bubbles with a fractal distribution. So before you buy a bunch of bagels, cut one open, look at the different hole sizes, and they range from very small to very large, they were cooked properly. Of course, you can always taste one bagel before buying a bunch from the same batch. But that’s not the “fractal way” to judge your food.“

James Wynne
LASIK Pioneer, IBM Researcher

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There’s enough financial fodder produced every day to make planners’ heads spin. To read, absorb, much less use all that investment info is virtually impossible. Not for Watson. It can collect masses upon masses of daily news, analyst documents, e-mails, transaction data and public opinion, then read it, remember it, learn from it and use it — all to help financial advisors separate the bears from the bulls and recommend investment and portfolio changes with confidence.

“One moment, please.” “We’ll be with you shortly.” “You are eighth in the queue.” Sound all too familiar? Maybe not for long—The Watson Engagement Advisor can listen to customer queries, suggest personalized follow up questions and help operators find answers in a flash. For even faster service, callers can interact directly with Watson itself. Could this also mean an end to the need for mind-numbing “hold music?” (One can only hope.)

In need of some retail therapy? Soon you’ll be able to bring Watson along. As the cognitive technology behind the Expert Personal Shopper app in development, Watson will be able to help you make smarter buys based on your preferences. Like your own uber-clued-in, trend-savvy sales associate that fits in your pocket, only without the attitude or high pressure sales pitches.

THINK OF IT AS…Bath water-generated hydroelectricity. This system uses gravity to make electricity from rainwater, grey water and black water as it exits tall buildings. With every flush or turn of a faucet, water rushes down into a turbine, generating power and making you rethink your next goldfish funeral.

Another patent from our 21st year of record-breaking innovation.

THINK OF IT AS…A mobile phone forcefield for textaholics.  This innovation can analyze your fingerprints, voice patterns, retina images, heartbeat and more—to prevent you from using a handheld device while operating a vehicle. So less attention on your phone and more on that moose that just stepped out in front of you…

Another patent from our 21st year of record-breaking innovation.

Yearning for the days of your youth, when playtime was all of the time? Bring play back! Through play, we try new things, problem-solve, create and learn how to make stuff even better. Play opens our minds to what’s possible and helps us make it happen. It sparks innovation and scientific breakthroughs by unleashing our curiosity and letting our imaginations run wild. So put your routine away and come out to play for a while. There’s room in the IBMblr sandbox for everyone. #IBMblrAtPlay