Chapter 7: Cognitive Computing

 Cognition means:
“The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and
understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.”
 This new field of study focuses on both:
 Neuroscience: study of structure and activities of various
parts of the brain, and
 Psychology: which talks about the functioning of the brain in
processing information and learning new things with
experience.
 The effort is always toward making machines as close to human
intelligence in learning as possible and as autonomous as humans:
self-learning and evolving.
 In the recent past, we could have reached something close to
cognitive computing, but we still had a way to go as compared to
humans’ intrinsic cognitive capabilities.
 The major difference between human cognitive studies and
cognitive computing: human cognitive studies maybe to help a brain
recover or train better if it isn’t working well but cognitive
computing takes input from the former and tries to recreate the
same cognition phenomena in machines.
 Cognitive computing tries to simplify the knowledge gained from
these studies and convert it into algorithms to implement in
machines.
 In humans, learning is stored as experiences through the sensations
(internal and external).
 So now the brain will start recording these experiences as good
feelings or bad feelings and responses would come as outcomes of
smiling or crying, as per the basic programming present in the
brain: a very binary response indeed.
 The responses between a smile and cry as output (i.e., intermediate
responses are developed) via the long learning of the brain after
birth.
 So, if the baby sees momma approaching, it relates this with good
feelings like cozy care, love, and food in the stomach; then the baby
smiles or at least does not cry, depending upon whether it was busy
perceiving something at that point or was free to react.

Cognitive Computing
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 This is nothing but trying to mimic maximum human cognition
properties in a programmable machine using various computer
science technologies and mathematical models.

 So, the series of cognitive abilities simulated in these systems from

human cognitionaspects are as follows: perceiving, sensing,
analyzing, problem solving, weighing adecision, simulating the
possibilities to get the best one, learning, expressing,
responding,and so on.
 Cognitive computing creates machines which keep learning and
keepmodifying their behaviors or responses with this continuous
learning.
 The knowledge progressively coming into the system creates new
learning mapsand associations to generate meaning.
 This is facilitated by the new knowledge input andtraining the
system to understand this data.
 Along similar lines, the cognitive system toomakes a huge
association for every subject area and all the available knowledge
input toit.
 This either gets updated with a new dimension or gets replaced or
completely removedwith time.
 Learning is very much influenced by emotions.
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 Emotions change inthe human for the same experience with the
passage of time.
 For machines, this difficult task could meanidentification of pitch
and facial point distortions which it’s programmed to perceive as
emotions.
 Machines do not expect.
 The expectations arethere but only as expected output and
changing expectation toward a new output is againa challenge.
 These perception- and emotion-driven actions are simple for a
human to do butprogramming this capability into a machine is a
mammoth task.
 These are the limitationswhich current cognitive computing
scientists need to fill in order to obtain a cognitivesystem of a higher
order.
 The hardware is cheap and state of the art and so is the abundance
of softwareavailable. Also, the business use cases for doing this are
abundant.
 All this is drivingcognitive computing.
 The discipline of natural language processing is very important for
cognitivecomputing.
 This makes it Nativelyinteractable with humans and More human-
like.
 For example, an IBM Watson for cancer assists the doctors in
making the bestdecisions for critical cancer patients where a small
deviation here or there might befatal.
 The application cannot replace a doctor; so then what is the utility?
Let us see whatshould be the true capability of a doctor doing this
diagnosis.
 This expectation is not anyscale given by any organization and
considered mandatory to qualify as a good or baddoctor.
 Rather, the expectation is that of the doctor herself to be the best in
her field: todo the best diagnoses and patient consultations and to
treat patients with the greatestprobability of success in the shortest
time. In short: best treatment.
 There are about30,000 to 50,000 research papers published every
year just on cancer treatment.
 That issomething like 80 to 140 papers per day.
 There are millions of cancer cases diagnosedevery year across the
globe.
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 On top of that, there could be millions of pages withinmedical
textbooks on the same subject across the globe.
 So, any doctor determined toprovide the best consultation should
want to go through all this knowledge, be able torefer to any part of
it for details relevant to specific patient cases (as there are
varioustypes of cancers), and then decide on treatment.
 This isn’t humanly possible.
 This iswhere Watson for cancer jumps in.
 With its cognitive capabilities, it relates to the rightsources,
including an organization called bestdoctors.com, to get the latest
diagnosisdetails by the top physicians in this area.
 The machine learns the patient’s current statsand sifts through all
the relevant details (even almost in real time), and then
suggestsweighted paths of treatment with the probable result.
 So, cognitive computing with all its capabilities partners with
humans to add value tothe processes and actions to be taken.
 It works as an advisor.