At the High Performance Computing (HPC) Linux Financial Markets event in New York City on April 4, IBM leaders, along with customers Datatrend Technologies and Insurance Services Office, kicked off the conference with a panel discussion about how IBM systems and Watson technology could be applied to the financial industry.
In February, Watson, which incorporates IBM POWER7 systems with Linux and analytics software, competed on Jeopardy! The man vs. machine competition showcased Watson's ability to answer questions posed in natural language, and in the 3-day contest Watson succeeded in beating the television game show's two most successful players.
Jean Staten Healy, director of Cross-IBM Linux, and Eddie Epstein, manager of unstructured information for the IBM Watson project, spoke with the press after the panel about the importance of open source technologies to Watson, and how the technology will support financial customers.
Watson's ability to sort through enormous amounts of unstructured data, assess its confidence in an answer, and do so with great speed are capabilities that could be put to good use in the financial industry.
Reducing risk is always important to the financial community and, with unstructured data only increasing, speed will also become more critical, Healy explained in an interview with CIO.com.
Just as in the medical field, the volume of information is growing beyond humans' ability to keep pace, but analyzing large amounts of text and unstructured data is Watson's strength, Epstein told Securities Technology Monitor.com.