IBM announced that Munich, Germany, will serve as the global headquarters for its Watson Internet of Things (IoT) unit. Big Blue added that this will also serve as the first European Watson innovation center, marking its largest investment in the region in more than two decades.

The European headquarters will house 1,000 IBM developers, consultants, researchers and designers along with data scientists, engineers and programmers, all of whom will be responsible for driving innovation and solutions for the connected world. IBM also aims to utilize the new center to drive collaborative projects with its clients, partners, and IBM researchers and data scientists to create new opportunities for growth in IoT.

“The Internet of Things will soon be the largest single source of data on the planet, yet almost 90 percent of that data is never acted upon,” said Harriet Green, general manager, Watson IoT and Education. “With its unique abilities to sense, reason and learn, Watson opens the door for enterprises, governments and individuals to finally harness this real-time data, compare it with historical data sets and deep reservoirs of accumulated knowledge, and then find unexpected correlations that generate new insights to benefit business and society alike.”

New Watson API

IBM also announced four new families of Watson API services that will be available as part of its IBM Watson IoT Analytics offering. These families will allow IBM clients, partners and developers to make better sense of gathered data via machine learning and correlation with unstructured data. The four Watson API families are as follows:

Natural Language Processing (NLP) API Family allows users to interact with systems and devices using simple, human language, much like how we use Siri, Cortana and Google Now to get information quickly on our mobile devices, but on a technical level.

Machine Learning Watson API Family automates data processing and continuously monitors new data and user interactions to rank data and results based on learned priorities. Machine learning can be applied to any data coming from devices and sensors to automatically understand the current conditions, what’s normal, expected trends, properties to monitor and suggested actions when an issue arises.

Video and Image Analytics API Family enables monitoring of unstructured data from video feeds and image snapshots to identify scenes and patterns. This can be combined with machine data to get a deeper understanding of past events and emerging situations.

Text Analytics API Family enables mining of unstructured textual data, including transcripts from customer call centers, maintenance technician logs, blog comments and tweets to find correlations and patterns in these vast amounts of data.

In addition, the company announced the opening of eight new Watson IoT Client Experience Centers across Asia, Europe and the Americas, with locations including Beijing, China; Boeblingen, Germany; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Seoul, Korea; Tokyo, Japan; and Massachusetts, North Carolina and Texas in the United States. These centers provide clients and partners access to technology, tools and talent needed to develop and create new products and services using cognitive intelligence delivered through the Watson IoT Cloud Platform.

Driving IoT innovation

Back in October, IBM acquired The Weather Company’s business-to-business, mobile and cloud-based web properties, which it will utilize to launch the Watson IoT unit. These new efforts in the IoT space are in line with IBM’s announcement made earlier this year about the creation of a new IoT division and investing $3 billion in the said space in the span of four years.

Photo by Sebastian Anthony