(9a) Beyond Big Data Analytics Integrating with Cognitive Computing to Enable Smarter Manufacturing

The oil & gas, downstream and petrochemicals industries are facing challenges such as aging workforce with wide gaps in experience, aging asset base with more complex operations, market variability and speed of change requiring faster and better decisions at real-time, production and energy optimization, safe, secure and reliable operations for compliance.

We will discuss how the winning companies can step up to meet the above challenges by moving beyond the capabilities of Big Data Analytics by integrating Analytics with Cognitive Computing to enable real-time Cognitive Manufacturing. This will enable real-time decision management leveraging the insights and benefits from Analytics using cognitive systems such as IBM Watson that can:

• Ingest unstructured and structured data in all its forms.
• Understand unstructured data, through sensing and interaction;
• Reason with Bid Data by generating hypotheses, considering arguments, and recommendations; and
• Continuously learn from training by experts, from every interaction and from growing data.

IBM Watson has evolved from a single capability of natural language Q&A powered by few technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing (as seen in Jeopardy! in 2011) to more than 28 capabilities such as relationship extraction, personality analysis, tone analysis, concept expansion and trade-off analytics powered by 50 technologies. These capabilities have all been turned into digital services platform offered via APIs. These capabilities are provided as cognitive building blocks in in a cloud based ecosystem which anyone could build into their applications to scale and accelerate innovation.

Decision management platforms utilizing IBM Watson will meet the need for greater consistency in optimal decision making and knowledge retention by providing the capabilities such as the following: 1. Deeper human engagement, 2. Elevated expertise, 3. Cognitive products and services, 4. Cognitive processes and operations, 5. Intelligent exploration and discovery.