E-Business
IBM’s Cognitive Exploration to Drive Better Business Outcomes
IBM has announced the availability of a cognitive-infused Watson Explorer, a powerful combination of data exploration and content analytics capabilities.
Typical organizations only use 12 percent of their dataˡ, leaving a wealth of untapped information across the enterprise that could be leveraged to make smarter decisions.
Watson Explorer equips users with the information and analytics capabilities which can help them to deliver better performance and real-time results.
Watson Explorer has enabled hundreds of customers to connect with their data, build information-centric applications and helped them to improve the quality and speed of their decision making.
With the announcement, Watson Explorer advances core cognitive components by providing organizations the ability to quickly use natural language processing capabilities and data exploration to discover valuable business information in both structured and unstructured data.
Watson Explorer advances data exploration by bringing cognitive capabilities, providing users with a 360-degree view of contextually relevant information to offer deeper levels of insight, showing what is happening and why.
Unlike traditional search solutions that fail to provide context, trends and relationships, Watson Explorer can help professionals find and understand the information they need to work more efficiently, gain more insights from their unstructured content and realize their objectives of improving business outcomes.
New Watson Explorer features include advanced content analytics capabilities giving users a view into structured and unstructured data. Watson Explorer provides the bridge between cloud-based services and on-premise proprietary information, making it the logical first step in a Watson journey.
Today’s business environment demands an ability to make high quality decisions more quickly than ever before, against a rapidly expanding set of inputs. Enterprise data and applications are typically siloed and lack the information sharing capacity to facilitate better employee performance. Take, for example, a customer service representative at a global retailer.
Hundreds of billions of customer service calls are handled annually, during which an average customer service representative interfaces with over ten different systems per call, requiring them to move between different applications, run multiple searches, mentally correlate the information and respond to the customer all in real-time – a monumental undertaking.
When a customer calls with questions, representatives face a struggle to create a consistently excellent experience for their customer due to challenges finding, organizing, analyzing and correlating the right information for that specific customer at that moment.
Cognitive exploration can enhance a user’s ability to use information to make more informed, evidence based decisions. It does this by providing information and understanding from relevant sources, much like a human would.
With Watson Explorer, for example, a representative is able to ask a question in natural language and instantly retrieve relevant content, expertly culled from a variety of data sources, both structured and unstructured.
Watson Explorer’s content analytics feature leverages the power of natural language processing to enable organizations to extract meaning from content such as customer comments, messages, social media, legal documents and research reports
“Exploration of data is part of a journey toward discovery of valuable information to help organizations make critical business decisions,” said Stephen Gold, vice president, IBM Watson Group.
“We are continually looking for ways to provide enterprise customers with tools that will make a difference to their employees and drive results for their bottom line. Watson Explorer brings cognitive capabilities to users at every level, giving them real-time access to the valuable information often locked in structured and unstructured data.”
The Power of Cognitive Exploration
Exploration enables users to uncover new possibilities. But exploration in complex, heterogeneous environments present unique challenges with massive volumes of data spread across a variety of sources and a limited ability to understand the connections that exist in the data.
To speed the time, Watson Explorer connects information from a range of internal and external sources, analyzes that content and looks for underlying relationships or patterns that help interpret information.
Explore – Watson Explorer combines content and data from many different systems throughout the enterprise and public sources and presents it to users based on their role and current activities, which can dramatically reduce the amount of time spent looking for information, and increasing their ability to work smarter.
In today’s information-rich environment, few important tasks can be completed with information from a single source—whether the task is to assist a customer, plan a marketing strategy for a new product or investigate a security breach.
Watson Explorer brings data and analytics from many sources, as well as relevant cognitive insights to a user’s desktop or mobile device, in a context-appropriate manner to enable them work with confidence.
Analyze – For many organizations, the growing volume of unstructured data represents untapped business opportunities.
Documents, e-mail messages, call center transcripts and social media are examples of the kinds of content that may yield a wealth of insights that can help improve business performance if gathered and analyzed by the right tools.
Watson Explorer’s content analytics capabilities enable users to uncover trends, patterns and correlations from unstructured information using natural language processing technology, delivering insights in hours or days rather than or weeks or months. Those insights are then available to users in real-time as a 360-degree view.
Interpret – Watson Explorer provides the ability to integrate a growing list of IBM Watson Developer Cloud services for an enhanced experience leveraging the combined strength of exploration, analytic and cognitive capabilities.
As new capabilities are developed by IBM and exposed in the Watson Developer Cloud, they will be made available to qualified Watson Explorer users who license the Watson Developer Cloud services.
The available services for integration with Watson Explorer at the time of release are: Question Answer, User Modeling, Relationship Extraction, Message Resonance, Concept Expansion, Language Identification and Machine Translation.
“We’ve put Watson Explorer in the hands of our call center agents to equip them with a 360-degree view of the information they need, including self-performance reports and other analytics,” said Farouk Ferchichi, Corporate Manger, Toyota Financial Services.
“With over four million customers, we recognize the importance of top-notch service and are committed to actively maintaining customer satisfaction. Watson Explorer gives agents the ability to get detailed metrics on their performance to identify strengths and focus areas to improve.”
Watson Explorer will enable customers like Toyota Financial Services to maximize business opportunities by providing frontline workers with a more holistic view of their information landscape.
Watson Explorer is currently available as two principal offerings:
Enterprise Edition provides search and 360-degree information applications across multiple sources, as well as the ability of qualified customers to license cognitive services from the Watson Developer Cloud to help enhance, scale, and accelerate human expertise.
Advanced Edition includes all of the capabilities of Enterprise Edition plus advanced content mining and content analytics to help organizations take the next step with advanced content mining and analytics capabilities to aggregate, analyze and visualize massive amounts of unstructured content to expose new insights.
IBM Watson: Pioneering a New Era of Computing
IBM Watson represents a new era of computing in which apps and systems interact with human users more naturally, augment our knowledge with Big Data insights, and learn to improve how they assist us.
Fueled by innovation from a mission to transform industries and professions, Watson is uniquely positioned at the forefront of the new era of computing, evidenced by an unmatched demonstration of what cognitive systems can bring to transform decision-making. IBM is delivering a range of cloud-based products and services to clients in industries such as banking, healthcare, insurance, retail and education.
In January, 2014, IBM launched the IBM Watson Group, a new business unit dedicated to developing and commercializing cloud-delivered cognitive advisors. The move signifies a strategic shift by IBM to deliver a new class of software, services and apps that think, improve by learning, and discover insights from massive amounts of Big Data.
IBM is investing $1 billion into the Watson Group, focusing on development and research and bringing cloud-delivered cognitive applications and services to market. This includes $100 million available for venture investments to support IBM’s ecosystem of start-ups and businesses building cognitive apps made with Watson
By Nancy Werteen
When you get anti-hacking advice, you’ve probably heard “Don’t use a simple password,” or “Don’t plug in that USB you found on the ground.”
But there’s one form of hacking that doesn’t always require a computer, and it costs businesses about 4.88 million dollars a year.
Modern hackers aren’t trying to get into your computer; they’re trying to get into you.
“They’ll try to learn about you a little bit, and they’ll try to use that information against you to try to get you to complete some action, maybe to send somebody some money,” said Kevin Moran, PhD, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Cyber Security and Privacy Cluster, University of Central Florida.
IBM calls this human hacking, because it exploits human error instead of system error.
“With people just being busy and maybe not very carefully checking some of the emails or the phone calls that they get, can be something unfortunately that people can fall victim to,” said Moran.
Also known as social engineering, this often takes the form of phishing, where the hacker tries to “fish” the information out of you by impersonating family, friends, or even your bank.
There’s also baiting, where the hacker baits you with something of value. Remember the Nigerian prince scam?
That’s a famous example of baiting. There’s also pretexting, where the hacker will claim the victim has already been hacked, and that the hacker can fix it if you just send over your passwords. So, what can you do?
“Just as a rule of thumb, instead of clicking on links and emails, just go to the website yourself. And that will prevent, a lot of these types of attacks from happening,” explained Moran.
Phishing can take many forms.
Spear phishing targets people with access to confidential information, often to get access into an entire business, and whale phishing targets CEOs or political figures.
Search engine phishing is when hackers create fake websites promising services or goods you’ll never receive.
Angler phishing is when hackers create fake social media accounts impersonating famous people or companies.
Finally, vishing and smishing is phishing done through phone calls and texts respectively.
Federal government has said that it has successfully captured 59,786 inmates, representing approximately 74 percent of the total prison population into the National Identity Number (NIN) database.
This figure is based on a total of 80,879 inmates across 256 custodial centres across the country.
Abubakar Umar, spokesman, Nigerian Correctional Service (NCoS), Deputy Controller of Corrections, who made this disclosure in a statement issued on Sunday in Abuja, dismissed recent media reports alleging that the NIN registration had yet to begin in custodial centres.
Umar described such report as misleading, inaccurate, and not representative of the current situation.
According to Umar, the NIN registration exercise within the correctional facilities was ongoing and has achieved substantial progress.
He credited the achievement to collaboration between the NCoS and the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), which has enabled successful enrollment of majority of inmates into the national identity database.
According to him, “As of June 7, 2025, a total of 59,786 inmates, roughly 74 percent cent of the total inmate population have been captured on the NIMC platform,” Umar said.
“Efforts are ongoing to register the remaining inmates, and necessary mechanisms have been established to ensure the seamless completion of the process.”
He emphasised that the assertion that NIN registration has not started in custodial centres was factually incorrect and overlooks the extensive work already carried out.
The Service reaffirmed its commitment to integrating all inmates into national data systems, including NIN registration, as part of broader efforts to support rehabilitation, reintegration, and digital inclusion for individuals in custody.
Umar also urged media outlets to confirm their information with appropriate authorities before publication to prevent the spread of misinformation that could undermine the Service’s progress and public understanding.
National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) has clarified that all its verification service platforms remain fully functional and accessible to all authorized partners, including security agencies.
Abisoye Coker-Odusote, DG, NIMC
In a statement on Thursday, the Commission firmly denied claims that it had denied the Police Service Commission (PSC) access to its verification server.
Dr. Kayode Adegoke, head of Corporate Communications, NIMC, described the reported “inability of the Police Service Commission to access the NIMC verification server” as misleading and inaccurate.
He suggested that any challenges faced by the PSC may be due to internal issues within the commission itself, not from NIMC’s end.
The statement reads: “To set the record straight, the NIMC granted verification access to all Nigerian Police formations for the verification of the National Identification Number (NIN). The NPF, PSC and other security agencies have been enjoying uninterrupted verification services for over five years.
“NIMC has provided top-notch verification services for recruitment into the Nigeria Police Force, as conducted by the PSC and at no time have there been any complaints or issues regarding NIN Verification by the NPF or PSC.
“The Commission has a robust and harmonious working relationship with the Nigerian Police Force and the Police Service Commission. The Information Communications and Technology (ICT) department of the Nigeria Police Force is actively managing the long-standing verification and integration service between the NIMC and all Nigeria Police formations.Entertainment tourism packages
“NIMC will continue to provide flawless verification services for the purpose of recruitment, security mapping, cybercrime control, and any other security matters.
“The framework by which NIMC provides services to the security agencies was recently restructured for standardization and effective implementation, following consultation with the Office of the National Security Adviser, and NPF has confirmed the verification services have continued to be available. We therefore believe that any service interruption experienced by PSC may be due to internal matters.
“NIMC is committed to providing excellent verification services to the PSC, NPF and all its partners but the terms and conditions inherent must be adhered to for uninterrupted flow of service.”
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