Since the first perceptron was implemented in an IBM 7042 to the success of Deep Blue against a human opponent and, more recently, IBM Watson’s victory on Jeopardy!, IBM has been intimately involved with the advancement of cognitive systems. With IBM Research exploring artificial intelligence and machine learning for decades the results are not limited to crucial theoretical advancements but exist as ready-to-use solutions that can be used by anyone in a variety of scenarios.

In this talk we will briefly review the road that has lead us to the current artificial intelligence boom and do a hands-on exploration of the portfolio of tools that IBM offers, from cognitive APIs that do visual recognition and text-to-speech to the Watson Data Platform for end-to-end data analysis, from well-known solution like SPSS to the integration of open toolkits with Data Science Experience and Watson Machine Learning.