IBM Watson to work with a person's Autism

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When the media reports on stories related to supercomputers and autism, the topic is usually centered around an attempt to find an “autism cure” through better understanding of genetics and biomarkers. However, what makes this effort interesting is that it’s focused on making life easier for individuals who already have the disorder. Projects such as these are part of a wider societal movement for progressing beyond “awareness” for individuals with special needs, and towards “inclusion and acceptance”. As the father of a wonderful young man with autism, I can certainly appreciate the importance of such efforts.

The new Watson application, called Content Clarifier, was developed on Bluemix, IBM’s cloud platform, by IBM Accessibility Research and represents a powerful combination of machine learning, cognitive technologies and natural language processing. The system takes a long and complicated body of source content and dynamically filters out unnecessary information, replacing complex and recurring words or phrases, and converting it into something more understandable for the user. The content is essentially tailored to their specific needs.