(Editor’s Note: This is the blog post I gifted as a secret santa blog. I have republished it here, with a few small embelishments.)

I had the great fortune to attend the Cognitive Colloquium in early October of this year at the IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. It was one of those life-changing moments when you feel like you’re sitting on top of a mountain and you can see much more distant horizons. In my case, the horizon I saw involved using some of my mental energy to solve the grand problems of digital content using the methods of cognitive computing.

What are these methods? Well, at IBM, we describe cognitive computing as a cluster of practices that use machine learning, natural language processing and high-performance computing to change the way computers work and how humans work with them. Heady stuff, I know.

Before you…