IBM has launched its Watson Internet of Things (IoT) business unit together with a series of offerings designed to bring cognitive computing to bear on the Internet's connected devices and sensors.

Munich, Germany's Highlight Towers will serve as global headquarters for the unit, which will be home to an "innovation lab" employing 1,000 developers, engineers and programmers.

According to IBM, there are more than nine billion connected devices operating in the world today, generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of new data daily. Making sense of data embedded in intelligent devices is creating a market opportunity that the company says will reach $1.7 trillion by 2020. Yet without a proper infrastructure in place to analyze all of this data in real-time, its value is minimal.

"Cognitive computing" represents a new class of systems that learn at scale, reason with purpose and interact with humans naturally. Rather than being explicitly programmed, they learn from their interactions with humans and their environment, enabling them to keep pace with the volume and complexity of information generated by the IoT.

Munich's Highlight Towers will serve as the unit's global headquarters. Image credit: IBM.According to IBM, cognitive systems can make sense of the 80% of the world’s data that computer scientists call “unstructured,” which means they can look at aspects of the world that would otherwise be invisible. IBM says this will allow users to gain greater insight and make more informed decisions.

As part of the launch, IBM says that it is making four Watson API services available as part of an IBM Watson IoT Analytics offering. The services comprise:

• Natural Language Processing API Family—enabling users to interact with systems and devices using simple, human language.
• Machine Learning Watson API Family—which automates data processing and continuously monitors new data and user interactions to rank data and results based on learned priorities.
• Video and Image Analytics API Family—enabling monitoring of unstructured data from video feeds and image snapshots to identify scenes and patterns.
• Text Analytics API Family—facilitating the mining of unstructured textual data, including transcripts from customer call centers, maintenance technician logs, blog comments and tweets to find correlations and patterns.

The company also says that it has opened eight Watson IoT Client Experience Centers across Asia, Europe and the Americas to provide customers access to tools needed to develop new products and services using cognitive intelligence.