Infrastructure Slideshow: IBM's Watson Supercomputer Goes to Work for You: 11 Personal Apps

Beginning Feb. 14, man matched wits with machine on Jeopardy! as the world watched IBM supercomputer Watson face off against the quiz show's two most famous human champions. For three days the world tuned in to see how IBM's Watson supercomputer fared in the two-game tournament. In the battle of man vs. machine, machine won. To achieve this victory, researchers fed Watson 200 million pages of text-about 1 million books-ranging from encyclopedias to movie scripts to newspapers to children's book abstracts. With its ability to store all that data, Watson then mines it to formulate contextual relationships. Puns and wordplay? No problem. Obscure trivia? Combining random facts? Elementary, my dear….er, Watson. IBM says Watson's Deep Q&A technology could be applied in diverse fields such as health care, legal, education and government. Now assuming you could afford the hardware and information resources, imagine if you had your own personal Watson to help make you healthy, fabulously wealthy, well-dressed, well-adjusted, a great conversationalist at parties and perhaps even happy. Here, we present 11 of our best ideas for personalized Watson apps.