IBM Watson is perhaps the world's most famous supercomputer, and has incredible cognitive abilities more akin to a human brain thanks to its powerful analytics. Of course this amount of potential is only utilised with the right applications, and so the first-ever Watson Hackathon was held earlier this year during IBM’s World of Watson conference. 

Working in collaboration with NUI Central, the hackathon brought together talented teams of UX/UI designers, developers, and entrepreneurs to develop cognitive apps - with a total prize pool of $25,000 for some added motivation. 

The winners of the hackathon have now been announced... 

Likemind 

Likemind won the "gold medal" and aims to match an individual with others in your area which could have similar personality traits and interests through analysing other people's tweets in your vicinity and putting them through IBM's Personality Insight API to generate a user profile. 

Fetch 

Fetch was another winner, and will translate speech into text. It is billed as being particularly useful for students or professionals during lectures or conferences to have notes which they can take away for quick reference at a later point instead of having to listen back over audio recordings.

 

Alchamelon

Alchamelon is an application which hopes to enable learning about notable figures through exploring their lives. Whether modern or historical, the app uses technology similar to IBM’s Watson computer called AlchemyIP and its Entity and Relation Extraction methods to dynamically generate game content in the form of storylines, characters, and environments from their perspective. 

Are you impressed / inspired by the winners of IBM Watson's hackathon? Let us know in the comments.