36 IT Pro July/August 2017 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1520-9202/17/$33.00 © 2017 IEEE COGNITIVE COMPUTING Christopher Asakiewicz, Edward A. Stohr, Shrey Mahajan, and Lalitkumar Pandey, Stevens Institute of Technology Academic advisors assist students in academic, professional, and personal matters. The authors’ cognitive advising system uses IBM Watson’s cognitive intelligence to identify question categories and then answer questions accordingly. A ccording to IBM, we are entering a third great era of computing—the cog- nitive computing era—characterized by computers’ deep intelligence and abil- ity to both understand problems that were hith- erto tractable only for humans and, importantly, learn from experience. Cognitive computing of- fers powerful technologies with the potential to augment human capacity and understanding and thus has significant commercial and societal importance. 1 The first two computing eras, the tabulat- ing era (1900 to 1940) and the programming era (1940 to the present) are distinguished by the development of our capacity to instruct comput- ers to perform complex operations at high speed and with unparalleled accuracy and reliability. In the second era, the exponential growth in com- putational power and storage capacity changed big data from a challenge to an unprecedented source of opportunity and innovation. Enabled by the explosion of computing power, advances in machine learning, and the newfound ability to handle massive structured and unstructured datasets, cognitive computing is at last helping to realize the potential of some 50 years of artificial intelligence research. The parallel developments associated with big data and cognitive computing Building a Cognitive Application Using Watson DeepQA