New computer, new modeling possibilities.

AN IBM COMPUTER SYSTEM CALLED Watson recently won a US TV quiz-show Jeopardy against two former champs! There is more at stake here than winning a game. It shows that the potential applications of this technology to transform the operations of industries such as health care, government and finance are enormous.

In the financial services industry, integrated risk management is an everyday struggle. Financial practitioners and supervisory and regulatory authorities must make split-second decisions using information coming from all sides: the Internet to corporate and call centre channels.

The challenge is to efficiently process diverse data streams and pick out …