Do you remember when International Business Machine’s Watson supercomputer beat two human Jeopardy champs at their own game, in 2011, and won $1 million? Of course you do. It was an early pop culture breakout for machine learning and automated reasoning, one that has since been eclipsed by Apple Inc.’s Siri and the movie “Her.” The mechanical robot is about to have a similar moment in March, when a German table tennis champ competes against a robotic player.

Table tennis champion Timo Boll will face off March 11 against Agilus, built by robot manufacturer Kuka, which wants to mark the opening of its new factory in China. The match is being promoted with a polished video on YouTube. The robot was designed for industrial uses such as assembly and loading. IBM Corp. is still looking for ways to bring Watson technology to market – in other words, for ways to make machine learning applicable and financially meaningful to a large number of companies. Robots are more commonplace in certain industries, but may end up being more unsettling because their physical interaction with humans – and their potential to displace large swaths of the workforce – is more visible and easily understood by some people.

As Josh Lowensohn of the Verge notes, “this isn't the first time the very same robot has been used for something unusual. Late last year Kuka showed off the KR Agilus model replicating 3D artwork made by Israeli industrial designer Yaron Elyasi. The robot's orange color was also the inspiration for a line of stainless steel luxury watches made by Sevenfriday.”

IBM has been working hard to build a business around Watson. The business case for mechanical robots is easy to make in a variety of industries. They already are deeply entrenched in the industrial world. As CIO Journal reported last year, a Chrysler Group LLC body assembly plant can use as many as 1,000 robots on the manufacturing floor, and a variety of “telepresence” robots are making their way into the office world. These life-sized mobile devices, which are like videoconferencing terminals on wheels, can be manipulated from far away by remote control. Academics such as Patrick Lin of California Polytechnic and Stanford universities and Illa R. Nourbakhsh of Carnegie Mellon University are exploring the ethical implications of a world in which robots and automation will play an ever-larger role.

For CIOs, the question is whether they have established an infrastructure that will support a range of automation, from Watson to Agilus, all of which will grow in sophistication during the next few years.

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