IBM Watson and R: Put Watson to work for you

You may be familiar with IBM’s Watson from Jeopardy or perhaps you saw the ads featuring Watson during the Oscars (https://youtu.be/IiYRIhGnLiY). What you might not realize is that many elements of Watson are now accessible to the public via APIs – for free. Derek Franks, Data Scientist with IBM Market Data Analytics, will walk us through an overview of some of the Watson cognitive services accessible via API – particularly those that help you analyze text and images. We’ll learn what these various services do, how they work, and how to get access to them. Then we’ll learn how to use these APIs in R and how to parse the XML data we get back. Once we’ve got the raw data, we’ll learn how to work with it for further analysis, along with a review of some of the tools and possible next steps. Finally, we’ll cover how to make the APIs and data analysis available to a wider (non-technical) audience via a Shiny web app. We’ll cover the basic structure of a Shiny app and see how it allows us to quickly and easily deploy our R code on the web.