Twenty-five MBA students from the U of R's Simon School of Business were the first in the nation to team up with IBM on figuring out how to put Watson to work.

Manoj Saxena is the general manager of IBM's Watson Solutions unit.

He says the first place idea used the supercomputer for crunching reams of weather and census data in the event of a disaster, “And helping the local authorities deploy the right resources to prevent damage and destruction.”

Two other winning ideas put Watson to work within the mining and air travel industries.
Saxena says IBM will evaluate the winning ideas for market attractiveness.

The company plans to repeat the "academic case competition" at other universities.

Saxena says a major part of the initiative is building analytical skills into the future work force.