USC Marshall School of Business

Where did IBM turn to this year for brilliant young minds? USC. Thanks to Leventhal undergraduate student Mingbo Gong Class of 2014 who petitioned to bring IBM’s Watson Academic Case Competition to USC’s campus and on the West Coast.

24 USC student teams were given 48 hours to dive into the world of Big Data and come up with new applications and business plans for Watson, the IBM cognitive computing innovation that is able to understand and process the subtleties of human questions, sift through vast amounts of Big Data, and use sophisticated analytics to generate fast, accurate answers for its human users.