UNH students getting free access to IBM's Watson

The New England Council reports:

"IBM Watson Analytics, a branch of New England Council (NEC) member IBM Corporation, recently partnered with the University of New Hampshire, a fellow NEC member, to provide UNH students with free access to IBM’s Waston Analytics Student Edition.

"Waston Analytics is a cloud-based smart data analytics and visualization service. In addition to providing students free access to the service, IBM ran a 90-minute training program to teach UNH faculty how to incorporate the technology into their classes. IBM Watson Analytics and UNH connected at the Peter T. Paul Entrepreneurship Center’s fall hackathon on data analytics, which was sponsored by IBM. IBM Watson Analytics was so impressed by the caliber of students participating from UNH that the company offered to provide access to their service for all students on UNH’s Durham, Manchester and Concord campuses.

“'The end goal is to prepare our students for the new demands of the workforce,' said UNH Director of Graduate Analytics and Data Science, Robert McGrath. 'We believe Watson Analytics will help prepare the next generation of ‘citizen’ data scientists and be instrumental in helping close a critical skills gap identified in the workforce.”'

"The New England Council commends IBM and UNH for creating this opportunity for UNH students to expand their marketable data analytics skills and help prepare them to enter the workforce.''