From 2 to 16th of July we organized the Big Data in Society Summerschool at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. As part of our Collaborative Innovation Center with IBM, we presented an introduction of the technical and theoretical underpinnings of IBM Watson and discussed the use of big data and implications for society. We looked at examples of how the original Watson system can be adapted to new domains and tasks, and presented the CrowdTruth approach for gathering training and evaluation data in this context. The participating students, which ranged from bachelor to PhD level, said they learned a lot from the lectures and found the practical hands-on sessions very useful.