Like the story of the six blind men trying to explain the nature of an elephant, current research in cognitive computational systems attempts to identify the nature of an illness, human behavior, or socio-economical phenomenon, from their own perspective. At present, there is no agreed upon definition for cognitive systems. One large communication corporation defines cognitive systems as a category of technology that uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and reasoning, to enable people and machines to interact more naturally. It also extends and magnifies human expertise and cognition to enable accurate decisions on time. Two of the most famous risk and financial advisory firms agree with that interpretation. A different large corporation, however, considers “cognitive systems” as merely marketing jargon. If cognitive systems are going to help us solve challenging problems in medicine, economics, or other fields, three aspects must be considered in order to reveal the “true nature of the elephant”. § All facets of the problem must be addressed, like the main parts of the elephant had to be touched by the men. § These facets must be properly assembled, like the men needed to join hands around the elephant in order to understand what it was. § This assembly must be completed within sufficient time to anticipate future decisions. Just like the men needed to know what an elephant is before the next one charges them. This talk will explain how agnostic (unsupervised, blinded) machine learning findings can be assembled by multiobjective and multimodal optimization research techniques would be utilized to uncover a multifaceted view of the “elephant”, in this case the human being (e.g., genomic variants, personality traits, brain images). It will also give real-world examples of how this knowledge will “extend the human capabilities” by achieving an integrative assessment of the whole person in relation to their risk, which will allow professionals to generate accurate person-centered policies: from personalized diagnoses, business opportunities, or the prevention of outbreaks.