Beyond Watson: Technology Implications Today and In the Future

Project and Program: Enterprise Data Center

Tags: Proceedings, 2011, SHARE in Orlando 2011

If you watched IBM's Watson take on and soundly defeat the two ranking champions on Jeopardy!, you were probably both impressed and occasionally amused at some of Watson's answers. You may have also wondered how, or even if, this impressive mix of hardware and software technology impacts real-world situations. Starting with this session, and continuing through the day/week, SHARE will enlighten you. The impact ranges from Project Management, such as how you bring in a complex hardware/software project with many unknowns and an aggressive five-year schedule, to extensions into real-world applications like medical diagnosis, and beyond. With less "horsepower" Watson could also be applied to simpler domains, such as help desk problem diagnosis or data center management.

IBM Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, was built by a team of IBM scientists and engineers who set out to accomplish a grand challenge -- build a computing system that rivals a human's ability to answer questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and confidence. IBM Watson passed its first test on Jeopardy! in February 2011, but the real challenge is in applying the underlying systems, data management and analytics technology in business and across different industries.

Our speaker has been in the thick of this awesome development project, and will give you his vision of how they did it, and how Watson can move out into the world and help you solve problems that themselves may seem like science fiction at times. He will provide an overview of the IBM technologies, including the Deep Question Answering (DeepQA) technology, used in passing the Jeopardy! challenge and the business implications of Watson in the areas of industry transformations, data management and analytics and workload optimized systems.

This session will be followed by a series of sessions that will delve deeper into the technologies used in meeting the Jeopardy! challenge including applications of advanced Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning,  Machine Learning technologies and Big Data.

Presenter(s): Pat O'Rourke, IBM Corporation

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