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iniewski
At which point Watson will take over our lives? Singularity coming after all?
DrQuine
What about pattern recognition? Years ago neural nets were the great hope for ...
IBM's Watson goes to college
R Colin Johnson
1/31/2013 11:39 AM EST
PORTLAND,
Ore.--IBM is installing a more general-purpose version of its
artificially intelligent Watson cluster supercomputer at the Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute (RPI). The system was specifically architected for
researchers whose aim is to deepen the AI's cognitive abilities as well
as to explore novel new application areas.
The original Watson debuted two years ago when it beat the world champions in the game show Jeopardy. Since then, it has been cloned in versions designed to give medical advice to doctors, financial advice to securities traders, and retail advice to businesses.
Watson understands spoken language and can answer ad hoc questions about knowledge in its domain. Based on IBM's DeepQA technology--which RPI and seven universities help IBM develop as an open architecture--Watson can quickly sift through vast amounts of unstructured "Big Data" drilling-down to the fundamental answers to the queries put to it by humans.
For instance, in the healthcare field, Watson can analyze a patient's medical history and symptoms and in minutes compare them to case studies in textbooks, hospital databases, medical journals and all the latest news sources, helping doctors make the most accurate diagnoses and advise patients about the very latest therapy options available. Likewise, financial institutions and retailing are applying Watson similarly to their own Big Data.
RPI will aim to deepen Watson's cognitive abilities by broadening the number, types and sources of data it can draw on for answers. Researchers at RPI also plan to explore new applications of Watson in information technology (IT), telecommunications, business analytics (BA), commerce and financial services.
RPI's Watson will have roughly the same mass storage as the original--15 terabytes--but will allow up to 20 RPI researchers to access it simultaneously from various locations on its campus. The system was funded by IBM's Shared University Research (SUR) Award program, under which IBM will provide Rensselaer with Watson hardware, software and training. Watson will be located at the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations, which IBM was a partner in creating at RPI.
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The original Watson debuted two years ago when it beat the world champions in the game show Jeopardy. Since then, it has been cloned in versions designed to give medical advice to doctors, financial advice to securities traders, and retail advice to businesses.
Watson understands spoken language and can answer ad hoc questions about knowledge in its domain. Based on IBM's DeepQA technology--which RPI and seven universities help IBM develop as an open architecture--Watson can quickly sift through vast amounts of unstructured "Big Data" drilling-down to the fundamental answers to the queries put to it by humans.
For instance, in the healthcare field, Watson can analyze a patient's medical history and symptoms and in minutes compare them to case studies in textbooks, hospital databases, medical journals and all the latest news sources, helping doctors make the most accurate diagnoses and advise patients about the very latest therapy options available. Likewise, financial institutions and retailing are applying Watson similarly to their own Big Data.
RPI will aim to deepen Watson's cognitive abilities by broadening the number, types and sources of data it can draw on for answers. Researchers at RPI also plan to explore new applications of Watson in information technology (IT), telecommunications, business analytics (BA), commerce and financial services.
RPI's Watson will have roughly the same mass storage as the original--15 terabytes--but will allow up to 20 RPI researchers to access it simultaneously from various locations on its campus. The system was funded by IBM's Shared University Research (SUR) Award program, under which IBM will provide Rensselaer with Watson hardware, software and training. Watson will be located at the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations, which IBM was a partner in creating at RPI.
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yalanand
2/1/2013 12:24 PM EST
Good to see the clone version of Watson being used in different fields. Definitely applications of watson can truly revolutionize the way we deal with data because watson can process lot of data very quickly.
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daleste
2/1/2013 8:38 PM EST
Any chance of the rest of us getting a crack at it? It would be interesting to see what it can do.
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DrQuine
2/3/2013 3:07 PM EST
What about pattern recognition? Years ago neural nets were the great hope for identifying patterns in data which were not detected by human analysts. Perhaps Watson could help to identify patterns of crime in urban environments to enable preventative steps to be taken. It would be a fitting application honoring his namesake.
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iniewski
2/4/2013 1:15 PM EST
At which point Watson will take over our lives? Singularity coming after all?
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