Revolutionary, My Dear Watson

January 16, 2011

One can only imagine what heights AI will reach in say, five years. The exciting news is that there is a glimpse of the future today with the first tangible steps taken by IBM. Per an article on InfoWorld.com, Watson, IBM’s new supercomputer, has been introduced on the game show circuit of all places.

During an exhibition round of “Jeopardy”, Watson faired well against the top reigning human champs, winning by a handy $1100. While literally a trivial endeavor, Watson’s game performance proves some noteworthy achievements. Watson possesses “sufficient artificial intelligence to ably play a game like “Jeopardy” that not only tests the amount of raw data a machine (or human) has stored away, but also an ability to analyze natural language — “Jeopardy” categories and answers contain puns, for example — so as to understand what sort of information is really being requested and to present that information clearly, concisely, and quickly.”

The extensions of Watson’s abilities are far-reaching, including value-adding services to nearly any industry, bringing to the table the power to evaluate huge collections of data and find correlated relationships humans would often miss. The potential for gaining momentum on the cure for cancer has even been tossed around.

So great job, IBM! You have achieved what has to date been the unachievable. Now, if only those pesky kinks in the search on your public facing Web site could be ironed out. Maybe Watson could be put on the case? Does Watson use OminiFind?

Sarah Rogers, January 16, 2011

Freebie

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business strategy, News, Online (general), Search, Text processing

Comments

One Response to “Revolutionary, My Dear Watson”

Paul O'Hagan on January 17th, 2011 9:58 am

Hi Sarah,

Watson uses components shared with OmniFind and IBM Content Analytics for semantic understanding of unstructured content. IBM customers are already in production today with solutions that use this advanced technology.

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/enterprise-search/omnifind-enterprise/

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/content-management/analytics/

You can read more on my blog at http://paulohagan.wordpress.com if you’re interested.

Regards,
Paul O’Hagan
Offering Manager – IBM ECM
pohagan@ca.ibm.com

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.