What Is a Fresh Start, Alex?
February 26, 2011
With the mounting anticipation of the man versus machine episode of Jeopardy! set to air on February 14, 15, and 16, 2011, it is hard to ignore the buzz over Watson. If you’ve been locked in a closet for the last month, Watson is IBM’s supercomputing experiment in AI. Recent articles in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and USA Today can bring you up to speed if necessary. In previous weeks we covered Watson’s win in the game’s practice round. But trivialities aside, what does Watson actually mean for IBM?
Well, Watson won.
The head gander in Harrod’s Creek maintains that IBM is pulling a PR stunt considering the company’s long history of work in the search field without ever impacting the market in a significant way. Omnifind 9.1 for Lucene has not been met with much fanfare, at least not here at Beyond Search, largely in part to the convoluted web of features (or corresponding fixes) and lack of support.
Yes, it is all happening on a game show, so the possibility of rigging exists. But how would introducing a fraud over national airwaves benefit IBM or what appears to be a quest to remind the public of its ingenuity? Watson performs so well due to refined natural language processing (NLP) and QA technology, two facets of search that are likely to be important players in the future. So if all goes according to plan, rather than typing a query into a search engine and waiting for a list of results out of which you must dig your own answer, the quandary will automatically be resolved. That is the claim of Watson’s power, it accurately plucks answers out of information stores and the range of applications is huge. This could be the next step in search and IBM could once again be a great innovator in the foreground. Even though IBM processors are in nearly every gadget on the market, it’s been a while since IBM has had any real recognition. That is why it does not surprise me they choose to roll-out their new tech on a prime-time television show, making advanced technology more palatable and memorable to the average consumer.
Perhaps I am being naïve or am too huge a fan of the science fiction novel, but I can’t help but be in Watson’s corner. Hey, Arthur C. Clarke got satellite communication right; maybe HAL 9000 is on its way.
Now Watson is headed to health care. Stay tuned.
Sarah Rogers, February 26, 2011
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