Watson Put to Work in Academia as a Sounding Board and Study Buddy
November 24, 2015
The article on Kurzweil AI titled IBM’s Watson Shown to Enhance Human-Computer Co-Creativity, Support Biologically Inspired Design discusses a project set up among researchers and student teams at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The teams input information and questions about biomimetics, or biologically inspired design, and then Watson served as an “intelligent research assistant” for a Computational Creativity course in Spring 2015. The professor teaching the class, Ashok Goel, explained the benefits of this training.
“Imagine if you could ask Google a complicated question and it immediately responded with your answer — not just a list of links to manually open, says Goel. “That’s what we did with Watson. Researchers are provided a quickly digestible visual map of the concepts relevant to the query and the degree to which they are relevant. We were able to add more semantic and contextual meaning to Watson to give some notion of a conversation with the AI.”
Biomimetics is all about the comparison and inspiration of biological systems for technological system creation. The ability to “converse” with Watson could even help a student study a complicated topic and understand key concepts. Using Watson as an assistant who can bounce answers back at a professional could apply to many fields, and Goel is currently looking into online learning and healthcare. Watch out, grad students and TAs!
Chelsea Kerwin, November 24, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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