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Monday, March 14, 2011

What's next for IBM's Watson supercomputer -- Government Computer News

Victory in hand, IBM's Watson heads to medical school

Supercomputer to work on health care problems

By Nick Wakeman
Feb 17, 2011

What’s a supercomputer to do after it beats two of the best human minds at trivia game? It’s enrolls in medical school, of course.
IBM Corp.’s Watson, which won a three-day "Jeopardy!", tournament this week, will now begin work with Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Maryland Medical School on health care analytics research, IBM announced today.
IBM and Nuance Communications Inc. are partnering on the research project that will focus on combining IBM’s Deep Question Answering, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning capabilities with Nuance’s speech recognition and Clinical Language Understanding solutions.
The goal is to develop a commercial offering in the next 18 to 24 months that will exploit Watson’s capabilities to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of patients.

Read More...
http://gcn.com/articles/2011/02/17/ibm-watson-next-steps.aspx

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IBM's Watson and the Future of Semantic Supercomputers

Added by Wesley Fenlon on Feb. 17, 2011

It was a Jeopardy! match for the ages as brainiacs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter took on IBM’s supercomputer Watson in a three-day quiz show extravaganza. For IBM, Watson’s appearance on Jeopardy! was the culmination of four years of hard work. Cramming the computer’s memory with terabytes and terabytes of knowledge was the easy part. Teaching it to understand Jeopardy’s clever clues was a whole different story. Between Jeopardy’s vicious puns and quirky alliteration, only a master of natural language can come out on top.

And after four years, IBM created just that--a masterfully smart and complex computer that is guaranteed a bright future. Playing Jeopardy! is just the beginning.

To understand Watson’s future, we have to look at its past. Though not a direct inspiration for its creation, the reliable computer of Star Trek became a sort of model for Watson. StarTrek.com conducted an interview with Dr. Christopher Welty, one of Watson’s designers, a longtime Star Trek fan who wanted Watson to be a bit more like the Enterprise computer and a bit less like the nefarious HAL. But before they could construct anything remotely close to the all-knowing computers of Star Trek, IBM’s team had to build one seriously powerful computer.

Watson’s 80 teraflops of processing power are driven by about 2000 CPUs. Because Watson can perform a great many processes in parallel, rather than in the serial fashion we expect out of computers, it’s roughly equivalent to the power of 6000 desktops united into one computing powerhouse with 15TB of RAM.

Despite that raw power, there are things Watson struggles with that we take for granted. Teaching the system to understand natural language was a huge challenge. For most contestants on Jeopardy!, interpreting a question is an instantaneous, second-nature response. Welty explains:

Read more...
http://www.tested.com/news/ibms-watson-and-the-future-of-semantic-supercomputers/1853/

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