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2010-06-19 13:27:39
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IBM’s “Watson” supercomputer apparently is getting ready to make its Jeopardy debut.

IBM officials last year unveiled Watson, a computer with the natural language capabilities that not only can find information when asked directly for it—as the Google search engine can do—but can quickly go through its vast knowledge database and make the connections necessary to answer the types of questions posed on Jeopardy, which often have subtle meanings or are put in the form of puns, riddles or other such sentences.

IBM officials, who made headlines in 1997 when its Blue Gene supercomputer beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov in a classic machine-vs.-man match, a year ago said the computer was getting prepped for a run on Jeopardy. Now, according to a report in the The New York Times, that could happen as early as this fall.


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2010-06-19 20:42:23



DanUntied
 
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2010-06-20 22:48:53

This is going to be so cool...
Watson will be on all the gameshows before long.
IBM must have written quite an algorithm/s to emulate and/or beat human reasoning when it comes to answering those "Jeopardy" questions properly.
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2011-01-13 11:15:58


IBM computer taking on 'Jeopardy!' champs for $1M



The system, which is powered by 10 racks of IBM servers running the Linux operating system and has 15 terabytes of random-access memory, or RAM, has been in the works for four years. It has digested encyclopedias, dictionaries, books, news, movie scripts and more, IBM says. It has access to the equivalent of 200 million pages of content. It is not connected to the Internet, so it does not do Web searches.

The company says Watson rivals a human's ability to answer questions posed in natural language — rather than computer code — with speed, accuracy and confidence. Unlike earlier computers, it can deal with "Jeopardy's!" subtleties of language, including puns and riddles.

IBM scientist David Ferrucci, a leader of the Watson team, said last month that using "Jeopardy!" to develop the computer system "is going to drive the technology in the right directions."

"It asks all kinds of things," he said. "It has the confidence aspect — don't answer if you don't think you're right. You also have to do it really quickly."

Watson is reminiscent of IBM's famous Deep Blue computer, which defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. But while chess is well-defined and mathematical, "Jeopardy!" presents a more open-ended challenge.

Winning at "Jeopardy!" is not the main prize, IBM says. The technology could mean speedier diagnosing of medical conditions and researching of legal case law, for example.


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2011-01-16 01:42:11


David Ferrucci of IBM discusses the DeepQA Project; the technology and architecture behind IBM's newest technological innovation, the question answering and natural language processing system, Watson.


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2011-02-16 14:39:36


IBM execs and Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek explain why Jeopardy! is the ideal practice ground for IBM's Watson computer and the future of its technology.


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2011-02-16 14:53:54


The implications of progress in A.I. are being brought into sharp relief now by the broadcasting of a recorded competition pitting the I.B.M. computing system named Watson against the two best human Jeopardy players, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

Watson is an effort by I.B.M. researchers to advance a set of techniques used to process human language. It provides striking evidence that computing systems will no longer be limited to responding to simple commands. Machines will increasingly be able to pick apart jargon, nuance and even riddles. In attacking the problem of the ambiguity of human language, computer science is now closing in on what researchers refer to as the “Paris Hilton problem” — the ability, for example, to determine whether a query is being made by someone who is trying to reserve a hotel in France, or simply to pass time surfing the Internet.

If, as many predict, Watson defeats its human opponents on Wednesday, much will be made of the philosophical consequences of the machine’s achievement. Moreover, the I.B.M. demonstration also foretells profound sociological and economic changes.


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2011-02-16 23:36:39



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2011-02-18 19:46:47


IBM's Watson supercomputer, which shellacked Jeopardy's top human champions during airings of the game show this week, is powered by 90 servers and a network-attached storage (NAS) cluster with 21.6TB of data.

Behind Watson's simple scribble-faced monitor that he used as a Jeopardy contestant are 90 IBM Power 750 Express servers powered by 8-core processors -- four in each machine for a total of 32 processors per machine. The servers are virtualized using a Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) implementation, creating a server cluster with a total processing capacity of 80 teraflops. A teraflop is one trillion operations per second.

On top of processing power, the each server has 160GB of DRAM to provide the full machine with almost 15TB of memory.


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2011-02-21 13:12:05


The Watson supercomputer that appeared on Jeopardy last week was made up of 90 IBM Power 750 Express servers powered by 8-core processors -- four in each machine for a total of 32 processors per machine. The servers are virtualized using a Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) implementation, creating a server cluster with a total processing capacity of 80 teraflops. A teraflop is one trillion operations per second.

According to Tony Pearson, master inventor and senior consultant at IBM, a Power 750 server retails for $34,500. Thus the 90 that make up Watson would cost about $3 million.

The original compute algorithm single threaded on a single core processor took two hours to scan memory and produce an answer to a question. IBM technologists just added 2,880 CPUs, which produced the ability to answer the Jeopardy questions in three-seconds.


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2011-07-20 12:59:13


IBM Watson: The Science Behind an Answer


After Watson's groundbreaking performance on Jeopardy!, see how this incredible smart technology processes data. In this video, the four steps of Watson's question answering technology are covered, along with what the future holds for IBM's intelligent natural language processing platform beyond Jeopardy!


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2011-09-26 14:07:14


Watson, IBM's super computer which took on two of "Jeopardy's" all time champs, is now being tested to see how it deals with patients in a health care setting.


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2011-11-30 18:40:34


The commercialization of Watson technology means that today’s students will require new skills when they enter the job market. As future leaders in a wide range of industries and entrepreneurial ventures, students will need to combine business skills and knowledge with advanced analytical techniques to compete successfully in the world economy.

By bringing the discussion around Watson to the university community, IBM aims to inspire the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs to think about the possibilities of Watson technology and the skills they will need to take advantage of the opportunities Watson creates
, said Bernard Meyerson, vice president of innovation and university programs, IBM.

Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, is a computing system created by IBM scientists that understands the meaning and context of human language, that can analyze data and learn correlations between data. The technology introduces the capability to sift through an equivalent of about 1 million books or roughly 200 million pages of data to provide instant answers to questions posed to it. With the amount of digital information being generated, stored, processed and analyzed each year growing at an exponential rate--and affecting every industry segment--there is a real need for businesses and governments to use business analytic technology like Watson to make sense of large amounts of data to achieve their goals.


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