IBM sends Watson to NY college to boost its skills
Jan 30, 2013 6:06 AM (ET)
By MICHAEL HILL
Associated Press
http://apnews.myway.com//article/20130130/DA44FT880.html
TROY, N.Y. (AP) - Watson, the supercomputer famous for beating the
world's best human "Jeopardy!" champions, is going to college.
IBM is announcing Wednesday that it will provide a Watson system to
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the first time the computer is being
sent to a university. Just like the flesh-and-blood students who will
work on it, Watson is leaving home to sharpen its skills. Course work
will include English and math.
"It's a big step for us," said Michael Henesey, IBM's vice president of
business development. "We consider it absolutely strategic technology
for IBM in the future. And we want to evolve it, of course,
thoughtfully, but also in collaboration with the best and brightest in
academia."
Watson is a cognitive system that can process massive amounts of data,
including natural language. To beat "Jeopardy!" champions in 2011, it
was fed the contents of encyclopedias, dictionaries, books, news
dispatches and movie scripts. For its medical work, it takes in medical
textbooks and journals. After it takes in data, Watson can provide
information like a "Jeopardy!" answer, a medical diagnosis or an
estimate of financial risk.
IBM, which provided a grant to RPI to operate Watson for three years,
sees it as a way to help it boost the computer's cognitive capabilities.
Artificial intelligence researchers at RPI want to do things like
improve Watson's mathematical ability and help it quickly figure out the
meaning of new or made-up words. They want to improve its ability to
handle the torrent of images, videos and emails on the Web, the sort of
unstructured information that is overwhelmingly fueling the data boom.
For Selmer Bringsjord, who heads RPI's department of cognitive science,
getting a crack at Watson is like a car aficionado being tossed the keys
to a souped-up Lamborghini. Bringsjord said he and his graduate students
could potentially focus on providing Watson with a deeper understanding
of the structure of sentences and how dialogues unfold.
"If I can make a tiny, tiny contribution in that direction, given how
historic the system is, I'd be very happy and I think my graduate
students would be as well," Bringsjord said.
The original Watson remains at IBM's Research Headquarters in
Westchester County, about 100 miles south of the school. RPI has
hardware fully dedicated to running the system's software at its
supercomputing center in the Rensselaer Tech Park near the school. RPI's
version of Watson has 15 terabytes of memory, enough to store a massive
library. It will allow 20 users to access the system at once.
IBM has worked collaboratively with other outside institutions on
Watson, such as Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City,
New York-based Citigroup Inc. (C) and the Cleveland Clinic. But this is
the first time hardware fully dedicated to running the Watson software
is being installed at a college.
Officials with IBM and RPI say Watson's college tenure also will prepare
RPI students for jobs in cognitive science and "big data," a field where
demand is quickly outpacing supply. John Kolb, RPI's chief information
officer, said he would like the next generation of the school's
technology graduates "to help IBM take Watson to the next level."
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