IBM Watson is a
question-answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in
natural language
In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languages ...
,
developed in
IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by
principal investigator
In many countries, the term principal investigator (PI) refers to the holder of an independent grant and the lead researcher for the grant project, usually in the sciences, such as a laboratory study or a clinical trial. The phrase is also often us ...
David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's founder and first CEO, industrialist
Thomas J. Watson
Thomas John Watson Sr. (February 17, 1874 – June 19, 1956) was an American businessman who served as the chairman and CEO of IBM. He oversaw the company's growth into an international force from 1914 to 1956. Watson developed IBM's managemen ...
.
The computer system was initially developed to answer questions on the
quiz show
A game show is a genre of broadcast viewing entertainment (radio, television, internet, stage or other) where contestants compete for a reward. These programs can either be participatory or demonstrative and are typically directed by a host, sh ...
''
Jeopardy!
''Jeopardy!'' is an American game show created by Merv Griffin. The show is a quiz competition that reverses the traditional question-and-answer format of many quiz shows. Rather than being given questions, contestants are instead given genera ...
'' and, in 2011, the Watson computer system competed on ''
Jeopardy!
''Jeopardy!'' is an American game show created by Merv Griffin. The show is a quiz competition that reverses the traditional question-and-answer format of many quiz shows. Rather than being given questions, contestants are instead given genera ...
'' against champions
Brad Rutter
Bradford Gates Rutter (born January 31, 1978) is an American game show contestant, TV host, producer, and actor. With over $5.1 million in winnings, he is currently the 2nd highest-earning American game show contestant of all time, behind Ken Je ...
and
Ken Jennings
Kenneth Wayne Jennings III (born May 23, 1974) is an American game show host, author, and former game show contestant. He is the highest-earning American game show contestant, having won money on five different game shows, including $4,522,70 ...
,
winning the first place prize of $1 million.
In February 2013, IBM announced that Watson's first commercial application would be for
utilization management
Utilization management (UM) or utilization review is the use of managed care techniques such as prior authorization that allow payers, particularly health insurance companies, to manage the cost of health care benefits by assessing its appropriaten ...
decisions in
lung cancer
Lung cancer, also known as lung carcinoma (since about 98–99% of all lung cancers are carcinomas), is a malignant lung tumor characterized by uncontrolled cell growth in tissue (biology), tissues of the lung. Lung carcinomas derive from tran ...
treatment at
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK or MSKCC) is a cancer treatment and research institution in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, founded in 1884 as the New York Cancer Hospital. MSKCC is one of 52 National Cancer Institute– ...
, New York City, in conjunction with WellPoint (now
Anthem
An anthem is a musical composition of celebration, usually used as a symbol for a distinct group, particularly the national anthems of countries. Originally, and in music theory and religious contexts, it also refers more particularly to short ...
).
[
]
Description
Watson was created as a question answering
Question answering (QA) is a computer science discipline within the fields of information retrieval and natural language processing (NLP), which is concerned with building systems that automatically answer questions posed by humans in a natural l ...
(QA) computing system that IBM built to apply advanced natural language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...
, information retrieval
Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the process of obtaining information system resources that are relevant to an information need from a collection of those resources. Searches can be based on full-text or other co ...
, knowledge representation
Knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, KR²) is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can use to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medic ...
, automated reasoning
In computer science, in particular in knowledge representation and reasoning and metalogic, the area of automated reasoning is dedicated to understanding different aspects of reasoning. The study of automated reasoning helps produce computer progra ...
, and machine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence.
Machine ...
technologies to the field of open domain question answering
Question answering (QA) is a computer science discipline within the fields of information retrieval and natural language processing (NLP), which is concerned with building systems that automatically answer questions posed by humans in a natural ...
.[
IBM stated that Watson uses "more than 100 different techniques to analyze natural language, identify sources, find and generate hypotheses, find and score evidence, and merge and rank hypotheses."
In recent years, Watson's capabilities have been extended and the way in which Watson works has been changed to take advantage of new deployment models (Watson on IBM Cloud), evolved machine learning capabilities, and optimized hardware available to developers and researchers. It is no longer purely a question answering (QA) computing system designed from Q&A pairs but can now 'see', 'hear', 'read', 'talk', 'taste', 'interpret', 'learn' and 'recommend'.
]
Software
Watson uses IBM's DeepQA software and the Apache UIMA UIMA ( ), short for Unstructured Information Management Architecture, is an OASIS standard for content analytics, originally developed at IBM. It provides a component software architecture for the development, discovery, composition, and deploy ...
(Unstructured Information Management Architecture) framework implementation. The system was written in various languages, including Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...
, C++
C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...
, and Prolog
Prolog is a logic programming language associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics.
Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is intended primarily ...
, and runs on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
SUSE Linux Enterprise (often abbreviated to SLE) is a Linux-based operating system developed by SUSE. It is available in two editions, suffixed with Server (SLES) for servers and mainframes, and Desktop (SLED) for workstations and desktop compu ...
11 operating system using the Apache Hadoop
Apache Hadoop () is a collection of open-source software utilities that facilitates using a network of many computers to solve problems involving massive amounts of data and computation. It provides a software framework for distributed storage an ...
framework to provide distributed computing.
Hardware
The system is workload-optimized, integrating massively parallel
Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of t ...
POWER7
POWER7 is a family of superscalar multi-core microprocessors based on the Power ISA 2.06 instruction set architecture released in 2010 that succeeded the POWER6 and POWER6+. POWER7 was developed by IBM at several sites including IBM's Roche ...
processors and built on IBM's ''DeepQA'' technology, which it uses to generate hypotheses, gather massive evidence, and analyze data.[ Watson employs a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers, each of which uses a 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight-core processor, with four threads per core. In total, the system has 2,880 POWER7 processor threads and 16 ]terabyte
The byte is a units of information, unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character (computing), character of text in a computer and for this ...
s of RAM.
According to John Rennie, Watson can process 500 gigabytes (the equivalent of a million books) per second. IBM master inventor and senior consultant Tony Pearson estimated Watson's hardware cost at about three million dollars.
Its Linpack performance stands at 80 TeraFLOPs, which is about half as fast as the cut-off line for the Top 500 Supercomputers
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non- distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coinc ...
list. According to Rennie, all content was stored in Watson's RAM for the Jeopardy game because data stored on hard drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnet ...
s would be too slow to compete with human Jeopardy champions.[
]
Data
The sources of information for Watson include encyclopedia
An encyclopedia (American English) or encyclopædia (British English) is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of knowledge either general or special to a particular field or discipline. Encyclopedias are divided into articles ...
s, dictionaries
A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, p ...
, thesauri
A thesaurus (plural ''thesauri'' or ''thesauruses'') or synonym dictionary is a reference work for finding synonyms and sometimes antonyms of words. They are often used by writers to help find the best word to express an idea:
Synonym dictionar ...
, newswire
A news agency is an organization that gathers news reports and sells them to subscribing news organizations, such as newspapers, magazines and radio and television broadcasters. A news agency may also be referred to as a wire service, newswire, ...
articles and literary work
Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include ...
s. Watson also used databases, taxonomies and ontologies
In computer science and information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definition of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, and entities that substantiate one, many, or all domains ...
including DBPedia
DBpedia (from "DB" for "database") is a project aiming to extract structured content from the information created in the Wikipedia project. This structured information is made available on the World Wide Web. DBpedia allows users to semantica ...
, WordNet
WordNet is a lexical database of semantic relations between words in more than 200 languages. WordNet links words into semantic relations including synonyms, hyponyms, and meronyms. The synonyms are grouped into '' synsets'' with short definition ...
and Yago. The IBM team provided Watson with millions of documents, including dictionaries, encyclopedias and other reference material, that it could use to build its knowledge.
Operation
Watson parses questions into different keywords and sentence fragments in order to find statistically related phrases.[ Watson's main innovation was not in the creation of a new ]algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specificat ...
for this operation but rather its ability to quickly execute hundreds of proven language analysis algorithms simultaneously.[ The more algorithms that find the same answer independently, the more likely Watson is to be correct. Once Watson has a small number of potential solutions, it is able to check against its database to ascertain whether the solution makes sense or not.][
]
Comparison with human players
Watson's basic working principle is to parse keywords in a clue while searching for related terms as responses. This gives Watson some advantages and disadvantages compared with human ''Jeopardy!'' players. Watson has deficiencies in understanding
Understanding is a psychological process related to an abstract or physical object, such as a person, situation, or message whereby one is able to use concepts to model that object.
Understanding is a relation between the knower and an object o ...
the contexts of the clues. Watson can read, analyze, and learn from natural language which gives it the ability to make human-like decisions. As a result, human players usually generate responses faster than Watson, especially to short clues. Watson's programming prevents it from using the popular tactic of buzzing before it is sure of its response. However, Watson has consistently better reaction time
Mental chronometry is the scientific study of processing speed or reaction time on cognitive tasks to infer the content, duration, and temporal sequencing of mental operations. Reaction time (RT; sometimes referred to as "response time") is meas ...
on the buzzer once it has generated a response, and is immune to human players' psychological tactics, such as jumping between categories on every clue.
In a sequence of 20 mock games of ''Jeopardy'', human participants were able to use the six to seven seconds that Watson needed to hear the clue and decide whether to signal for responding.[ During that time, Watson also has to evaluate the response and determine whether it is sufficiently confident in the result to signal.][ Part of the system used to win the ''Jeopardy!'' contest was the electronic circuitry that receives the "ready" signal and then examined whether Watson's confidence level was great enough to activate the buzzer. Given the speed of this circuitry compared to the speed of human reaction times, Watson's reaction time was faster than the human contestants except when the human anticipated (instead of reacted to) the ready signal.] After signaling, Watson speaks with an electronic voice and gives the responses in ''Jeopardy!'' question format.[ Watson's voice was synthesized from recordings that actor Jeff Woodman made for an IBM ]text-to-speech
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal languag ...
program in 2004.
The ''Jeopardy!'' staff used different means to notify Watson and the human players when to buzz, which was critical in many rounds. The humans were notified by a light, which took them tenths of a second to perceive
Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sense, sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous ...
. Watson was notified by an electronic signal and could activate the buzzer within about eight milliseconds. The humans tried to compensate for the perception delay by anticipating the light, but the variation in the anticipation time was generally too great to fall within Watson's response time. Watson did not attempt to anticipate the notification signal.
History
Development
Since Deep Blue
Deep Blue may refer to:
Film
* ''Deep Blues: A Musical Pilgrimage to the Crossroads'', a 1992 documentary film about Mississippi Delta blues music
* Deep Blue (2001 film), ''Deep Blue'' (2001 film), a film by Dwight H. Little
* Deep Blue (2003 ...
's victory over Garry Kasparov
Garry Kimovich Kasparov (born 13 April 1963) is a Russian chess grandmaster, former World Chess Champion, writer, political activist and commentator. His peak rating of 2851, achieved in 1999, was the highest recorded until being surpassed by ...
in chess in 1997, IBM had been on the hunt for a new challenge. In 2004, IBM Research manager Charles Lickel, over dinner with coworkers, noticed that the restaurant they were in had fallen silent. He soon discovered the cause of this evening hiatus: Ken Jennings
Kenneth Wayne Jennings III (born May 23, 1974) is an American game show host, author, and former game show contestant. He is the highest-earning American game show contestant, having won money on five different game shows, including $4,522,70 ...
, who was then in the middle of his successful 74-game run on ''Jeopardy!''. Nearly the entire restaurant had piled toward the televisions, mid-meal, to watch ''Jeopardy!''. Intrigued by the quiz show as a possible challenge for IBM, Lickel passed the idea on, and in 2005, IBM Research executive Paul Horn supported Lickel, pushing for someone in his department to take up the challenge of playing ''Jeopardy!'' with an IBM system. Though he initially had trouble finding any research staff willing to take on what looked to be a much more complex challenge than the wordless game of chess, eventually David Ferrucci took him up on the offer. In competitions managed by the United States government, Watson's predecessor, a system named Piquant, was usually able to respond correctly to only about 35% of clues and often required several minutes to respond. To compete successfully on ''Jeopardy!'', Watson would need to respond in no more than a few seconds, and at that time, the problems posed by the game show were deemed to be impossible to solve.[
In initial tests run during 2006 by David Ferrucci, the senior manager of IBM's Semantic Analysis and Integration department, Watson was given 500 clues from past ''Jeopardy!'' programs. While the best real-life competitors buzzed in half the time and responded correctly to as many as 95% of clues, Watson's first pass could get only about 15% correct. During 2007, the IBM team was given three to five years and a staff of 15 people to solve the problems.][ John E. Kelly III succeeded Paul Horn as head of ]IBM Research
IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research org ...
in 2007. ''InformationWeek
''InformationWeek'' is a digital magazine which conducts corresponding face-to-face events, virtual events, and research. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California and was first published in 1985 by CMP Media, later called Informa. The ...
'' described Kelly as "the father of Watson" and credited him for encouraging the system to compete against humans on ''Jeopardy!
''Jeopardy!'' is an American game show created by Merv Griffin. The show is a quiz competition that reverses the traditional question-and-answer format of many quiz shows. Rather than being given questions, contestants are instead given genera ...
''. By 2008, the developers had advanced Watson such that it could compete with ''Jeopardy!'' champions.[ By February 2010, Watson could beat human ''Jeopardy!'' contestants on a regular basis.]
During the game, Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabyte
The byte is a units of information, unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character (computing), character of text in a computer and for this ...
s of disk storage
Disk storage (also sometimes called drive storage) is a general category of storage mechanisms where data is recorded by various electronic, magnetic, optical, or mechanical changes to a surface layer of one or more rotating disks. A disk drive is ...
including the full text of the 2011 edition of Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
, but was not connected to the Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
. For each clue, Watson's three most probable responses were displayed on the television screen. Watson consistently outperformed its human opponents on the game's signalling device, but had trouble in a few categories, notably those having short clues containing only a few words.
Although the system is primarily an IBM effort, Watson's development involved faculty and graduate students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute () (RPI) is a private research university in Troy, New York, with an additional campus in Hartford, Connecticut. A third campus in Groton, Connecticut closed in 2018. RPI was established in 1824 by Stephen Van ...
, Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...
, University of Massachusetts Amherst
The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, it ...
, the University of Southern California
The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in C ...
's Information Sciences Institute
The USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is a component of the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering, and specializes in research and development in information processing, computing, and communications techno ...
, the University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...
, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
, and the University of Trento
The University of Trento (Italian: ''Università degli Studi di Trento'') is an Italian university located in Trento and nearby Rovereto. It has been able to achieve considerable results in didactics, research, and international relations accor ...
, as well as students from New York Medical College
New York Medical College (NYMC or New York Med) is a private medical school in Valhalla, New York. Founded in 1860, it is a member of the Touro College and University System.
NYMC offers advanced degrees through its three schools: the School o ...
. Among the team of IBM programmers who worked on Watson was Ed Toutant, who himself had appeared on ''Jeopardy!'' in 1989 (winning one game).
''Jeopardy!''
Preparation
In 2008, IBM representatives communicated with ''Jeopardy!'' executive producer Harry Friedman
Harry Friedman (born November 12, 1946) is an American television industry executive. He was the executive producer of the syndicated game shows ''Jeopardy!'' and '' Wheel of Fortune'' from 1999 to 2020. Initially he shared the title of executiv ...
about the possibility of having Watson compete against Ken Jennings
Kenneth Wayne Jennings III (born May 23, 1974) is an American game show host, author, and former game show contestant. He is the highest-earning American game show contestant, having won money on five different game shows, including $4,522,70 ...
and Brad Rutter
Bradford Gates Rutter (born January 31, 1978) is an American game show contestant, TV host, producer, and actor. With over $5.1 million in winnings, he is currently the 2nd highest-earning American game show contestant of all time, behind Ken Je ...
, two of the most successful contestants on the show, and the program's producers agreed.[ Watson's differences with human players had generated conflicts between IBM and ''Jeopardy!'' staff during the planning of the competition.] IBM repeatedly expressed concerns that the show's writers would exploit Watson's cognitive deficiencies when writing the clues, thereby turning the game into a Turing test
The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to artificial intelligence, exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing propos ...
. To alleviate that claim, a third party randomly picked the clues from previously written shows that were never broadcast.[ ''Jeopardy!'' staff also showed concerns over Watson's reaction time on the buzzer. Originally Watson signalled electronically, but show staff requested that it press a button physically, as the human contestants would. Even with a robotic "finger" pressing the buzzer, Watson remained faster than its human competitors. Ken Jennings noted, "If you're trying to win on the show, the buzzer is all", and that Watson "can knock out a microsecond-precise buzz every single time with little or no variation. Human reflexes can't compete with computer circuits in this regard."] Stephen Baker, a journalist who recorded Watson's development in his book ''Final Jeopardy'', reported that the conflict between IBM and ''Jeopardy!'' became so serious in May 2010 that the competition was almost cancelled.[ As part of the preparation, IBM constructed a mock set in a conference room at one of its technology sites to model the one used on ''Jeopardy!''. Human players, including former ''Jeopardy!'' contestants, also participated in mock games against Watson with Todd Alan Crain of '']The Onion
''The Onion'' is an American digital media company and newspaper organization that publishes satirical articles on international, national, and local news. The company is based in Chicago but originated as a weekly print publication on August 2 ...
'' playing host.[ About 100 test matches were conducted with Watson winning 65% of the games.
To provide a physical presence in the televised games, Watson was represented by an "]avatar
Avatar (, ; ), is a concept within Hinduism that in Sanskrit literally means "descent". It signifies the material appearance or incarnation of a powerful deity, goddess or spirit on Earth. The relative verb to "alight, to make one's appearanc ...
" of a globe, inspired by the IBM "smarter planet" symbol. Jennings described the computer's avatar as a "glowing blue ball crisscrossed by 'threads' of thought—42 threads, to be precise", and stated that the number of thought threads in the avatar was an in-joke
An in-joke, also known as an inside joke or a private joke, is a joke whose humour is understandable only to members of an ingroup; that is, people who are ''in'' a particular social group, occupation, or other community of shared interest. It i ...
referencing the significance of the number 42 in Douglas Adams
Douglas Noel Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English author and screenwriter, best known for ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy''. Originally a 1978 BBC radio comedy, ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' developed into a " ...
' ''Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' (sometimes referred to as ''HG2G'', ''HHGTTG'', ''H2G2'', or ''tHGttG'') is a comedy science fiction franchise created by Douglas Adams. Originally a 1978 radio comedy broadcast on BBC Radio 4, it w ...
''. Joshua Davis, the artist who designed the avatar for the project, explained to Stephen Baker that there are 36 trigger-able states that Watson was able to use throughout the game to show its confidence in responding to a clue correctly; he had hoped to be able to find forty-two, to add another level to the ''Hitchhiker's Guide'' reference, but he was unable to pinpoint enough game states.
A practice match was recorded on January 13, 2011, and the official matches were recorded on January 14, 2011. All participants maintained secrecy about the outcome until the match was broadcast in February.
Practice match
In a practice match before the press on January 13, 2011, Watson won a 15-question round against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter with a score of $4,400 to Jennings's $3,400 and Rutter's $1,200, though Jennings and Watson were tied before the final $1,000 question. None of the three players responded incorrectly to a clue.
First match
The first round was broadcast February 14, 2011, and the second round, on February 15, 2011. The right to choose the first category had been determined by a draw won by Rutter. Watson, represented by a computer monitor display and artificial voice, responded correctly to the second clue and then selected the fourth clue of the first category, a deliberate strategy to find the Daily Double as quickly as possible. Watson's guess at the Daily Double location was correct. At the end of the first round, Watson was tied with Rutter at $5,000; Jennings had $2,000.
Watson's performance was characterized by some quirks. In one instance, Watson repeated a reworded version of an incorrect response offered by Jennings. (Jennings said "What are the '20s?" in reference to the 1920s. Then Watson said "What is 1920s?") Because Watson could not recognize other contestants' responses, it did not know that Jennings had already given the same response. In another instance, Watson was initially given credit for a response of "What is a leg?" after Jennings incorrectly responded "What is: he only had one hand?" to a clue about George Eyser
George Louis Eyser (August 31, 1870 – March 6, 1919) was a German-American gymnast who competed in the 1904 Summer Olympics, earning six medals in one day, including three gold and two silver medals. Eyser competed with a wooden prosthe ...
(the correct response was, "What is: he's missing a leg?"). Because Watson, unlike a human, could not have been responding to Jennings's mistake, it was decided that this response was incorrect. The broadcast version of the episode was edited to omit Trebek's original acceptance of Watson's response. Watson also demonstrated complex wagering strategies on the Daily Doubles, with one bet at $6,435 and another at $1,246. Gerald Tesauro, one of the IBM researchers who worked on Watson, explained that Watson's wagers were based on its confidence level for the category and a complex regression model
In statistical modeling, regression analysis is a set of statistical processes for estimating the relationships between a dependent variable (often called the 'outcome' or 'response' variable, or a 'label' in machine learning parlance) and one o ...
called the Game State Evaluator.
Watson took a commanding lead in Double Jeopardy!, correctly responding to both Daily Doubles. Watson responded to the second Daily Double correctly with a 32% confidence score.
However, during the Final Jeopardy! round, Watson was the only contestant to miss the clue in the category U.S. Cities ("Its largest airport was named for a World War II hero; its second largest
The second (symbol: s) is the unit of Time in physics, time in the International System of Units (SI), historically defined as of a day – this factor derived from the division of the day first into 24 hours, then to 60 minutes and finally t ...
, for a World War II battle"). Rutter and Jennings gave the correct response of Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
, image_map =
, map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago
, coordinates =
, coordinates_footnotes =
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdivision_name ...
, but Watson's response was "What is Toronto
Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the ancho ...
?????" with five question marks appended indicating a lack of confidence. Ferrucci offered reasons why Watson would appear to have guessed a Canadian city: categories only weakly suggest the type of response desired, the phrase "U.S. city" did not appear in the question, there are cities named Toronto in the U.S., and Toronto in Ontario has an American League
The American League of Professional Baseball Clubs, known simply as the American League (AL), is one of two leagues that make up Major League Baseball (MLB) in the United States and Canada. It developed from the Western League, a minor league ...
baseball team. Dr. Chris Welty, who also worked on Watson, suggested that it may not have been able to correctly parse the second part of the clue, "its second largest, for a World War II battle" (which was not a standalone clause despite it following a semicolon
The semicolon or semi-colon is a symbol commonly used as orthographic punctuation. In the English language, a semicolon is most commonly used to link (in a single sentence) two independent clauses that are closely related in thought. When a ...
, and required context to understand that it was referring to a second-largest ''airport''). Eric Nyberg Eric Nyberg is a professor in the Language Technologies Institute of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the director for the Master of Computational Data Science (formerly known as the M.S. in Very Large Informatio ...
, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a member of the development team, stated that the error occurred because Watson does not possess the comparative knowledge to discard that potential response as not viable. Although not displayed to the audience as with non-Final Jeopardy! questions, Watson's second choice was Chicago. Both Toronto and Chicago were well below Watson's confidence threshold, at 14% and 11% respectively. Watson wagered only $947 on the question.
The game ended with Jennings with $4,800, Rutter with $10,400, and Watson with $35,734.
Second match
During the introduction, Trebek (a Canadian native) joked that he had learned Toronto was a U.S. city, and Watson's error in the first match prompted an IBM engineer to wear a Toronto Blue Jays
The Toronto Blue Jays are a Canadian professional baseball team based in Toronto. The Blue Jays compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the American League (AL) East division. Since 1989, the team has played its home games ...
jacket to the recording of the second match.
In the first round, Jennings was finally able to choose a Daily Double clue, while Watson responded to one Daily Double clue incorrectly for the first time in the Double Jeopardy! Round. After the first round, Watson placed second for the first time in the competition after Rutter and Jennings were briefly successful in increasing their dollar values before Watson could respond.[ Nonetheless, the final result ended with a victory for Watson with a score of $77,147, besting Jennings who scored $24,000 and Rutter who scored $21,600.
]
Final outcome
The prizes for the competition were $1 million for first place (Watson), $300,000 for second place (Jennings), and $200,000 for third place (Rutter). As promised, IBM donated 100% of Watson's winnings to charity, with 50% of those winnings going to World Vision
In its most general sense, the term "world" refers to the totality of entities, to the whole of reality or to everything that is. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the worl ...
and 50% going to World Community Grid
World Community Grid (WCG) is an effort to create the world's largest volunteer computing platform to tackle scientific research that benefits humanity. Launched on November 16, 2004, with proprietary Grid MP client from United Devices and adding ...
. Similarly, Jennings and Rutter donated 50% of their winnings to their respective charities.
In acknowledgement of IBM and Watson's achievements, Jennings made an additional remark in his Final Jeopardy! response: "I for one welcome our new computer overlords." Jennings later wrote an article for ''Slate
Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. It is the finest grained foliated metamorphic rock. ...
'', in which he stated: IBM has bragged to the media that Watson's question-answering skills are good for more than annoying Alex Trebek. The company sees a future in which fields like medical diagnosis
Medical diagnosis (abbreviated Dx, Dx, or Ds) is the process of determining which disease or condition explains a person's symptoms and signs. It is most often referred to as diagnosis with the medical context being implicit. The information re ...
, business analytics
Business analytics (BA) refers to the skills, technologies, and practices for continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive business planning. Business analytics focuses on developing ne ...
, and tech support
Technical support (abbreviated as tech support) is a call centre type customer service provided by companies to advise and assist registered users with issues concerning their technical products. Traditionally done on the phone, technical suppor ...
are automated by question-answering software like Watson. Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the 20th century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of 'thinking' machines. 'Quiz show contestant' may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I'm sure it won't be the last.
Philosophy
Philosopher John Searle
John Rogers Searle (; born July 31, 1932) is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959, and was Willis S. and Mario ...
argues that Watson—despite impressive capabilities—cannot actually think. Drawing on his Chinese room
The Chinese room argument holds that a digital computer executing a program cannot have a " mind," "understanding" or "consciousness," regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave. The argument was pres ...
thought experiment
A thought experiment is a hypothetical situation in which a hypothesis, theory, or principle is laid out for the purpose of thinking through its consequences.
History
The ancient Greek ''deiknymi'' (), or thought experiment, "was the most anci ...
, Searle claims that Watson, like other computational machines, is capable only of manipulating symbols, but has no ability to understand the meaning of those symbols; however, Searle's experiment has its detractors.
Match against members of the United States Congress
On February 28, 2011, Watson played an untelevised exhibition match of ''Jeopardy!'' against members of the United States House of Representatives
The United States House of Representatives, often referred to as the House of Representatives, the U.S. House, or simply the House, is the Lower house, lower chamber of the United States Congress, with the United States Senate, Senate being ...
. In the first round, Rush D. Holt, Jr.
Rush Dew Holt Jr. (born October 15, 1948) is an American scientist and politician who served as the U.S. representative for from 1999 to 2015. He is a member of the Democratic Party and son of former West Virginia U.S. Senator Rush D. Holt Sr ...
(D-NJ, a former ''Jeopardy!'' contestant), who was challenging the computer with Bill Cassidy
William Morgan Cassidy (born September 28, 1957) is an American physician and politician serving as the senior United States senator from Louisiana, a seat he has held since 2015. A member of the Republican Party, he served in the Louisian ...
(R-LA, later Senator from Louisiana), led with Watson in second place. However, combining the scores between all matches, the final score was $40,300 for Watson and $30,000 for the congressional players combined.
IBM's Christopher Padilla said of the match, "The technology behind Watson represents a major advancement in computing. In the data-intensive environment of government, this type of technology can help organizations make better decisions and improve how government helps its citizens."
Current and future applications
According to IBM, "The goal is to have computers start to interact in natural human terms across a range of applications and processes, understanding the questions that humans ask and providing answers that humans can understand and justify." It has been suggested by Robert C. Weber, IBM's general counsel
A general counsel, also known as chief counsel or chief legal officer (CLO), is the chief in-house lawyer for a company or a governmental department.
In a company, the person holding the position typically reports directly to the CEO, and their ...
, that Watson may be used for legal research. The company also intends to use Watson in other information-intensive fields, such as telecommunications, financial services, and government.
Watson is based on commercially available IBM Power 750 servers that have been marketed since February 2010.
Commentator Rick Merritt said that "there's another really important reason why it is strategic for IBM to be seen very broadly by the American public as a company that can tackle tough computer problems. A big slice of BM's profitcomes from selling to the U.S. government some of the biggest, most expensive systems in the world."
In 2013, it was reported that three companies were working with IBM to create apps embedded with Watson technology. Fluid is developing an app for retailers, one called "The North Face", which is designed to provide advice to online shoppers. Welltok is developing an app designed to give people advice on ways to engage in activities to improve their health. MD Buyline is developing an app for the purpose of advising medical institutions on equipment procurement decisions.
In November 2013, IBM announced it would make Watson's API
An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standa ...
available to software application providers, enabling them to build apps and services that are embedded in Watson's capabilities. To build out its base of partners who create applications on the Watson platform, IBM consults with a network of venture capital firms, which advise IBM on which of their portfolio companies may be a logical fit for what IBM calls the Watson Ecosystem. Thus far, roughly 800 organizations and individuals have signed up with IBM, with interest in creating applications that could use the Watson platform.
On January 30, 2013, it was announced that Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute () (RPI) is a private research university in Troy, New York, with an additional campus in Hartford, Connecticut. A third campus in Groton, Connecticut closed in 2018. RPI was established in 1824 by Stephen Van ...
would receive a successor version of Watson, which would be housed at the Institute's technology park and be available to researchers and students. By summer 2013, Rensselaer had become the first university to receive a Watson computer.
On February 6, 2014, it was reported that IBM plans to invest $100 million in a 10-year initiative to use Watson and other IBM technologies to help countries in Africa address development problems, beginning with healthcare and education.
On June 3, 2014, three new Watson Ecosystem partners were chosen from more than 400 business concepts submitted by teams spanning 18 industries from 43 countries. "These bright and enterprising organizations have discovered innovative ways to apply Watson that can deliver demonstrable business benefits", said Steve Gold, vice president, IBM Watson Group. The winners were Majestyk Apps with their adaptive educational platform, FANG (Friendly Anthropomorphic Networked Genome); Red Ant with their retail sales trainer; and GenieMD with their medical recommendation service.
On July 9, 2014, Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories
Genesys, or Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc., is an American software company that sells customer experience (CX) and call center technology to mid-sized and large businesses. It sells both cloud-based and hybrid cloud software. The ...
announced plans to integrate Watson to improve their customer experience platform, citing the sheer volume of customer data to analyze.
Watson has been integrated with databases including ''Bon Appétit'' magazine to perform a recipe generating platform.
Watson is being used by Decibel, a music discovery startup, in its app MusicGeek which uses the supercomputer to provide music recommendations to its users. The use of Watson has also been found in the hospitality industry. Go Moment uses Watson for its Rev1 app, which gives hotel staff a way to quickly respond to questions from guests. Arria NLG has built an app that helps energy companies stay within regulatory guidelines, making it easier for managers to make sense of thousands of pages of legal and technical jargon.
OmniEarth, Inc. uses Watson computer vision services to analyze satellite and aerial imagery, along with other municipal data, to infer water usage on a property-by-property basis, helping districts in California improve water conservation efforts.
In September 2016, Condé Nast started using Watson to help build and strategize social influencer campaigns for brands. Using software built by IBM and Influential, Condé Nast's clients will be able to know which influencer's demographics, personality traits and more best align with a marketer and the audience it is targeting.
In February 2017, Rare Carat, a New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
-based startup
A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend t ...
and e-commerce
E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain manageme ...
platform for buying diamonds and diamond rings, introduced an IBM Watson-powered artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...
chatbot
A chatbot or chatterbot is a Software agent, software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or Speech synthesis, text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent. Designed to convincingly si ...
called "Rocky" to assist novice diamond buyers through the daunting process of purchasing a diamond. As part of the IBM Global Entrepreneur Program, Rare Carat received the assistance of IBM in the development of the Rocky Chat Bot.
In May 2017, IBM partnered with the Pebble Beach Company
Pebble Beach is an unincorporated area, unincorporated community on the Monterey Peninsula in Monterey County, California, Monterey County, California. The small coastal residential community of mostly single-family homes is also notable as a r ...
to use Watson as a concierge
A concierge () is an employee of a multi-tenant building, such as a hotel or apartment building, who receives guests. The concept has been applied more generally to other hospitality settings and to personal concierges who manage the errands of ...
. Watson's artificial intelligence was added to an app developed by Pebble Beach and was used to guide visitors around the resort. The mobile app was designed by IBM iX and hosted on the IBM Cloud. It uses Watson's Conversation applications programming interface.
In November 2017, in Mexico City, the Experience Voices of Another Time was opened at the National Museum of Anthropology using IBM Watson as an alternative to visiting a museum.
Healthcare
In healthcare, Watson's natural language, hypothesis generation, and evidence-based learning capabilities are being investigated to see how Watson may contribute to clinical decision support system
A clinical decision support system (CDSS) is a health information technology, provides clinicians, staff, patients, or other individuals with knowledge and person-specific information, to help health and health care. CDSS encompasses a variety of ...
s and the increase in artificial intelligence in healthcare
Artificial intelligence in healthcare is an overarching term used to describe the use of machine-learning algorithms and software, or artificial intelligence (AI), to mimic human cognition in the analysis, presentation, and comprehension of compl ...
for use by medical professionals. To aid physicians in the treatment of their patients, once a physician has posed a query to the system describing symptoms and other related factors, Watson first parses the input to identify the most important pieces of information; then mines patient data to find facts relevant to the patient's medical and hereditary history; then examines available data sources to form and test hypotheses; and finally provides a list of individualized, confidence-scored recommendations. The sources of data that Watson uses for analysis can include treatment guidelines, electronic medical record data, notes from healthcare providers, research materials, clinical studies, journal articles and patient information. Despite being developed and marketed as a "diagnosis and treatment advisor", Watson has never been actually involved in the medical diagnosis process, only in assisting with identifying treatment options for patients who have already been diagnosed.
In February 2011, it was announced that IBM would be partnering with Nuance Communications
Nuance Communications, Inc. is an American multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, that markets speech recognition and artificial intelligence software.
Nuance merged with its compe ...
for a research project to develop a commercial product during the next 18 to 24 months, designed to exploit Watson's clinical decision support capabilities. Physicians at Columbia University
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
would help to identify critical issues in the practice of medicine where the system's technology may be able to contribute, and physicians at the University of Maryland
The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the University System of M ...
would work to identify the best way that a technology like Watson could interact with medical practitioners to provide the maximum assistance.
In September 2011, IBM and WellPoint (now Anthem
An anthem is a musical composition of celebration, usually used as a symbol for a distinct group, particularly the national anthems of countries. Originally, and in music theory and religious contexts, it also refers more particularly to short ...
) announced a partnership to utilize Watson to help suggest treatment options to physicians. Then, in February 2013, IBM and WellPoint gave Watson its first commercial application, for utilization management
Utilization management (UM) or utilization review is the use of managed care techniques such as prior authorization that allow payers, particularly health insurance companies, to manage the cost of health care benefits by assessing its appropriaten ...
decisions in lung cancer
Lung cancer, also known as lung carcinoma (since about 98–99% of all lung cancers are carcinomas), is a malignant lung tumor characterized by uncontrolled cell growth in tissue (biology), tissues of the lung. Lung carcinomas derive from tran ...
treatment at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK or MSKCC) is a cancer treatment and research institution in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, founded in 1884 as the New York Cancer Hospital. MSKCC is one of 52 National Cancer Institute– ...
.
IBM announced a partnership with Cleveland Clinic
Cleveland Clinic is a nonprofit American academic medical center based in Cleveland, Ohio. Owned and operated by the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, an Ohio nonprofit corporation established in 1921, it runs a 170-acre (69 ha) campus in Cleveland, ...
in October 2012. The company has sent Watson to the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University
Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) is a private research university in Cleveland, Ohio. Case Western Reserve was established in 1967, when Western Reserve University, founded in 1826 and named for its location in the Connecticut Western Reser ...
, where it will increase its health expertise and assist medical professionals in treating patients. The medical facility will utilize Watson's ability to store and process large quantities of information to help speed up and increase the accuracy of the treatment process. "Cleveland Clinic's collaboration with IBM is exciting because it offers us the opportunity to teach Watson to 'think' in ways that have the potential to make it a powerful tool in medicine", said C. Martin Harris, MD, chief information officer of Cleveland Clinic.
In 2013, IBM and MD Anderson Cancer Center
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (colloquially MD Anderson Cancer Center) is a comprehensive cancer center in Houston, Texas. It is the largest cancer center in the U.S. and one of the original three comprehensive cancer centers ...
began a pilot program to further the center's "mission to eradicate cancer". However, after spending $62 million, the project did not meet its goals and it has been stopped.
On February 8, 2013, IBM announced that oncologists at the Maine Center for Cancer Medicine and Westmed Medical Group in New York have started to test Watson in an effort to recommend treatment for lung cancer.
On July 29, 2016, IBM and Manipal Hospitals (a leading hospital chain in India) announced the launch of IBM Watson for Oncology, for cancer patients. This product provides information and insights to physicians and cancer patients to help them identify personalized, evidence-based cancer care options. Manipal Hospitals is the second hospital in the world to adopt this technology and first in the world to offer it to patients online as an expert second opinion through their website. Manipal discontinued this contract in December 2018.
On January 7, 2017, IBM and Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance entered into a contract for IBM to deliver analysis to compensation payouts via its IBM Watson Explorer AI, which resulted in the loss of 34 jobs. The company said it would speed up compensation payout analysis via analyzing claims and medical records, and increase productivity by 30%. The company also said it would save ¥140m in running costs.
Several startups in the healthcare space have been effectively using seven business model archetypes to take solutions based on IBM Watson to the marketplace. These archetypes depends on the value generate for the target user (e.g. patient focus vs. healthcare provider and payer focus) and value capturing mechanisms (e.g. providing information or connecting stakeholders).
By 2022, IBM Watson Health was generating about a billion dollars in annual gross revenue, but was facing a lack of profitability and increased competition. One expert assessed to CNN that "IBM was clearly not gaining much traction in the healthcare market". On January 21, 2022, IBM announced the sell-off of its Watson Health unit to Francisco Partners
Francisco Partners is an American private equity firm focused exclusively on investments in technology and technology-enabled services businesses. Founded in August 1999 and based in San Francisco with offices in London and New York City, Francis ...
.
IBM Watson Group
On January 9, 2014, IBM announced it was creating a business unit around Watson, led by senior vice president Michael Rhodin. IBM Watson Group will have headquarters in New York
New York most commonly refers to:
* New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York
* New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States
New York may also refer to:
Film and television
* '' ...
's Silicon Alley
Silicon Alley is an area of high tech companies centered around southern Manhattan's Flatiron district in New York City. The term was coined in the 1990s during the dot-com boom, alluding to California's Silicon Valley tech center. The term has ...
and will employ 2,000 people. IBM has invested $1 billion to get the division going. Watson Group will develop three new cloud
In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may co ...
-delivered services: Watson Discovery Advisor, Watson Engagement Advisor, and Watson Explorer. Watson Discovery Advisor will focus on research and development
Research and development (R&D or R+D), known in Europe as research and technological development (RTD), is the set of innovative activities undertaken by corporations or governments in developing new services or products, and improving existi ...
projects in pharmaceutical industry
The pharmaceutical industry discovers, develops, produces, and markets drugs or pharmaceutical drugs for use as medications to be administered to patients (or self-administered), with the aim to cure them, vaccinate them, or alleviate symptoms. ...
, publishing
Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...
, and biotechnology
Biotechnology is the integration of natural sciences and engineering sciences in order to achieve the application of organisms, cells, parts thereof and molecular analogues for products and services. The term ''biotechnology'' was first used b ...
, Watson Engagement Advisor will focus on self-service applications using insights on the basis of natural language
In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languages ...
questions posed by business users, and Watson Explorer will focus on helping enterprise users uncover and share data-driven insights based on federated search more easily. The company is also launching a $100 million venture fund to spur application development for "cognitive" applications. According to IBM, the cloud-delivered enterprise-ready Watson has seen its speed increase 24 times over—a 2,300 percent improvement in performance and its physical size shrank by 90 percent—from the size of a master bedroom to three stacked pizza boxes. IBM CEO Virginia Rometty
Virginia Marie "Ginni" Rometty (born July 29, 1957) is an American business executive who served as executive chairman of IBM after stepping down as CEO on April 1, 2020. She previously served as chairman, president and CEO of IBM, becoming the ...
said she wants Watson to generate $10 billion in annual revenue within ten years. In 2017, IBM and MIT established a new joint research venture in artificial intelligence. IBM invested $240 million to create the MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab in partnership with MIT, which brings together researchers in academia and industry to advance AI research, with projects ranging from computer vision and NLP to devising new ways to ensure that AI systems are fair, reliable and secure. In March 2018, IBM's CEO Ginni Rometty
Virginia Marie "Ginni" Rometty (born July 29, 1957) is an American business executive who served as executive chairman of IBM after stepping down as CEO on April 1, 2020. She previously served as chairman, president and CEO of IBM, becoming the ...
proposed "Watson's Law," the "use of and application of business, smart cities, consumer applications and life in general."["IBM CEO Rometty Proposes 'Watson's Law': AI In Everything"](_blank)
, Adrian Bridgewater, ''Forbes'', March 20, 2018
Chef Watson
Chef Watson is ''Bon Appétit'' magazine's and IBM's artificial-intelligence cooking web app. IBM's collaboration with the Institute of Culinary Education
The Institute of Culinary Education (ICE) is a private for-profit culinary college in New York City. ICE is accredited by the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges (ACCSC), and offers career training diploma programs in the cu ...
to pair the expertise of chefs with cognitive computing, produced
Watson helped a team of chefs create five new poutine
Poutine () is a dish of french fries and cheese curds topped with a brown gravy. It emerged in Quebec, in the late 1950s in the Centre-du-Québec region, though its exact origins are uncertain and there are several competing claims regarding it ...
s for the 2015 La Poutine Week food festival in Toronto and Montreal. It analyzed the demographics and popular cuisines of the cities and drew from a database of tens of thousands of recipes to create fusion
Fusion, or synthesis, is the process of combining two or more distinct entities into a new whole.
Fusion may also refer to:
Science and technology Physics
*Nuclear fusion, multiple atomic nuclei combining to form one or more different atomic nucl ...
pairings for each city.[
]
Chatbot
Watson is being used via IBM partner program as a chatbot
A chatbot or chatterbot is a Software agent, software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or Speech synthesis, text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent. Designed to convincingly si ...
to provide the conversation for children's toys.
Building codes
In 2015, the engineering firm ENGEO created an online service via the IBM partner program named GoFetchCode. GoFetchCode applies Watson's natural language processing and question-answering capabilities to the International Code Council
The International Building Code (IBC) is a model building code developed by the International Code Council (ICC). It has been adopted for use as a base code standard by most jurisdictions in the United States. The IBC addresses both health and saf ...
's model building codes.
Teaching assistant
IBM Watson is being used for several projects relating to education, and has entered partnerships with Pearson Education, Blackboard, Sesame Workshop and Apple.
In its partnership with Pearson, Watson is being made available inside electronic text books to provide natural language, one-on-one tutoring to students on the reading material.
As an individual using the free Watson APIs available to the public, Ashok Goel
Ashok K. Goel is a professor of computer science and human-centered computing in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, and the chief scientist with Georgia Tech's Center for 21st Century Universities. He condu ...
, a professor at Georgia Tech, used Watson to create a virtual teaching assistant to assist students in his class. Initially, Goel did not reveal the nature of "Jill", which was created with the help of a few students and IBM. Jill answered questions where it had a 97% certainty of an accurate answer, with the remainder being answered by human assistants.
The research group of Sabri Pllana developed an assistant for learning parallel programming using the IBM Watson. A survey with a number of novice parallel programmers at the Linnaeus University indicated that such assistant will be welcome by students that learn parallel programming.
Weather forecasting
In August 2016, IBM announced it would be using Watson for weather forecasting
Weather forecasting is the application of science and technology forecasting, to predict the conditions of the Earth's atmosphere, atmosphere for a given location and time. People have attempted to predict the weather informally for millennia a ...
. Specifically, the company announced they would use Watson to analyze data from over 200,000 Weather Underground
The Weather Underground was a Far-left politics, far-left militant organization first active in 1969, founded on the Ann Arbor, Michigan, Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan. Originally known as the Weathermen, the group was organiz ...
personal weather stations, and data from other sources, as a part of project Deep Thunder.
Fashion
IBM Watson together with Marchesa designed a dress that changed the colour of the fabric depending on the mood of the audience. The dress lit up in different colours based on the sentiment of Tweets about the dress. Tweets were passed through a Watson tone analyzer and then sent back to a small computer inside the waist of the dress.
Tax preparation
On February 5–6, 2017, tax preparation company H&R Block
H&R Block, Inc., or H&R Block, is an American tax preparation company operating in Canada, the United States, and Australia. The company was founded in 1955 by brothers Henry W. Bloch and Richard Bloch.
As of 2018, H&R Block operates approximat ...
began nationwide use of a Watson-based program.
Advertising
In September 2017, IBM announced that with its acquisition of The Weather Company's advertising sales division, and a partnership with advertising neural network Cognitiv, Watson will provide AI-powered advertising solutions.
See also
* Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...
* Blue Gene
Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption.
The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/P, ...
* Commonsense knowledge (artificial intelligence)
In artificial intelligence research, commonsense knowledge consists of facts about the everyday world, such as "Lemons are sour", that all humans are expected to know. It is currently an unsolved problem in Artificial General Intelligence. The f ...
* Glossary of artificial intelligence
This glossary of artificial intelligence is a list of definitions of terms and concepts relevant to the study of artificial intelligence, its sub-disciplines, and related fields. Related glossaries include Glossary of computer science, Glossary o ...
* Strong AI
* Tech companies in the New York metropolitan area
Tech or The Tech may refer to:
* An abbreviation of technology or technician
*Tech Dinghy, an American sailing dinghy developed at MIT
*Tech (mascot), the mascot of Louisiana Tech University, U.S.
* Tech (river), in southern France
* "Tech" (''S ...
* Wolfram Alpha
WolframAlpha ( ) is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It answers factual queries by computing answers from externally sourced data.
WolframAlpha was released on May 18, 2009 and is based on Wolfram's earlier product Wolfram Mathe ...
References
Bibliography
*
Further reading
* Baker, Stephen (2012) ''Final Jeopardy: The Story of Watson, the Computer That Will Transform Our World'', Mariner Books.
* Jackson, Joab (2014).
IBM bets big on Watson-branded cognitive computing
' PCWorld: Jan 9, 2014 2:30 PM
* Greenemeier, Larry. (2013). Will IBM's Watson Usher in a New Era of Cognitive Computing? Scientific American. Nov 13, 2013 , * Lazarus, R. S. (1982).
* Kelly, J.E. and Hamm, S. ( 2013). Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing. Columbia Business School Publishing
External links
Watson homepage
DeepQA homepage
About Watson on Jeopardy.com
Smartest Machine on Earth (PBS ''NOVA'' documentary about the making of Watson)
Power Systems
''The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
''. June 16, 2010.
This is Watson
– IBM Journal of Research and Development (published by the IEEE
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...
)
J! Archive
''Jeopardy!'' Show #6086 – Game 1, Part 1
''Jeopardy!'' Show #6087 – Game 1, Part 2
''Jeopardy!'' Show #6088 – Game 2
Videos
PBS NOVA documentary on the making of Watson
* (21:42), IBMLabs
*
*
* – November 15, 2011, David Ferrucci at Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact on ...
alternate
* – 2012
* – IBM at EDGE 2012
* – Martin Kohn, 2013
IBM Watson playlist
IBMLabs Watson playlist
{{Differentiable computing
Computer-related introductions in 2006
IBM cloud services
IBM computers
Jeopardy! contestants
Natural language processing software
One-of-a-kind computers
Virtual assistants