ThomasNet reports, “Two years ago, IBM software Watson beat two of the world’s best Jeopardy players. Now researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, N.Y. are working with the program to enhance its cognitive reasoning skills and experiment with applications in a variety of fields. Steven Cherry of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) interviewed one of the lead researchers, Professor Jim Hendler, about the next evolution of Watson for a Techwise Conversations podcast. [below]” Read more

Video of the full presentation referenced in this article is available here.

During the three-day Jeopardy challenge that saw IBM’s Watson emerge victorious over mere mortals Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, viewers learned a bit about the future IBM envisioned for its Deep QA system outside the game show circuit. At SemTech in San Francisco, IBM research staff member Aditya Kalyanpur provided a little more insight into the technology’s capabilities and its suitability for other domains where structured and unstructured data abound.

“What the technology really enables is better decision-making over vast amounts of structured and unstructured data,” said Kalyanpur, who joined the Watson project a couple years back after working on other research at IBM. (The Semantic Web Blog featured Kalyanpur in his pre-Watson days as one of the young guns moving the technology forward in this article.) “It’s applicable in so many domains. The bottom line is any domain where you need to make sense of vast amounts of information, this can work,” he told the crowd assembled to hear more about the inner workings of the charismatic computer system.

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At the 2011 SemTech San Francisco, there was a special presentation by Aditya Kalyanpur, of IBM Research. Kalyanpur was part of the algorithm team on the Watson project. You remember Watson, right? The computer who won Jeopardy earlier this year?  We covered the story, if you need a reminder of what happened.

Here is the full presentation by Kalyanpur. (Slides were not made available to the general public):

Following this presentation, our own Jennifer Zaino caught up with Kalyanpur for this interview.

A recent article discusses the lessons that can be learned from Watson, IBM’s champion computer: “Big Blue has set its sights on many commercial applications for the technology in healthcare, financial services and customer service operations.  But the question remains, is it practical? Does Watson embody an approach that enterprises can exploit, or learn from?  How readily can a “Watson” be applied to the knowledge and content access problems of the typical enterprise?” Read more

Watson, it may come as no surprise to those who’ve been following its progress on Jeopardy this week, took home the grand prize, or rather the charity it was playing for did : $1 million for World Vision and World Community Grid.

But while Watson started off strong this round, its two human competitors – especially Ken Jennings – gave it a better run for its money than we’ve seen in the whole competition. Especially Ken Jennings, who actually was on a winning streak going once or twice in the game. He advanced big-time at one point by landing on the Daily Double and betting the lot of his winnings, telling the audience that it was either do that or unplug Watson.

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Probably the most surprising moment on tonight’s edition of Jeopardy! featuring Watson was the final round. The smartest computer on the planet answered, “What is Toronto?” to a statement about the U.S. city whose largest airports were named after World War II heroes and battles.

How’d he (it, I mean it!) miss that one – insofar as getting the country wrong, that is?

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The team at IBM responsible for Watson must be feeling pretty good about its work right now – and rightly so. On the first day of the Jeopardy! The IBM Challenge, Watson tied for first place with Brad Rutter, each having earned $5,000. Ken Jennings was on the board, with $2,000.

But early on in the game it was no sure thing that either of the former Jeopardy! Champions were going to make a strong mark against the closest thing we have to HAL 9000. While Rutter got the first win for the alternate four-letter word for vantage point or belief (what is view), Watson beat both its opponents to the buzzer the next time around.

And right after that it hit the Daily Double – winning even though it had only a 71 percent confidence in its answer (who is Hyde, the category being Literary APB and the answer noting that we were looking for the murderer of Sir Danvers Carew). From there, up until about the first commercial break, our man Watson was regularly making a killing, its confidence levels in its question-answers regularly hitting the 90-percent plus mark. From this vantage point, Jennings and Rutter were both looking a little stunned.

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The world’s waiting to see how IBM’s Watson will fare against past Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The battle of the brains – real and digital – takes place next week, and we here at The Semantic Web Blog will be keeping you up to date with coverage of the big event. (Yes, not all show recap blogs have to be about American Idol or Dancing With the Stars.)

The topic has, of course, been a hot one in the Semantic Web trenches. Heck, it’s been a hot one in the general press. Will the NLP, machine learning, knowledge representation and reasoning, and deep analytics algorithms invested in this massively parallel QA system that counts terabytes of storage and thousands of POWER7 computing cores enable it to beat its human competitors to the buzzer with the right answer? As of this writing, some 54 percent of voters responding to a poll here thought Watson would emerge as the winner of the Jeopardy! IBM Grand Challenge. Rutter, who’s won more money on Jeopardy than anyone else, held 28 percent and Jennings, who went undefeated longer than any other contestant, was clocking in at 18 percent.

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