IBM is looking for an IBM Watson User Interface & Tooling Developer in Dublin, OH. According to the post, “The IBM Watson offerings are based on the solution created by IBM Research and is a platform which is very different from most common software/hardware platforms in that it involves an uncommon and complex system of systems. These new product offerings will meet the requirements of an emerging market for Deep Question/Answer Solutions. The capability is based on UIMA AS an Open Source framework for deployment of a highly parallel, probabilistic infrastructure running across dozens of discrete Linux systems. You will specialize in designing, developing, testing, and deploying use cases in targeted industries including, but not limited to: health care, financial services, and contact center domains. Read more

Conversational user interfaces and natural language processing could be put to much more use than they currently are.  At the GigaOM Structure Data event in New York City this week, IBM distinguished engineer Currie Boyle, who leads the vendor’s North American natural language services practice, including for deep question and answer Watson-type natural language and unstructured information processing systems, and Nuance Communications CTO Vlad Sejnoha, discussed the realized promises, but also the waiting opportunities.

At Nuance, Sejnoha noted, the focus is on the notion that we are entering a time when how we interact with systems and access information and content is undergoing a “dramatic transformation.” Contributors to that include high- level artificial intelligence reasoning and natural language understanding. “We are overwhelmed with lots of data including unstructured data and these technologies make a difference in how we take advantage of all that,” he said.

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James Hendler recently discussed what the arrival of Watson at RPI will mean  for the growing technology. He writes, “The Watson program is already a breakthrough technology in AI. For many years it had been largely assumed that for a computer to go beyond search and really be able to perform complex human language tasks it needed to do one of two things: either it would “understand” the texts using some kind of deep ‘knowledge representation,’ or it would have a complex statistical model based on millions of texts.” Read more

Friend of SemanticWeb.com Dr. James Hendler recently shared his perspective on the arrival of Watson at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: “Every single student in the Department of Computer Science here at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has the potential to revolutionize computing. But with the arrival of Watson at Rensselaer, they’re even better positioned to do so. Watson has caused the researchers in my field of artificial intelligence (AI) to rethink some of our basic assumptions. Watson’s cognitive computing is a breakthrough technology, and it’s really amazing to be here at Rensselaer, where we will be the first university to get our hands on this amazing system.” Read more

IBM will provide Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a modified version of Watson, making RPI the first university to receive the technology. The article states, “The arrival of the Watson system will enable new leading-edge research at Rensselaer, and afford faculty and students an opportunity to find new uses for Watson and deepen the systems’ cognitive capabilities. The firsthand experience of working on the system will also better position Rensselaer students as future leaders in the areas of Big Data, analytics, and cognitive computing.” Read more

Brian Jackson recently discussed three of IBM’s latest patents that could, as he puts it, “be used to create a futuristic cyborg.” Jackson explains, “Well, it’s possible. Out of the 6,478 patents that big blue registered in the U.S. last year, a few of them definitely focus on giving computers more human-like capabilities. Combining them and projecting into the future, you could imagine that someone like Star Trek’s Commander Data could be the result of intellectual groundwork like this.” Read more

IBM recently announced “the formation of a collaboration to advance Watson’s use in the medical training field. The IBM team of researchers that created Watson will work with Cleveland Clinic clinicians, faculty and medical students to enhance the capabilities of Watson’s Deep Question Answering technology for the area of medicine. Watson’s ability to analyze the meaning and context of human language and quickly process information to piece together evidence for answers can help healthcare decision makers, such as clinicians, nurses and medical students, unlock important knowledge and facts buried within huge volumes of information.” Read more

IBM reports that the company is putting Watson to work: “Watson’s cognitive capabilities were designed to take on the real-world challenges of Big Data across a range of industries. From the outset, the aim was to put Watson to work first in healthcare and finance. Both industries confront deluges of unstructured data every day, and both industries have a compelling need to act on information quickly… While the Jeopardy! challenge demonstrated Watson’s ability to provide a single correct answer with confidence, IBM envisions the underlying technology moving toward a broader range of applications and industries to provide evidence-based decision support over large volumes of variable content.” Read more

Ivan Herman recently offered some insight into how Watson actually works. Herman reports, “I was at Chris Welty’s keynote yesterday at the WWW2012 Conference. His talk was on Jeopardy/Watson and, although this is not the first time I heard/saw something on Watson, some things really became clear only at his keynote. Namely: what is really the central paradigm that made the question answering mechanism so successful in the case of Watson? Well… query answering in Watson is not some sort of a deterministic algorithm that turns a natural language question into a query into a huge set of data. This approach does not work.” Read more

Watson’s gone into banking: Citi is evaluating ways that IBM’s Deep QA technology can help advance digital banking efforts, through analysis of customer needs and processing tons of up-to-the-minute financial, economic, product and client data, according to a press release.

“We are working to rethink and redesign the various ways in which our customers and clients interact with money. We will collaborate with IBM to explore how we can use the Watson technology to provide our customers with new, secure services designed around their increasingly digital and mobile lives,” said Don Callahan, Citi’s Chief Administrative Officer and Chief Operations & Technology Officer in the press statement. The plan is to use Watson’s NLP capabilities for analyzing human-language questions and drawing upon its interpretations of the query to derive potential answers that it then tests, validates, and scores, to help financial reps sort out options, opportunities and risks targeted to a consumer’s individual circumstances.

Earlier this year, IBM paired up with WellPoint in a strategic partnership in another vertical sector, health care, with the goal of using Watson’s DeepQA to help physicians improve treatment for oncology patients by assessing medical evidence and personal case data to deliver probability-based treatment options.

But financial services has always been discussed as an industry that could benefit from Watson’s brainpower, too. In a video here, Dr. Carl Abrams of IBM Research, Financial Services, says that, “The currency of financial services is information, and the ability to semantically analyze that, to extract from that what the meaning is, and then take that meaning and apply it to something is simply becoming a level playing field.”

Financial services executive Jay Dweck, formerly global head of strategy and technology at Morgan Stanly, notes in the video that data in the sector is growing about 70 percent a year, and that having this much data requires a large range and variety of tools to be able to extract real knowledge from it. “You could put together the logical connections among the disparate pieces of information,” he said.