IBM Watson

Was an interesting week. Was assigned as IT facilitator to a workshop conducted by Harvard-Macy trainers. Week-long event, and learnt lots of IT tools.

Got to know about IBM-Watson, a supercomputer that's darn good in Jeopardy. Well, it actually won Jeopardy in 2011...and I guessed by now, it should be even better! Humans, are we ready to be replaced? Computers with 'reasoning' skill is already possible. Hmm, how about computers with common-sense next? Or, computers with empathy?

Read about Watson here:
http://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-opens-watson-2013-11

Watson is an artificially intelligent computer system that's able to answer question posed to it in natural language.


Here's a wiki diagram on the high level architecture of DeepQA used in Watson.


See Watson in action: Watson (represented by the LCD monitor with an avatar) pitted against Jeopardy winners (most recurring win and the one that won most money)


If there's a structure, if there's a pattern to it, then these can be 'taught' and 'retained' by a machine. Learning 'abilities' can also be programmed. 'Reasoning' for computer at this stage, sounds pretty much by basing decisions on precedence (knowledge from reputable documentations eg. journals, papers etc), coupled that with probability of confidence level and 'reasoning' can be quite good.

Fascinating. Watson receives a question and immediately sets out to ask more questions to test its hypothesis. The answer will carry with it a confidence percentage. It won't throw out all the answers, but will decide based on pre-programmed rules. For example, in Jeopardy game, it might answer only if confidence percentage of that answer is above say, 50%.


It still sounds pretty much like mimicking of human processing, right?

When we're faced with a question. What's the first thing that we do? When we process that particular question, do we ask more questions? For example, "What do you think about sushi?"
In our brain, do we ask ourselves, "Is sushi edible?", "Have I eaten it before?"->if yes, "Do I recall what was the taste?" etc etc. Intrinsicly, we sort of 'know' the answer. But perhaps, the process might be of the above but shortened considerably and when the synapses passes the electrical current to invoke that piece of memory, we got the answer. Instantaneously.

The beauty of tech nowadays is lower cost, speed, search algorithm and availability of data is fuelling rapid development of capabilities. Availability of data, predictive text, analytical capabilities, data association, merging of information and able to use these collection of data together...It's going to be fascinating.