S.T.'s Artificial Intelligence #1: IBM's Watson

Watson's logo

Watson at home in 2011.
It has since has been miniaturized to the size of a server.

Watson is an artificial intelligence system that answers normal questions posed by people. David Ferrucci led a research team in IBM's DeepQA project to create Watson. The specific application when it was developed was to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy. In 2011 Watson played and won the game against the two famous Jeopardy winners Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, complete with a sweet $1 million prize. Both of these men are professional knowledge memorizers. During the game Watson had over 200 million pages of data that included all of Wikipedia.

Watson was designed with three capabilities to meet this challenge:

1. Hypothesis generation
2. Evidence-based learning
3. Natural language processing

Technical Specs during the game:

• Processing Speed: 90 x 'IBM Power 750 Server' at 3.5MHz each = +80 Teraflops = +80 trillion operations per second
• Processing Type: Parallel processing
• RAM: 16TB 
• HDD: 4TB
• At startup HDD is loaded into RAM for quick processing
• OS: Power Linux 
• Not connected to internet

Watson's first commercial application is as both a lung cancer specialist and a utilization manager (Create a health care plan that is often tailored for individual patients according to their needs) with IBM's partners Memorial Sloan Kettering and WellPoint. 
Hospitals and health care networks can buy or rent Watson's advice over the internet or from their own server. 
Doctors can determine an appropriate plan for their patients by consulting Watson using an iPad. They will be presented with a list of options arranged with highest probability first. The reasoning behind  the calculation of each probability can be viewed by the doctor if they doubt Watson.
Manoj Saxena is the business chief of IBM Watson. She claims that 90% of nurses in the field follow Watson's guidance.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2013/02/08/ibms-watson-gets-its-first-piece-of-business-in-healthcare/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilization_management

http://www.ibmsystemsmag.com/ibmi/trends/whatsnew/It%E2%80%99s-Technical,-Dear-Watson/

Author: Seamus Taylor
Post #: 1