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IBM's Watson Goes To College To Extend Abilities

Posted by samzenpus on from the welcome-back-students dept.

An anonymous reader writes in with news that IBM's Jeopardy winning supercomputer is going back to school"A modified version of the powerful IBM Watson computer system, able to understand natural spoken language and answer complex questions, will be provided to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, making it the first university to receive such a system. IBM announced Wednesday that the Watson system is intended to enable upstate New York-based RPI to find new uses for Watson and deepen the systems' cognitive computing capabilities - for example by broadening the volume, types, and sources of data Watson can draw upon to answer questions."

6 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. This bit bothers me for some reason by eksith · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "RPI will extend Watson's reasoning and cognitive abilities to finance, information technology, business analytics, and other areas, IBM says."

    The reason we go to school (at first at least) is really to learn how to learn. Which is what this is doing right now so when it has perfected the ability to learn, there's no real limit to what it can learn considering... well, brain in NAS, not skull.

    Are we sure this thing has a kill-switch somewhere?

    --
    If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
    1. Re:This bit bothers me for some reason by TapeCutter · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Ok, I'll feed you. You're not impressed because (like my wife) you simply don't understand the difficulty of the problem. Watson's Jeopardy answers are in the form of a question and performed in realtime, it is not plugged into a database of questions, it extracts relationships from data via an algorithm (ie: it learns), different from how humans learn, but demonstrably superior to any human in terms of both speed and accuracy.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    2. Re:This bit bothers me for some reason by N0Man74 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Watson still just seems like a fancy language parser that passes the query along to any number of plugged in databases, as far as I can tell. I don't feel nearly as impressed as I think everyone wants me to be.

      "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."- Edsger W. Dijkstra

  2. They are behind the schedule by pegdhcp · · Score: 4, Funny

    As the system should have been able to gain self awareness in 29 August 1997, way behind. Typical software project management failure........

  3. Re:Really? Extend? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yeah, and what will happen is that Watson will finish up at school with a burdensome student debt and next we'll have a Slashdot article about Watson working at Starbucks.

  4. Re:What is Toronto?????? under US citys by bws111 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I guess you missed the part where it was smart enough to know it didn't know the correct answer (it gave a very low confidence factor for the answer). And the IBM team explained why it gave that answer, which had nothing to do with not being 'smart enough'. The biggest factor was that they put very little weight on the category (US Cities), because the categories are often misleading.