WATSON BY IBM

Rhythm Arora rhythm@qubixtechnologies.com

WHAT IS WATSON

Watson is an artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's Deep QA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's first president, Thomas J. Watson.

WATSON IN NEWS

In 2011, as a test of its abilities, Watson competed on the quiz show Jeopardy!, in the show's only human-versus-machine match-up to date. In a two-game, combined-point match, Watson bested Brad Rutter, the biggest all-time money winner on Jeopardy!, Watson received the first prize of $1 million,

WHATS THE GAME OF

JEOPARDY!

Jeopardy! is an American quiz show featuring trivia in history, literature, the arts, pop culture, science, sports, geography, wordplay, and more. The show has a unique answer-andquestion format in which contestants are presented with clues in the form of answers, and must phrase their responses in question form.

WHERE DOES WATSON LIVE?

The IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for IBM Research -- the largest industrial research organization in the world, with eight labs in six countries. Established in 1961, the Watson Research Center is located in Westchester County, New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts and spans three sites and four buildings -- the main laboratory in Yorktown Heights, two buildings in Hawthorne, and one building in Cambridge. The research focuses primarily on IT hardware (ranging from exploratory work in the physical sciences to semiconductors and systems technology); software (including areas as diverse as security, programming, mathematics and speech technologies); and services, with a focus on applying them to transform businesses in a wide range of industries.

HOW IT WORKS

WHATS WATSON MADE OF ?

Hardware Watson is a workload optimized system designed for complex analytics, made possible by integrating massively parallel POWER7 processors and the IBM DeepQA software to answer Jeopardy! questions in under three seconds. Watson is made up of a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers (plus additional I/O, network and cluster controller nodes in 10 racks) with a total of 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 Terabytes of RAM.

HOW MUCH DOES IT COST?

According to John Rennie, Watson can process 500 gigabytes, the equivalent of a million books, per second. IBM's master inventor and senior consultant Tony Pearson estimated Watson's hardware cost at about $3 million and with 80 TeraFLOPs would be placed 94th on the Top 500 Supercomputers list, and 49th in the Top 50 Supercomputers list. According to Rennie, the content was stored in Watson's RAM for the game because data stored on hard drives are too slow to access.

SOFTWARE

Watson's software was written in both Java and C++ and uses Apache Hadoop framework for distributed computing, ApacheUIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) framework, IBMs DeepQA software and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 operating system.[ More than 100 different techniques are used to analyze natural language, identify sources, find and generate hypotheses, find and score evidence, and merge and rank hypotheses. [19]

HOW DOES WATSON KNOW EVERYTHING

The sources of information for Watson include encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, newswire articles, and literary works. Watson also used databases, taxonomies, and ontologies. Specifically, DBPedia, WordNet, and Yago were used. The IBM team provided Watson with millions of documents, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference material that it could use to build its knowledge. Although Watson was not connected to the Internet during the game,It contained 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage,including the full text of Wikipedia

WATSON VS HUMANS

Watson's basic working principle is to parse keywords in a clue while searching for related terms as responses. Watson has deficiencies in understanding the contexts of the clues. As a result, human players usually generate responses faster than Watson, especially to short clues. Watson's programming prevents it

KNOW MORE ABOUT WATSON

www.watson.ibm.com/ www.wikipedia.org/watson(computer)