IBM's Watson goes to college

IBM's Watson goes to college

PORTLAND, Ore.--IBM is installing a more general-purpose version of its artificially intelligent Watson cluster supercomputer at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). The system was specifically architected for researchers whose aim is to deepen the AI's cognitive abilities as well as to explore novel new application areas.

The original Watson debuted two years ago when it beat the world champions in the game show Jeopardy. Since then, it has been cloned in versions designed to give medical advice to doctors, financial advice to securities traders, and retail advice to businesses.

Watson understands spoken language and can answer ad hoc questions about knowledge in its domain. Based on IBM's DeepQA technology--which RPI and seven universities help IBM develop as an open architecture--Watson can quickly sift through vast amounts of unstructured "Big Data" drilling-down to the fundamental answers to the queries put to it by humans.

For instance, in the healthcare field, Watson can analyze a patient's medical history and symptoms and in minutes compare them to case studies in textbooks, hospital databases, medical journals and all the latest news sources, helping doctors make the most accurate diagnoses and advise patients about the very latest therapy options available. Likewise, financial institutions and retailing are applying Watson similarly to their own Big Data.

RPI will aim to deepen Watson's cognitive abilities by broadening the number, types and sources of data it can draw on for answers. Researchers at RPI also plan to explore new applications of Watson in information technology (IT), telecommunications, business analytics (BA), commerce and financial services.

RPI's Watson will have roughly the same mass storage as the original--15 terabytes--but will allow up to 20 RPI researchers to access it simultaneously from various locations on its campus. The system was funded by IBM's Shared University Research (SUR) Award program, under which IBM will provide Rensselaer with Watson hardware, software and training. Watson will be located at the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations, which IBM was a partner in creating at RPI.

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TAG:IBM Watson RPI Supercomputer