Watson is an IBM supercomputer that combines artificial intelligence ( AI) and sophisticated analytical software for optimal performance as a “question answering” machine. The supercomputer is named for IBM’s founder, Thomas J. Watson.
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Since winning Jeopardy! in 2011, IBM’s Watson has apparently found employment as a dress designer, a chef, and a movie director. The latest news is that IBM is doing deals with GM, Slack, and Pearson that will see Watson helping, respectively, with roadside assistance, business messaging, and education.
Even if you follow developments in AI closely, though, it can be hard to keep track of all the things Watson can do. It raises a question: what is it, exactly?
TV ads that portray Watson as some sort of super-smart Siri don’t exactly help. In truth, very little of the technology used to win Jeopardy!remains in Watson. The name has simply been coöpted for a wide range of AI techniques and related applications—everything from natural language processing to medicine, voice recognition, sentiment analysis, business analytics, and more. In most cases, the roles Watson is supposedly taking on involve applying some version of machine learning in a novel area. For example, IBM has bought up medical image databases and is using deep learning to try to help doctors spot diseases more rapidly.
technologyreview.com
The Watson supercomputer processes at a rate of 80 teraflops (trillion floating-point operations per second). To replicate (or surpass) a high-functioning human’s ability to answer questions, Watson accesses 90 servers with a combined data store of over 200 million pages of information, which it processes against six million logic rules. The device and its data are self-contained in a space that could accommodate 10 refrigerators.
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Watson's key components include:
Apache UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) frameworks, infrastructure and other elements required for the analysis of unstructured data.Apache's Hadoop, a free, Java-based programming framework that supports the processing of large data sets in a distributed computing environment. SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 11, the fastest available Power7 processor operating system.2,880 processor cores.15 terabytes of RAM.500 gigabytes of preprocessed information.IBM'sDeepQA software, which is designed for information retrieval that incorporates natural language processing and machine learning. |
