Will IBM Watson turn into Dr. Watson?

IBM's Watson computer put on quite a show earlier this month in the game show Jeopardy ! Well, if you have not heard about Jeopardy, there is a good chance that you are not based in North America because it is a US based show. The unique thing about this show is that it not a trivial question and answers type of quiz program but it has questions with a lot of puns. That really makes it pretty hard for somebody (like me!) to get the answers right quickly ! Watson was pitted against 2 of the all time champions in Jeopardy. So by no means it was an ordinary match up. Watson came out on top after an interesting battle. You can catch glimpse here

As you would have guessed, Watson is an artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project. For the technology enthusiasts, here is some information that will excite you. Watson is made up of a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers with a total of 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 Terabytes of RAM. Watson's software runs thousands of algorithms on the questions it receives in parallel and then compares the answers to decide the best answer by attaching a percentage value. Watson's programming is written in both Java and C++ and uses Apache Hadoop distributed file system, Apache UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) framework.

We should herald Watson's feat as a new breakthrough in artificial intelligence. Watson demonstrates great ability to perform natural language processing. Watson breaks the questions into parts and tries to understand the exact question that it needs to answer. Then it uses a number of analytical techniques to come up with right answers.

While Jeopardy proved to be a great showcase for Watson to unleash its glory, it was not just built for the jeopardy showdown. After all it came with a huge price tag. Its unique ability to do natural language and analytical processing makes it a workhorse to solve array of problems. There are countless possibility in which it could be leveraged. There are some obvious areas where it could be of immense value.

IBM is reported working in healthcare with some hospitals, doctors, researchers and universities to build innovative solution in the medical field. We cannot expect Watson to diagnose the illness on its own (yet), however it can be an excellent tool that the doctors that would help them make better decisions.

For example, Watson might recognize that the kidney failure in our patient is linked to kidney failure in a patient in Buffalo and another in San Antonio; all three patients, he might inform me, were taking a “natural” weight loss supplement that contained a Chinese herb, aristolochia, that has been associated with more than 100 cases of kidney failure.

Other areas where it could be of immediate help would be customer call centers, employee help desks, equity portfolio analysis and so on. This link even claims that it would be great tool for match making !

It is too early to predict how IBM and others would be able to turn Watson into something more meaningful than a machine that vanquished its human opponents. But I sincerely think feel that it has potential to do that !