So what can Watson do? Well, this computer can answer questions, quickly identify key info from any document, and find patterns and relationships across data. It can even analyze unstructured data, which makes up 80% of all data, and includes things like news articles and social media posts. This is unique about Watson, because it uses natural language processing to understand grammar and context (huge deal) to analyze this unstructured data.
How does Watson learn all of this? To learn a subject, all related material is loaded into Watson: word documents, PDFs and webpages. Watson is trained through question and answer pairs and is automatically updated as new information is published.
The loading of this information is called the "corpus", which is created with the help of humans. This data is pre-processed by Watson; it builds indices and other meta data to create a knowledge graph (see below), which makes working with the content more efficient. Once the data has been organized, Watson continues to learn through ongoing interactions with users. This is called "machine learning".
Watson takes parts of speech in a question and generates a hypothesis. Then, it searches millions of documents to find thousands of possible answers to support or refute the hypothesis. Next, Watson uses an algorithm to rate the quality of the evidence it finds. These steps sound pretty similar to the scientific method we use to answer a question right? Except Watson does it much, much faster than a human ever could.
Why does this matter? Who cares if a computer can beat some humans in Jeopardy? Well, Watson has a much more important role, and that is in the field of medicine. Health care data doubles every 2 years because there are always new studies and trials being done. Doctors would have to read 29 hours a workday to keep up with the new information. Watson can read 200 million pages of text in 3 seconds. That is incredible. It can read a million books per second. Then, it can use learning algorithms to find patterns in that massive amount of data. This is huge, particularly for cancer patients. Watson has tons of information about cancer which it can trace through its indices (see below) to find different types of cancer, symptoms, treatments, side effects, etc. to find the treatment that best fits a specific patient. In 99% of cases, Watson chose the same treatment that doctors would've, but much faster. And in 33% of those cases, Watson found something new. This is a huge, and very exciting, development that could change everything in the world of medicine.
Check out the 60 minutes segment here:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-artificial-intelligence-charlie-rose-robot-sophia/
References:
http://www.ibm.com/watson/what-is-watson.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-artificial-intelligence-charlie-rose-robot-sophia/
My dad used to work for IBM as well, so I have also heard a lot about IBM Watson! I think this post is so relevant because Watson or the technology used to build him has so much potential to be a great asset in the scientific or medical community.
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