"A computer system that can directly and precisely answer natural language questions over an open and broad range of knowledge has been envisioned by scientists and writers since the advent of computers themselves. Consider, for example, the "Computer" in Star Trek. Taken to its ultimate form, broad and accurate open-domain question answering may well represent a crowning achievement for the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
While current computers can store and deliver a wealth of digital content created by humans, they are unable to operate over it in human terms. The quest for building a computer system that can do open-domain Question Answering is ultimately driven by a broader vision that sees computers operating more effectively in human terms rather than strictly computer terms. They should function in ways that understand complex information requirements, as people would express them, for example, in natural language questions or interactive dialogs. Computers should deliver precise, meaningful responses, and synthesize, integrate, and rapidly reason over the breadth of human knowledge as it is most rapidly and naturally produced -- in natural language text.
The possibilities for enriching our global community and accelerating the pace at which we can exploit and expand human knowledge, solve problems and help each other in ways never before imagined, rests on our ability to bring information technology out of the era of operating in computer terms and into the era of operating in human terms.
The DeepQA project at IBM shapes a grand challenge in Computer Science that aims to illustrate how the wide and growing accessibility of natural language content and the integration and advancement of Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and massively parallel computation can drive open-domain automatic Question Answering technology to a point where it clearly and consistently rivals the best human performance."
- That's the mission state from IBM
While current computers can store and deliver a wealth of digital content created by humans, they are unable to operate over it in human terms. The quest for building a computer system that can do open-domain Question Answering is ultimately driven by a broader vision that sees computers operating more effectively in human terms rather than strictly computer terms. They should function in ways that understand complex information requirements, as people would express them, for example, in natural language questions or interactive dialogs. Computers should deliver precise, meaningful responses, and synthesize, integrate, and rapidly reason over the breadth of human knowledge as it is most rapidly and naturally produced -- in natural language text.
The possibilities for enriching our global community and accelerating the pace at which we can exploit and expand human knowledge, solve problems and help each other in ways never before imagined, rests on our ability to bring information technology out of the era of operating in computer terms and into the era of operating in human terms.
The DeepQA project at IBM shapes a grand challenge in Computer Science that aims to illustrate how the wide and growing accessibility of natural language content and the integration and advancement of Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and massively parallel computation can drive open-domain automatic Question Answering technology to a point where it clearly and consistently rivals the best human performance."
- That's the mission state from IBM
- There are many careers which might go the "travel agent" way. Given the big leap in voice recognition algorithms, call center jobs might be the first victims. This should be a no brainer; wakeup call for India.
- Give the limits of human cognition, it's not fair to expect doctors continuously comprehend the ever expanding medical database leave alone the genome research. Dr.Watson for much awaited Web M.D 2.0
- Writing creative, fluent and entertaining user manuals. For creatures driven by cognitive fluency, the manuals have always been horrible out of sync. Ok, being creative might be too far fetched, let's think creativity in terms of fun and easy read. First, I like have a good user manual written by a machine before we begin taking in terms of conscious machines (well, it could be ironical if user manuals become outdated by then).
- A future "Watson Junior" could replace PDA's and even secretaries. Robotics could be the "quasi-sentient" front end driven by the "conscious" servers on the cloud.
- Watson unleashes some promising (and my favorite) possibilities for websites like factcheck.org to have realtime fact quotes. Imagine a presidential debate or a cable news cognitive miser's facts being checked instantaneously.
- Google might be the biggest "loser" if it fails to adapt. One could only hope those google.org brahmins don't contaminate google.com.
- Thanks to bureaucracy, IBM has always been notorious to drop projects off the fly. It shouldn't be a surprise if DeepQA goes to abyss. Remember Deep Blue? Nothing was gained sans the processing power. In absence of it's own version of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, IBM probably uses Watson's and Deep Blue's as an expensive publicity tools.
- On an optimistic note, consilience amongst the different IBM projects and other neuroscience projects might the future of IA. Imagine a symbiosis between Blue Brain, Connectome, IBM genome sequencing project and DeepQA!! Until then let's subside that hogwash of transcendence and work on making life worth living on this planet.
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