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Events

The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

ceClub: IBM Watson and the Jeopardy! Challenge
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David Carmel and Dafna Sheinwald (IBM Research, Haifa)
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Wednesday, 30.03.2011, 11:30
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Taub 3
Over the last days, millions of viewers witnessed computing history being made as IBM's Watson question answering system defeated Jeopardy! quiz show champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. Watson is an application of advanced natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation and reasoning, and machine learning technologies to the field of open domain question answering. Watson runs on a cluster of 90 IBM Power 750 servers in 10 racks with a total of 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 Terabytes of RAM, enabling it to respond within less than 3 seconds. The deep analytic capabilities and systems technologies that enabled Watson to win at Jeopardy! now can be customized for specific industry lexicons and applications to help humans make smarter, faster and more effective decisions.

In this talk we will tell more about the challenge, Watson's architecture and technologies, our contributions to the system, and some insights from the man vs. machine match.