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| WATSON : IBM's Artificial Intelligence |
We all have seen JARVIS in Iron Man movies, or VIKI in I-Robot and we all want it in our lives too. What if I say that we have an Artificial Intelligence system similar to it ?
Yes, we do ! It's WATSON.
WATSON is IBM's artificially intelligent computer which can answer questions posed in natural language.
It is a breakthrough is the field of artificial intelligence, it can actually THINK!
It interacts with humans on human terms, it can read and understand questions in natural language like tweets, text, reports and answers them with amazing accuracy and with a supporting proof !
Where does the name come from?
WATSON has been named after Thomas J Watson, the founder of IBM.
What makes WATSON so unique?
Real language has nouns, verbs, people and places and also relationships between them and a computer cannot understand these things. All a computer can understand is strings of ones and zeros. Real language is out of scope of normal computers.
The all famous Google search engine matches keywords from a query posed in real language and displays relevant documents as the result.It is the job of the user to read through those documents and find the answer. On the other hand WATSON does all the thinking by itself and gives us the final result thereby saving time and increasing accuracy !
Where does WATSON access data from?
WATSON does not use the internet. Just like our brain, WATSON's knowledge base is entirely self contained.
If the human brain fits into a shoe box, WATSON's brain takes up more space than the size of 8 large refrigerators !
WATSON is not connected to the internet at all, it just accesses the millions of pages stored in it and answers our questions.
How does WATSON actually work?
WATSON reads, analyses and tries to understand millions of documents and books written in human language.
It works through the following steps:
ONE : Question analysis - WATSON breaks the question it gets into its parts of speech and identifies the different roles, the words and phrases in the sentence are playing. This helps WATSON understand two things : what the question is and what it is asking for.
In this stage WATSON looks for all possible combinations thereby increasing its chances of finding the correct answer.
TWO : For each interpretation of the question, WATSON searches through hundreds of millions of documents and comes up with thousands of answers.
THREE : It's not just enough for WATSON to answer the question, it is even important to support them.
So after deleting the obviously wrong answers, WATSON finds passages in support of the options it has and collects positive and negative evidence.
Thousands of algorithms work in parallel to score the evidence for each and every possible option.
FOUR : Weighted evidence scores are found out and are then merged to arrive at the final ranking with the highest ranking answers appearing in order on the panel of WATSON.
WATSON then estimates its confidence, this is based on how high the answer is rated during evidence scoring and ranking. WATSON does not answer if the confidence value is low, say below 50%.
WATSON KNOWS WHAT IT KNOWS, AND KNOWS WHAT IT DOESN'T !
WATSON wins !
WATSON participated in the famous TV show 'jeopardy' with former champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. WATSON won the event by answering 38 questions and getting 5 questions wrong. Ken scored 9/3 and Brad scored 10/1. WATSON won with $31,600 !
What WATSON cant do ?
WATSON cannot see or hear and hence it cannot answer audio or visual questions .On the other hand questions in text is fair-game. Of-course nobody is perfect and WATSON isn't perfect too.
We learn through WATSON, WATSON learns through us !
Where can it be used ?
WATSON can be used in the field of analytic's, healthcare, finance or any other industry for that matter where people are using information to help them make better decisions.
WATSON is the face of tomorrow. It will help the next-generation learn better and think better.
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