IBM's Watson ruled on Jeopardy, but how can scientists make it into a doctor or a banker? Photo: Courtesy IBM/Bob Goldberg/Feature Photo Service

IBMs Watson may have trounced former champion Ken Jennings in Jeopardy, but now its facing an even bigger challenge: proving that it can make money for its creators.

Its well on the way. Last week, IBM said that it was working with Citi to explore how the Watson technology could help improve and simplify the banking experience, but for the past six months, Big Blue has also teamed up with health insurer WellPoint to turn Watson into a machine that can support the doctors of the world.

IBM isnt saying too much about what Watson will be doing at Citi. The two companies plan to build the first consumer banking applications for the supercomputer. WellPoint is a bit more forthcoming. In December, the health insurer said that it was working with Cedars-Sinai Hospitals Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute to help physicians treat cancer patients.

It turns out that training Watson to help doctors and financial services customers has a lot in common with cramming for Jeopardy. In both cases, the computer has to do two things that machines have traditionally flubbed. First off, theres natural language processing. That means figuring out what the question actually is. Then theres machine learning: understanding what facts are important for which question. In others words, you give Watson questions, it gives you answers.

If we can parse the clue and understand what the question is asking about, and we can parse this text in our documents and understand what our text is talking about then we can try to match, says David Gondek, a scientist with IBM who has worked on Watson for the past five years.

But there are differences too. When Watson helps out Cedars-Sinai doctors, its not engaging in a vicious death-match for Triva-God bragging rights. Its a collaboration.

Its a very different situation. Because in Jeopardy we were kind of constrained in that you get a question, you get an answer, and thats it, says Gondek. In the medical case, we think more about interacting with a medical professional. that means that its not just a question and answer.

The processing is different, too. The Jeopardy system was trained to answer quiz show questions, where the answers are pretty much black and white. Feed Watson a copy of the Bible, and its pretty much good to go on Bible trivia questions. In business and medicine, there are a lot of different sources, and some of them are considered more important than others.

So IBM is working with doctors to ensure that it has the right data sources and that the different sources its using medical journals, papers and textbooks are given each given the proper weight.

Read more from the original source:
IBM Sends Jeopardy Supercomputer to Medical School