IBM Watson and the Jeopardy! Challenge

IBM will be hosting our next Washington Area CTO Roundtable to review IBM Watson and the Jeopardy! Challenge. In addition, CTO Roundtable Members will have an opportunity to compete with Watson!

To win Jeopardy!, IBM Watson had to rapidly and accurately answer rich open-domain questions, predict its own performance on any given category/question and deliver high degrees of precision and confidence with a 3-second response time. The need for speed and high precision demands a massively parallel computing platform capable of generating, evaluating and combing 1000’s of hypotheses and their associated evidence. Another key to success is automatically learning and combining accurate confidences across an array of complex algorithms and over different dimensions of evidence. Accurate confidences are needed to know when to “buzz in” against your competitors and how much to bet. High precision and accurate confidence computations are just as critical for providing real value in business settings where helping users focus on the right content sooner and with greater confidence can make all the difference.
The discussion will be led by Christopher F. Codella, Lead Technical Executive at the office of the CTO, US Public Sector, IBM Global Business Services.

Dr. Codella first joined IBM in 1979 at the East Fishkill, NY semiconductor lab, and at Yorktown Heights, NY. In 1989 he became a Research Staff Member in the Computer Science Department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center where he managed the Virtual Worlds Group developing software for collaborative, networked virtual environments. Later, as Senior Manager of the Enterprise Middleware department at the T. J. Watson Research Center, he led a team in development of object-oriented application server technology, distributed systems, reusable software components, component architecture, and web services. He has received IBM’s Invention Achievement Award, 2nd Plateau, and Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards for his contributions to Enterprise Java and J2EE, and for leading the development of IBM Research’s Global Technology Outlook for 2003. From 2003 to 2008 Dr. Codella served as Deputy Chief Technology Officer of IBM Federal. Dr. Codella is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, author of numerous of professional publications and conference papers, and holder of several US patents.

WHEN: March 23, 2012 from 8 AM - 10 AM

WHERE: IBM
2300 Dulles Station Blvd.
Herndon, VA 21071