Tag Archive: Watson

IBM has famously developed systems that have taken on the grandmasters of chess—and given them a pretty serious run for their money, defeating world champ Gary Kasparov back in 1997. Now, IBM is going after the big bucks with Watson, a new question-answering system that will compete on long-running U.S. television quiz show Jeopardy. Watson will not only have to understand the questions put to it in real time on the show against human contestants, but it will also have to “know what it knows,” determine its level of confidence in being able to answer a question, and buzz in—just like a real human. But Watson is more than a publicity stunt from IBM: it represents an effort to elevate computer intelligence and human-computer communication to a new level—and that’s technology that can be applied to much more than television quiz shows.

“In a move that could rankle privacy advocates, Microsoft said Monday that it is adding the PC equivalent of a flight data recorder to the next version of Windows, in an effort to better understand and prevent computer crashes.

The tool will build on the existing Watson error-reporting tool in Windows but will provide Microsoft with much deeper information, including what programs were running at the time of the error and even the contents of documents that were being created. Businesses will also choose whether they want their own technology managers to receive such data when an employee’s machine crashes. “  Read more...