IBM's Watson, SCS Faculty Featured Wednesday on PBS's NOVA
"Smartest Machine on Earth," the Feb. 9 episode of PBS's top-rated science documentary series, NOVA, will explore artificial intelligence research in light of the upcoming "man vs. machine" matches on TV's Jeopardy! game show. Tom Mitchell, head of the Machine Learning Department; Alex Waibel, professor in the Language Technologies Institute, and Luis von Ahn, assistant professor of computer science, are among the SCS faculty members who will be featured on the NOVA episode, which airs at 10 p.m. Feb. 9. NOVA, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/, can be seen in Pittsburgh on WQED-TV.

A video on what AI researchers are learning from robot soccer, featuring Manuela Veloso, professor of computer science, can be viewed on the NOVA website, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/soccer-playing-robots.html.

Watson, a question-answering system developed by IBM to compete on Jeopardy!, will square off against former champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter during three episodes scheduled to air Feb. 14-16; in Pittsburgh, the game show can be seen at 7 p.m. on WPXI-TV. A viewing part

Eric Nyberg, professor in LTI, and two LTI PhD students, Nico Schlaefer and Hideki Shima, worked with IBM to develop Watson. A viewing event for the finale of the Watson episodes, including commentary by Nyberg, will begin at 5:30 p.m. Feb. 16 in the Rashid Auditorium, GHC 4401. http://calendar.cs.cmu.edu/scsEvents/demo/6665.html

Will Watson Win on Jeopardy? NOVA posed that and related questions to Von Ahn, MIT's Rodney Brooks and IBM's David Ferrucci, who headed the Watson project. See what they had to say here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/will-watson-win-jeopardy.html

Some of Nyberg's thoughts on Watson can be heard on two videos produced by IBM: http://www.youtube.com/user/ibm#p/u/11/_429UIzN1JM and http://www.youtube.com/user/ibm#p/u/13/3PqaTxLEc-Y. More information and another video of Nyberg are available on the Carnegie Mellon web site, http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/computing/2011/winter/watson.shtml.