Jeopardy-Playing Machine Makes First Campus Visit March 30

Watson, the question-answering computing system that bested two all-time Jeopardy! champions during a historic TV matchup last month, will take on students from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh on Wednesday March 30 in the University Center's McConomy Auditorium.

The demonstration, the first test of Watson on any college campus, is part of a full day of events that includes talks by David Ferrucci, leader of the IBM Watson project team, and a question-and-answer session featuring Ferrucci and faculty from CMU and Pitt.

IBM chose to bring Watson to Carnegie Mellon because of the significant role that CMU faculty and students played in developing Watson and because of the long-standing collaboration between IBM and CMU on question-answering technologies and natural language processing. Eric Nyberg, professor in the Language Technologies Institute, consulted with IBM from the beginning of the Watson project, and his PhD students, Nico Schlaefer and Hideki Shima, both contributed important algorithms and components during the development of Watson. IBM and Carnegie Mellon worked together to develop an open-source architecture that is available to all researchers in the field of question-answering.

"IBM Watson is the first step in how computers will be designed and built differently and will be able to learn," Ferrucci said on the eve of last month's Jeopardy! showdown. "And with the help of Carnegie Mellon we will continue to advance the QA technologies that are the backbone of this system."

Ferrucci will discuss the Watson technology and its future applications in a talk, "Watson has a new job," at 1:30 p.m. in McConomy Auditorium. A demonstration pitting Watson against student teams from CMU and Pitt, hosted by IBM Watson researcher Eric Brown, will follow at 2:45 p.m. Representing Carnegie Mellon will be Connor Fallon, a junior Creative Writing major and president of the Games Creation Society; Erik Schmidt, a junior electrical and computer engineering major and secretary of IEEE at CMU; and Will Zhang, a junior computer science major and president of ACM@CMU.

After the demonstration, Ferrucci, Brown and Nyberg will field questions from the audience, along with Scott Fahlman, CMU research professor of computer science and language technologies, and Diane Litman, faculty director of the Intelligent Systems Program at Pitt.

Earlier in the day, Ferrucci, Nyberg and Pitt researchers will participate in a 9 a.m. symposium, "Natural Language Processing in the World of Business, Law and Medicine," at Pitt's University Club. Ferrucci will be keynote speaker at an LTI technical symposium, "A Deep Dive into Deep QA and Natural Language Technology," at 11:15 a.m. in Rangos 2&3 in the University Center.

Bernie Meyerson, IBM vice president of innovation and university programs, also will participate in the March 30 programs, as well as speaking with students about IBM's Smarter Planet Solutions at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday March 29 in room 6115 of the Gates and Hillman centers.