From: Gioia Sweetland <gioia@seas.harvard.edu>
Date: October 26, 2011 1:44:13 PM EDT
To: cs-all <cs-all@seas.harvard.edu>, colloquium <colloquium@seas.harvard.edu>, wam_seminars <wam_seminars@seas.harvard.edu>
Cc: Gioia Sweetland <gioia@seas.harvard.edu>
Subject: [Cs-faculty] Joint CS/Applied Math Colloquium on MONDAY, Oct. 31 - Eric Brown
Eric Brown of the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center will give a talk entitled “Beyond Jeopardy!: The Implications of IBM Watson” at a special joint Computer Science/Applied Math Colloquium.
MONDAY, October 31, 2011
11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Maxwell Dworkin G125
Refreshments at 11:00 a.m. outside MD G125
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Beyond Jeopardy!: The Implications of IBM Watson
Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, was built by a team of IBM researchers who set out to accomplish a grand challenge––build a computing system that rivals a human’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and confidence. The quiz show Jeopardy! provided the ultimate challenge because the game’s clues involve analyzing subtle meaning, irony, riddles and other complexities in which humans excel and computers traditionally do not. Watson passed its first test on Jeopardy!, beating the show's two greatest champions in a televised exhibition match, but the real test will be in applying the underlying data management and analytics technology in business and across industries. Learn about the present and future implications of Deep QA and the other technologies behind Watson from Dr. Eric Brown, Watson Algorithms, IBM Research.
Eric Brown earned his B.S. degree at the University of Vermont (1989) and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Massachusetts (1992, 1996), all in Computer Science. At UMass Eric was advised by Bruce Croft and was a member of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval. Eric joined the IBM T.J. Watson Research lab in 1995 as a Research Staff Member, and has been a manager since 2004. While at IBM Eric has conducted research in information retrieval, document categorization, text analysis, question answering, bio-informatics, and applications of automatic speech recognition. Since 2007 Eric has been a technical lead on the DeepQA project at IBM and the application of automatic, open domain question answering to build the Watson Question Answering system. The goal of Watson is to achieve human-level question answering performance. This goal was realized in February of 2011 when Watson beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a televised Jeopardy! exhibition match. Eric's role on the project has spanned architecture development, special question processing, and hardware planning and acquisition, and he is currently focused on commercialization. Eric has published numerous conference and journal papers, and holds several patents in the areas of text analysis and question answering. Eric currently resides in New Fairfield, CT with his wife and three children.
_______________________________________________
Cs-faculty mailing list
Cs-faculty@seas.harvard.edu
https://lists.seas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/cs-faculty