Jeopardy! The IBM Challenge: Inside the Mind of Watson

A lecture to be given on campus this week tells the fascinating story behind the most intriguing Jeopardy! challenge so far ....

Earlier this year an IBM computer took part in the well-known US tv quiz show and beat the best contestants of all time.

The next event in the Distinguished Lecture series at the Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences goes inside the mind of Watson, the IBM computer.

Watson is a computer system (devised and built by IBM engineers) which is capable of answering rich natural language questions and estimating its confidence in those answers at a level rivalling the best humans at the task. In this lecture Dr Chris Welty, Research Scientist at IBM's T J Watson Research Center in New York, will discuss how Watson works at a high level with examples from the show.

Chris Welty taught Computer Science at Vassar College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before moving to industrial research. His principal area of research is Knowledge Representation, specifically ontologies and the Semantic Web, and he spends most of his time applying this technology to Natural Language Question Answering as a member of the DeepQA/Watson team.

The Lecture takes place on Thursday 1 December at 5 pm in the Turner Sims Concert Hall on the Highfield Campus of the University of Southampton. No tickets are required and all are welcome. Refreshments are available from 4.30 pm.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.