When is watson gonna be on jeopardy

Close drawer menu Financial Times International Edition. Search the FT Search. World Show more World. US Show more US. Companies Show more Companies. Markets Show more Markets. Opinion Show more Opinion. Personal Finance Show more Personal Finance. While using Watson as a diagnosis tool might be its most obvious application in healthcare, using it to assist in choosing the right therapy for a cancer patient made even more sense.

MSKCC was a tertiary referral centre - by the time patients arrived, they already had their diagnosis. So Watson was destined first to be an oncologist's assistant, digesting reams of data - MSKCC's own, medical journals, articles, patients notes and more - along with patients' preferences to come up with suggestions for treatment options.

Each would be weighted accordingly, depending on how relevant Watson calculated they were. Unlike its Jeopardy counterpart, healthcare Watson also has the ability to go online - not all its data has to be stored. And while Watson had two million pages of medical data from , sources to swallow, it could still make use of the general knowledge garnered for Jeopardy - details from Wikipedia, for example.

What it doesn't use, however, is the Urban Dictionary. Fed into Watson late last year, it was reportedly removed after answering a researcher's query with the word "bullshit". As such, the sources are now medical publications like Nature and the British Medical Journal. And there are other safety nets too. The doctor and a data scientist are sitting next to each other, correcting Watson.

Spurious material, or conflicted material or something from a pharmaceutical company that the doctor feels may be biased - that is caught during the training cycle," added Saxena.

WellPoint and MSKCC used Watson as the basis for systems that could read and understand volumes of medical literature and other information - patients' treatment and family histories, for example, as well as clinical trials and articles in medical journals - to assist oncologists by recommending courses of treatment. Interactive Care Insights for Oncology provides suggestions for treatment plans for lung cancer patients, while New WellPoint Interactive Care Guide and Interactive Care Reviewer reviews clinicians' suggested treatments against their patients' plans and is expected to be in use at 1, healthcare providers this year.

Watson has bigger ambitions than a clinician's assistant, however. Its medical knowledge is around that of a first year medical student, according to IBM, and the company hopes to have Watson pass the general medical licensing board exams in the not too distant future.

We're starting with cancer and we will soon add diabetes, cardiology, mental health, other chronic diseases. And then our work is on the payment side, where we are streamlining the authorisation and approval process between hospitals, clinics and insurance companies," Saxena said. The ultimate aim for Watson is to be an aid to diagnosis - rather than just suggesting treatments for cancer, as it does today, it could assist doctors in identifying the diseases that bring people to the clinics in the first place.

Before then, there is work to be done. While big data vendors often trumpet the growth of unstructured data and the abandoning of relational databases, for Watson, it's these older sources of data that present more of a problem. Watson does not process structured data directly and it doesn't interpret images. It can interpret the report attached to an image, but not the image itself. In addition, IBM is working on creating a broader healthcare offering that will take it beyond its oncology roots.

We're using it as a learning process to create algorithms and methodologies that would be readily generalisable to any area of healthcare. They don't have to have to say, right, we have oncology under control, now let's start again with family practice or cardiology," Kohn said.

Watson has also already found some interest in banking. Citi is using Watson to improve customer experience with the bank and create new services. It's easy to see how Watson could be put to use, say, deciding whether a borderline-risk business customer is likely to repay the loan they've applied for, or used to pick out cases of fraud or identity theft before customers may be aware they're happening.

Citi is still early in its Watson experiments. A spokeswoman said the company is currently just "exploring use cases". From here on in, rather than being standalone products, the next Watson offerings to hit the market will be embedded into products in the IBM Smarter Planet product line.

They're expected to appear in the second half of the year. The idea behind the Engagement Advisor, aimed at contact centres, is that customer service agents can query their employers' databases and other information sources using natural language while they're conducting helpline conversations with their clients. One of the companies testing out the service is Australia's ANZ bank, where it will be assisting call centre staff with making financial services recommendations to people who ring up.

Watson could presumably one day scour available evidence for the best time to find someone able to talk and decide the communication channel most likely to generate a positive response, or pore over social media for disgruntled customers and provide answers to their problems in natural language. There are also plans to change how Watson's delivered, too. Instead of just interacting with it via a call centre worker, customers will soon be able to get to grips with the Engagement Advisor.

Rather than have some call centre agent read out Watson generated information to a customer with, say, a fault with their new washing machine or a stock-trader wanting advice on updating their portfolio, the consumer and trader could just quiz Watson directly from their phone or tablet, by typing their query straight into a business' app.

Apps with Watson under the hood should be out in the latter half of this year, according to Forbes. IBM execs have also previously suggested that Watson could end up a supercharged version of Siri , where people will be able to speak directly into their phone and pose a complex question for Watson to answer - a farmer holding up his smartphone to take video of his fields, and asking Watson when to plant corn, for example.

IBM is keen to spell out the differences between Watson and Siri. Siri, on the other hand, simply looks for keywords to search the web for lists of options that it chooses one from," the company says. But, the comparison holds: Watson could certainly have a future as your infinitely knowledgeable personal assistant.

While adding voice-recognition capabilities to Watson should be no great shakes for IBM given its existing partnerships, such a move would require Watson to be able to recognise images something IBM's already working on that would require Watson to query all sorts of sources of information including newspapers, books, photos, repositories of data that have been made publicly available, social media and the internet at large.

That Watson should take on such a role in the coming years, especially if the processing goes on in an IBM datacentre and not on the mobile itself, as you would expect, is certainly within the realms of the possible.

The supercomputer, named after former International Business Machines corporation president Thomas Watson, is a showcase of the company's expertise in advanced science and computing.

Watson showed off its encyclopedic knowledge of topics ranging from ancient languages to fashion design, along with a few glitches. The latest challenge shows that IBM — which turns this year — wants to stay at the forefront of the information technology industry, despite apparently being usurped by companies such as Google and Apple.

What makes Watson particularly advanced, even compared with Deep Blue, IBM's chess-playing supercomputer that beat world champion Garry Kasparov in , is its ability to find answers from ambiguous clues, such as this one: "It's a poor workman who blames these.

Watson was not perfect, however, and made some baffling errors such as coming up with "Dorothy Parker" instead of "The Elements of Style" and repeating other contestants' mistakes. IBM plans to donate Watson's winnings to charity.