Friday 11 July 2014

Moonshot

Today's meeting has given me plenty of potential blogging material. I went to three talks this afternoon, and each of them are worthy of a mention.

I'll save up the second two for another day, but the first talk that I went to was all about "Big Data" and one of the main parts was presented by some people from IBM, showing us some of the capabilities of "IBM Watson", which is a cognitive computer, and which is able to respond effectively to questions posed in natural language.

The thing that first brought Watson to prominence was its appearance on Jeopardy (the US game show, with which we are familiar thanks to Ellen and her Energy Adventure - Stupid Judy!), where it was able to demonstrate that it could compete successfully against the best human players.

The following Youtube video is worth a look.