New X Prize to Find Revolutionary Ways to Use IBM’s Watson

February 18, 2016

51

February 18, 2016 – A new $5 million U.S. competition was announced by IBM this week open to developers and researchers using Watson. IBM has joined the X Prize Foundation to promote technological innovation by demonstrating any use of Watson to solve a major challenge. Teams will have three years in which to propose and demonstrate their inventions at annual Watson conferences. Interim prizes will amount to $500,000 for winners of these annual events. The finals will be held in 2020 with the winner taking home $4.5 million.

So far there are no guidelines on the nature of the innovation a team can produce. This fits with IBM’s Watson strategy overall, which is to put the artificial intelligence technology to the test in a wide range of industries. Watson is being used in healthcare, education, finance, human resource management, travel planning, law, retailing, meteorology, security, agriculture and publishing, just to name a few of the areas where its AI is being applied.

Peter Diamandis, one of the founders of the X Prize states, “I’m sick and tired of the dystopian vision of artificial intelligence…AI is one of the most important inventions we will create to solve humanity’s grand challenges, to understand the potential the future provides for us.” I guess Diamandis is reacting to Elon Musk and Steven Hawking and those who fear that AI will wipe out 50% of all human employment on the planet by 2030.

Watson was first unveiled by IBM in a contest with the two biggest human winners of the TV trivia show, Jeopardy. The AI wiped the floor with its human challengers. The technology uses natural language processing and machine learning to analyze unstructured data such as news articles, research reports, social media postings, and business systems. Its natural language processing lets it understand grammar and context. It can evaluate all possible meanings of a statement to determine its purpose. And it presents answers based on found evidence.

How does Watson start to learn? Its human handlers load it with unstructured information (articles, documents, books, reports, memos, email, etc.). Then Watson is trained through an iterative process to match questions and answers. As new information is added Watson stays current.

How does Watson answer a question? Watson uses a scoring algorithm as it searches through unstructured data and then ranks all possible answers to a query.

The XPrize contestants will be able to join the Watson Ecosystem receiving APIs from IBM that will let them tackle the problems they want to solve.