IBM’s Watson Supercomputer Was Developed with the Help of Eight Prestigious Universities

IBM has just announced that no less than eight Universities have contributed to the development of the question answering (QA) technology behind the Watson computing system, which will compete against humans on the quiz show, Jeopardy!, airing between February 14 and 16 of 2011.

The eight Universities are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Texas at Austin, University of Southern California, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, University at Albany, University of Trento, University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Carnegie Mellon University.

All these education institutions have helped in developing the analytics system that understands the questions being asked and analyzes massive amounts of data to provide the best answer available based on the evidence it finds.

The work involved was enormous since Jeopardy! forces the system to respond quickly and with a high level of confidence to the questions.

In addition, the quiz show requires advanced forms of reasoning that are quite complicated since metaphors, puns, and puzzles are commonly used, requiring an advanced artificial intelligence algorithm to be developed.

"We are glad to be collaborating with such distinguished universities and experts in their respective fields who can contribute to the advancement of QA technologies that are the backbone of the IBM Watson system," says Dr. David Ferrucci, leader of the IBM Watson project team.

"The success of the Jeopardy! challenge will break barriers associated with computing technology's ability to process and understand human language, and will have profound effects on science, technology and business," concluded the company's rep.

Watson is powered by 10 racks of IBM Power 750 servers running Linux, and uses 15 terabytes of RAM, 2,880 processor cores and can deliver a whopping 80 teraflops of computing power.

In a practice round that was held in mid-January, Watson managed to beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the two Jeopardy! champions the system will go against a few days from now.