Episode 58: Whatever happened to IBM Watson?

Guest: Mike McGeein, IBM

In early 2011 a computer called Watson, developed by IBM, stunned the world by beating two of the all-time best human players of Jeopardy, a TV quiz show. To pull this off, Watson had to navigate vast amounts of unstructured knowledge, while also dealing with uncertainty, adding orders-of-magnitude complexity to the combinatoric problems solved by chess-playing computers of past generations.

Watson ushered in the dawn of the latest age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), well ahead of Apple Siri (Oct 2011) and Amazon Alexa (Nov 2014), and (unlike the intelligent assistants) without access to all the knowledge of the internet.

For several years, Watson was the centerpiece of many IBM marketing campaigns, but recently we have heard less and less about it. Or so it seems …

This week we talk to Mike McGeein of IBM who explains how IBM took that original research and infused it all across its software products, including Mike’s own charge, IBM Planning Analytics with Watson.