IBM Watson's College Debut

March 30, 2011

IBM chose to bring Watson to Carnegie Mellon because of the significant role that CMU faculty and students played in developing Watson. IBM and CMU have a long-standing collaboration on question-answering technologies and natural language processing.

Student Team Takes on Watson

Learn more about the Carnegie Mellon student team taking on Watson. Read more & watch video »

Behind the Development

Ph.D. students Hideki Shima and Nico Schlaefer, along with Nyberg, contributed important algorithms and components during the development of Watson. Read more & watch video »

Watson, the question-answering computer that beat two Jeopardy! champions during a TV matchup in Feb. 2011, took on students from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

This is the first time Watson played on any college campus, and David Ferrucci, leader of the IBM Watson project team, was on hand to talk tech.

Events

For the Language Techies

Deep Dive into Deep QA Natural Language Technology
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Dr. Randy Bryant, Dean of Computer Science, CMU
Dr. Ron Larsen, Dean of Information Sciences, PITT
Dr. Bernie Meyerson, VP of Innovation and University Programs, IBM
Keynote Speaker: Dr. David Ferrucci, Lead Investigator, IBM
Q & A to follow keynote moderated by Dr. Eric Nyberg, Professor, Language Technologies Institute, CMU

Interviews with experts at the event including students, professors and IBMers

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Watson Has a New Job

The Watson Technology and Its Future Applications
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Dr. Rick McCullough, VP of Research
Dr. Ron Larsen, Dean of Information Sciences, PITT
Dr. Bernie Meyerson, VP of Innovation and University Programs, IBM
Keynote Speaker: Dr. David Ferrucci, Lead Investigator, IBM

Watson Demo with CMU and Pitt Students

A question-answer demonstration

IBM Watson researcher Eric Brown. Representing Carnegie Mellon: Connor Fallon, junior Creative Writing major and president of the Games Creation Society; Erik Schmidt, junior electrical and computer engineering major and secretary of IEEE at CMU; and Will Zhang, junior computer science major and president of ACM@CMU. Alternate team members are all College Bowl members: Trevor Davis, senior computer science major; Dennis Meng, sophomore computer science major; John Retterer-Moore, freshman computer science major. Learn more »

Interviews with experts at the event including students, professors and IBMers

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Q & A Panel with experts from IBM, CMU and Pitt

Moderated by Dr. Bernie Meyerson, VP of Innovation and University Programs, IBM
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Panel members to include:

Dr. David Ferrucci, Lead Investigator, IBM
Dr. Eric Nyberg, Professor, Language Technologies Institute, CMU
Dr. Scott Fahlman, Professor, Language Technologies Institute, CMU
Dr. Jan Wiebe, Professor, Department of Computer Science. Director, Intelligent Systems Program, PITT
Dr. Diane Litman, Faculty Director, Intelligent Systems Program, PITT

Closing remarks & interviews with IBM's Dr. Bernie Meyerson & others

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IBM Watson and Carnegie Mellon University

Eric Nyberg, professor in the Language Technologies Institute, consulted with IBM from the beginning of the Watson project, and his PhD students, Nico Schlaefer and Hideki Shima, both contributed important algorithms and components during the development of Watson. IBM and Carnegie Mellon worked together to develop an open-source architecture that is available to all researchers in the field of question-answering.

"IBM Watson is the first step in how computers will be designed and built differently and will be able to learn," Ferrucci said on the eve of last month's Jeopardy! showdown. "And with the help of Carnegie Mellon we will continue to advance the QA technologies that are the backbone of this system."