IBM's Watson

"My dear Watson, it's Elementary!" ~Sherlock

“The opportunity to pursue an exploratory project that took an area of science that I wst interested in, and to bring together a team of world class people, and push the limits – it does't get any better than that.” ~Dr. David Ferrucci Principal Investigator, DeepQA/Watson project

Watson is a question answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language. Specifically developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy. Watson has accessed 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage including the full text of Wikipedia, but was not connected to the internet. Watson consistently outperformed its human opponents on Jeopardy's signalling device but had trouble in a few categories notably those having short clues containing only a few words. In February 2013, IBM announced that Watson software system's first commercial application would be for utilization management decisions in lung cancer treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer center in conjunction with health insurance company WellPoint. 90% of nurses in the field who use Watson now follow its guidance. The sources of information for Watson include encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, newswire articles, and literary works. Watson also used databases, taxonomies, and ontologies.

David Ferrucci is a Research Staff Member and leader of the Semantic Analysis and Integration Department at IBM’s T.J. Watson’s Research Center. In 2007, Dr. Ferrucci began exploring the feasibility of designing a computer system that can rival human champions at the game of Jeopardy. In 2011 he competed on the game show Jeopardy against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings receiving the first place prize of a million dollars. Following the Jeopardy challenge, Dr. Ferrucci and his team plan to apply DeepQA technologies to areas like medicine, government, and law to drive advances in computer supported intelligence and decision-making.


This website tells us when Jeopardy first aired, which is in 1964, and is one of the longest running game shows in history. They also tell us how it started and how they're looking ahead. Go to the website for more information.


This website tells us about the background information about his past life, like what college he went to and when he started working on Jeopardy. If you want to learn more, go to the website.

This website tells us about more information about Watson or Jeopardy. It says how it works and when people started to work on the game show. If you are interested, go to the website.

By: Marissa & Meghan