Monday, February 07, 2011

Will IBM’s Watson Defeat Humans on Jeopardy?

I’ve been following the unfolding story of IBM’s Super Computer named Watson and its ability to play the Jeopardy game. IBM ran several commercials on their “Intelligent” new computer system recently and the media has picked up on the story.

On the 14th, you can watch the broadcast of the match between the computer and two Jeopardy champions (it will run over three nights). The computer has no advantage over humans in the way the questions are presented. It will read the board and hear the questions the same as humans do. The show’s writers were not told that one of the contestants is a computer so there would be no bias in creating the questions. I think it will be a fascinating show to watch.  Also look for a special PBS Nova program on building this supercomputer.

The story I‘ve included here on Watson also has links to the story on a practice round complete with video.  Highly recommended. And you will be surprised at the quality of the computer’s voice. - JRC

Report: Hackers penetrated Nasdaq computers

Federal authorities are investigating repeated intrusions into the computer network that runs the Nasdaq stock exchange, according to a Wall Street Journal report that cited people familiar with the matter. The intrusions did not compromise the tech-heavy exchange's trading platform, which executes investors' trades, but it was unknown which other sections of the network were accessed, according to the report.

Takeaways from Egypt: Kill the kill switch and decentralize the Internet

The five-day Internet outage in Egypt has two big takeaways. It’s time to shoot down the Internet “kill switch” and we need a new way to decentralize the Internet.

Patch Tuesday heads-up: Critical flaws in Windows, Internet Explorer

As part of this month’s Patch Tuesday schedule, Microsoft plans to ship a dozen bulletins with fixes for 22 vulnerabilities, some serious enough to allow hackers complete access to a vulnerable Windows machine.

Why IBM’s Watson experiment is important for artificial intelligence

Will artificial intelligence capture the public’s imagination? By now, you have no doubt heard about IBM’s daring experiment to pit its latest supercomputer — dubbed “Watson” — against Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Feb. 14. (In fact, we covered the practice round)

Chrome 9 goes stable with WebGL and Chrome Instant

In a statement on the official Google Chrome Blog, the browser's developers have announced the availability of a new version in the stable channel. It brings some performance improvements and a handful of new features. Google's development efforts on Chrome have been moving forward at an impressive pace.

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