Watch IBM’s Watson on Jeopardy! compete against two of its most successful and celebrated contestants— Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter—on Feb. 15 & 16, then come hear Bill Murdock provide an overview of Watson’s road to becoming a tough contestant on the popular game show. Jeopardy! makes great demands on its players, testing everything from their range of topical knowledge to their ability to understand nuances in the language of the show’s “answers.” Can the analytical power of a computer system, normally accustomed to executing precise requests, overcome these obstacles? Can a machine search troves of knowledge, written in human terms, to deliver a single, precise response? Can a quiz show help advance science? We’ll find out!

J. William Murdock is a member of the DeepQA research team in IBM’s Watson Research Center. He has been working on the IBM Jeopardy! challenge since the initial feasibility study for the project in 2006. He developed many of the DeepQA components used in the Watson question answering system, particularly in the areas of typing answers and evaluating evidence from passages. In 2001, he received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech,  where he was a member of Ashok Goel’s Design & Intelligence Laboratory. He worked as a post- doc with David Aha at the United States Naval Research Laboratory. His research interests in- clude natural-language semantics, analogical reasoning, knowledge-based planning, machine learning, and self-aware artificial intelligence.