{"64206":{"#nid":"64206","#data":{"type":"event","title":"Distinguished Lecture: Bill Murdock, Designer of IBM\u0027s Watson","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EWatch IBM\u2019s Watson on Jeopardy! compete against two of its most successful and celebrated contestants\u2014 Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter\u2014on Feb. 15 \u0026amp; 16, then come hear Bill Murdock provide an overview of Watson\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201canswers.\u201d 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\u2019ll find out!\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EJ. William Murdock is a member of the DeepQA research team in IBM\u2019s 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,\u0026nbsp; where he was a member of Ashok Goel\u2019s Design \u0026amp; 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.\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EWatch IBM\u2019s Watson compete Feb. 14-16 on Jeopardy! (in Atlanta, 7:30 p.m. on WATL), then hear College of Computing alumnus Bill Murdock, one of the minds behind Watson, speak on Feb. 17 at 4 p.m. in the Klaus Building.\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"Alumnus Bill Murdock, programmer of IBM\u2019s Jeopardy!-playing computer Watson, will speak at the College of Computing."}],"uid":"27345","created_gmt":"2011-02-11 14:39:56","changed_gmt":"2016-10-08 01:54:05","author":"Cristina Gonzalez","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","field_event_time":{"event_time_start":"2011-02-17T15:00:00-05:00","event_time_end":"2011-02-17T15:00:00-05:00","event_time_end_last":"2011-02-17T15:00:00-05:00","gmt_time_start":"2011-02-17 20:00:00","gmt_time_end":"2011-02-17 20:00:00","gmt_time_end_last":"2011-02-17 20:00:00","rrule":null,"timezone":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"groups":[{"id":"1216","name":"Digital Lounge - Gaming"},{"id":"1217","name":"Digital Lounge - Digital Life"},{"id":"1218","name":"Digital Lounge - Entertainment and Music"},{"id":"1219","name":"Digital Lounge - Health and Education"},{"id":"1220","name":"Digital Lounge"},{"id":"47223","name":"College of Computing"},{"id":"50876","name":"School of Interactive Computing"}],"categories":[],"keywords":[],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[],"email":[],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}