IBM Watson taught to discuss world-class problems

The IBM Watson cognitive system can now discuss various people's problems as well as any expert. A team of specialists from the University of Technology in Georgia (USA), together with representatives of IBM, have been teaching the cognitive system for six months to understand the world and find solutions to some important problems.

Each of the six teams working on the project prepared 200 different questions. IBM Watson had to learn several new items for themselves in order to be able to engage in dialogue. For example, the cognitive system studied several hundred articles on biology from the repository of articles Biologue. After training Watson, the teams began to ask the system questions about architecture, telecommunications, and computing. Watson should have formulated a clear answer using the material studied.

For example, one of the questions was the following: “What method can you offer for desalination of sea water to make it suitable for use?”. This is a problem that has worried scientists for many years. On Earth, a huge amount of water, but drinking all this water is not. Therefore, to make it suitable for human consumption, desalination is necessary.
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Instead of offering the usual desalination plant, Watson suggested using the ready-made solution - a special system for cleaning sea water from salt that exists in gulls. Gulls can drink seawater without harm to themselves, and the cognitive system has advised to examine the organs responsible for the desalination of water in birds in order to create something similar for humans.



In addition, Watson answered the question of what is needed to create highly efficient solar cells that could be used in outer space. The system proposed to study the biochemical processes in animals and plants that live in very aggressive conditions. In particular, Watson advised to study the mechanisms of thermoregulation in plants growing in deserts.

The cognitive system practically did not think about the answers - the solutions were issued very quickly, in a split second.
By the way, Watson can ask leading questions if the person asked the main question, not too accurately formulating the idea. But in order to get the right answer, you need to ask your question correctly, right? And Watson helps a person with this, specifying the topic and content of the question to answer as fully and correctly as possible.



A new type of system called GT-Watson Plus. The developers hope that this platform will help both ordinary people and scientists, providing the latter with answers to questions in which specialists are not too well versed. GT-Watson Plus acts as a consultant in several disciplines at once.