Type of Talk: Viewing Party

Speaker/Affiliation: James Fan

/IBM Research

Date/Time: Tuesday, February 15, 2011, 4:20 p.m.

nLocation: ACES 2.402

Host: Bruce Porter, Ray Mooney, Ken Barker

Talk Title: Viewing Party for the Jeopardy! Challenge

Talk Abstract:

Watson is an automated question-answering system built by IBM for the Je

opardy! Challenge. Watson will compete against the two best human players i

n the history of the game, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The competition w

ill be televised over three days – February 14, 15 and 16, 4:30-5:00pm

– and you’re invited to join us. There will be time after the show for

discussion.

Speaker Bio:
James Fan is a research staff member at IB

M Research. His research interests include question answering, knowledge r

epresentation and reasoning, natural language processing and machine learn

ing. James is currently working on the DeepQA project which is advancing th

e state-of-the-art in automatic, open domain question answering technology

. The DeepQA team is pushing question answering technology to levels of per

formance previously unseen and demonstrating the technology by playing Jeop

ardy! at the level of a human champion. Prior to joining IBM in 2003, Jame

s received his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin and did his dissert

ation on the topic of interpreting loosely encoded questions.