Type of Talk: Viewing Party

Speaker/Affiliation: James Fan

/IBM Research

Date/Time: Wednesday, February 16, 2011, 4:20 p.m.

n
Location: ACES 2.302

Host: Bruce Porter, Ray Mooney, Ken Barker

Talk Title: Viewing Party for the Jeopardy! Challenge

Talk Abstra

ct:
Watson is an automated question-answering system built by IBM for the
Jeopardy! Challenge. Watson will compete against the two best human player

s in the history of the game, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The competitio

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

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

or discussion.

Speaker Bio:
James Fan is a research staff member at
IBM Research. His research interests include question answering, knowledg

e representation and reasoning, natural language processing and machine le

arning. James is currently working on the DeepQA project which is advancing
the state-of-the-art in automatic, open domain question answering technol

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

performance previously unseen and demonstrating the technology by playing J

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

ames received his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin and did his diss

ertation on the topic of interpreting loosely encoded questions.