Watson may have beat the most successful champions of “Jeopardy,” but it doesn’t mean machines are ready to take over the world.
Even Dan Gruhl, a researcher at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose who worked on Watson — a four-year project that involved about 20 to 25 people throughout IBM’s eight research labs — says so. He points to the 55 sparring sessions that Watson took part in from November to January before the big showdown with Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the game show’s most successful champions, this week. Watson — which IBM calls a DeepQA machine made up of custom algorithms, terabytes of storage and “many, many CPUs,” — won 71 percent of those mock games. Was Watson’s progress incremental, GMSV asked Gruhl in a phone interview Wednesday. “Oh, heck yeah,” he said.
When Gruhl talks about what’s next for Watson, he’s careful to stress that IBM sees Watson as a tool to help humans, not crush them. In particular, the folks at Almaden are working on how the technology behind Watson can be used in health care. For example, Gruhl said, Watson might scan through hundreds of pages of text of a person’s medical history, pull out what’s important and relay that to a doctor.
IBM this morning announced a partnership with Nuance, a provider of intuitive technologies, to commercialize Watson for use in health care. Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Maryland School of Medicine will also take part in the research and development effort.
What if Watson makes mistakes at the hospital? After all, Watson doesn’t know all the answers; its first “final Jeopardy” response, Toronto, was in a category called U.S. Cities. Gruhl points out that a doctor would be using Watson’s help, not relying solely on it. “In Jeopardy, if you get a question wrong, you might lose the game. In health care, that would be a problem,” Gruhl said.
“I see Watson’s capabilities not as a replacement for physicians but as an adjunct and tool to organize and highlight and prioritize information,” said Dr. Eliot Siegel, director of the Maryland Imaging Research Technologies Laboratory at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, in an e-mail.
Siegel said Watson can build on previous attempts at using artificial intelligence to help with medical diagnoses and treatments. “The first major breakthrough from the initial systems of the ’70s and ’80s is the ability to have the software ‘ingest’ vast amounts of data from textbooks, journal articles and other online resources. … The Watson team (has) technology that has the potential to result in a Renaissance in the application of artificial intelligence in medical data mining, data analysis, and decision support.”
Will doctors welcome Watson, maybe a little more than Jennings did during last night’s “Jeopardy” finale? (At one point, Jennings joked that he could “either unplug Watson or bet it all.” In this chat

on the Washington Post website, the wry and witty Jennings did express his appreciation at being a part of the whole deal, perceived as “gimmicky” by some: “This is the coolest thing I will every do in my life by a factor of a million. The future is here.”)
“Watson will have to fit in to the physician’s workflow without interfering with the establishment of a meaningful doctor-patient relationship,” said Dr. Herbert Chase, professor of Clinical Medicine at Columbia University, in an e-mail. “Given the data-driven nature of medicine, gadgets have the potential to occupy a provider’s attention during a visit.”
But it will probably be years until something like Watson is available on an iPad for doctors, IBM’s Gruhl acknowledged. For now, the technology — which was not connected to the Internet but was fed information from it — requires stacks and stacks of servers, like the ones shown on “Jeopardy” when Watson was introduced.
When it does become more widespread and practical for doctors, Chase thinks both “physicians BG” and “physicians AG” (Before Google and After Google) will embrace the technology behind Watson. “There is simply not enough time in the day to answer all the questions that need to be answered to provide the best care possible,” and Watson can help with that. “The Google generation will not only not have to be convinced, they are going to be disappointed if there are not sufficient decision support tools like Watson that can promote efficient and effective medical care,” Chase said

To readers who just can’t get enough of IBM’s explanations of Watson, which took up a lot of time on “Jeopardy,” especially during the first episode of the three-day series

here’s a a video

that further explains the project and shows Watson’s progress over time. At the 17:25 mark is the explanation of how Watson went from taking two hours to respond to a Jeopardy question to three seconds.