The Future of the 'Jeopardy-Winning Computer'

Now that IBM's Watson computer has defeated human champions at Jeopardy, the company has even bigger plans for its future, according to David Ferrucci, who leads the Watson research team.

I had a chance to interview Ferrucci at a press event last night, where he told me that his team is still trying to improve Watson's underlying technology, but it's also looking at ways to turn that technology into a commercial product. We've already written about IBM's plans to bring Watson into health care, and Ferrucci told me the company is also examining how Watson could also be used in finance industry.

Watson wasn't designed with any commercial purpose in mind, Ferrucci said — he and his team just wanted to develop the natural language technology that allows Watson to understand and answer to questions, and then Jeopardy seemed like the natural place to showcase those capabilities. (For more details about how Watson works, check out this interview with one of Ferrucci's team members.)…

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