Well, Watson won Jeopardy!. It's an amazing feat. I look forward to seeing where IBM takes the technology.
NOVA has made their episode on Watson's creation free to watch online. IBM has posted a YouTube video of a talk by Dr. David Ferrucci on the overarching DeepQA project. Ken Jennings, one of the human contestants, gave an entertaining live Q&A.
I would love to write software for a system like Watson. As a kid, I was fascinated by fictional super-intelligent computers like HAL, WOPR, and MCP. Over the past year, I've rediscovered a strong interest in data mining and machine learning. While I've helped develop server and storage systems capable of hosting such applications, I have not yet worked with these technologies directly. This is something I'm considering as part of my annual career planning.
