Uncommon Ideas for IBM’s Watson
Like every true geek, I watched the very interesting Watson vs. Past Champions Jeopardy series this past week, and it was very entertaining.
If you missed it, there is a good recap here. Basically, IBM created a distributed system that was designed to learn the intricacies of the human language, and answer trivia style questions based on its massive database. It was a great show, and I enjoyed seeing the answers that Watson would consider and their probability of being right. IBM has said that one real world application they are looking into is health care. While I think this is great and look forward to seeing the changes it brings, I also starting thinking of what other ways Watson could be used. Some practical, some, not so much:
Spam Filtering
I thought this could be interesting because I’m pretty sure that Watson has a better understanding of the English Language than a lot of
spammers:
Under forecasts of experts "Kaspersky's Laboratory", in 2010 of a spam does not become less -via spamuseme.blogspot.com
Watson could process an email, and then give it a probability based on whether it was a real person or not.
Answer Site
Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn Answers, Quora, I know, I know, but how cool would it be to have a computer instantly answer trivia for you? No waiting, no trolls, no idiots who think they know the answer to everything. Maybe even set it up as a twitter account, to keep it simple. Admit it, you are already thinking of things to ask it.
Sports Betting
Just to be clear, I’ve don’t bet sports or really know that much about it, so maybe this is way off. I have to imagine though, if you fed Watson all of the stats from the last 4 years of baseball, his probability algorithms could do some pretty sweet stuff. Add to that his ability to understand the human language, which means he could process sports writers and analysts, and he would have to be fairly accurate.
Drive-thru Attendant
Okay, admittedly more than a little silly, Watson would make a great drive-thru attendant. While I don’t eat fast food often, it seems almost inevitable that the order I place, if anything other than a number, is some how changed into something else by the time I get it.
Well, that’s all I have, what about you?