For the last 27 years, PPPL has hosted a series of Saturday morning public lectures for the general public on current scientific topics. We average more than 400 people every week ranging in age from 9 to 90. This year's topics ranged from neuroscience to robotics and the last lecture of the series was given by Dr. David Ferrucci, "An Overview of DEEPQA: How Watson Could Play Jeopardy."
Dr. Ferrucci led the team from IBM that created the Jeopardy-playing computer that recently took on the two best champions and beat them both. During his talk, he explained not only how Watson can answer a Jeopardy question, but also how the technology will eventually be used in medicine, helping doctors diagnose illnesses.
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| Photo by PPPL's Elle Starkman |
After that televised Jeopardy match, Watson "traveled" to Capitol Hill to take on members of Congress including the lab's Representative, Congressman Rush Holt. Before he joined Congress, Rush was the Assistant Director of PPPL and a major supporter of our Science Education Program. He is now also the only person to have publicly defeated Watson, winning a round of Jeopardy against the computer and making headlines for a human beating the machine. Before the Science on Saturday talk, I had the pleasure of introducing the creator of Watson to the person that bested it (at least for now).
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