Meet Watson, M.D – The World’s First AI Doctor

From its humble beginning as a game show contestant, to advising doctors in various medical fields, IBM’s advanced speech analyzing and data-crunching AI system Watson is the perfect example of how technology developed to tackle narrow and specific tasks can provide technological solutions that have genuine impact in real world scenarios.

So, if you’re unaware of the technological phenomenon that is Watson, we’re going to recount the short history of  the most advanced AI system in the world.

Genesis – The search for a new challenge

After IBM’s computer Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov at chess in 1997, IBM was looking for a new field which could fuel innovation in AI systems.

But it wasn’t till 2004 that the idea came to IBM Research Manager Charles Lickel to try and develop a computer that could play on the game show – Jeopardy, after finding people glued to the TV in a restaurant, watching an episode of the show. IBM soon found out that very few researchers were willing to take on the project – beating a chess master is no doubt difficult, but understanding language (including slang and colloquial terms), deciphering jokes and metaphors, analyzing huge quantities of data for information relevant to the question and doing all of that in enough time to beat a human to the buzzer and deliver the correct answer, was thought to be impossible at the time. The project was finally taken up by David Ferrucci, senior manager of IBM’s Semantic Analysis department.

First steps – the making of a champion

In the first tests during 2006, Watson was fed 500 Jeopardy clues from past programs – it’s performance was abysmal, as it could get only 15% of the answers correct. Building upon that performance and working continuously on tweaking and improving the system, by 2008, Watson could give human Jeopardy champions a stiff fight. Another two years later, by February 2010, Watson was beating human contestants with ease and on a regular basis, if only in controlled conditions. Watson was now ready to face the world and showcase its talents.

Watson wins them all!

For the final test of its abilities, Watson faced Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter – two of the most successful contestants in the game show’s history, and formidable opponents for Watson. In January, 2011 two matches took place between the three, and Watson won both of them and in convincing fashion. There were some technical glitches during the matches, but Watson managed to outshine the human players with ease, scoring more than double of the runner-up in both games. After almost six years of work, IBM had succeeded in building the best language processing AI in the world.

What next for Watson?

Having fulfilled their primary objective, IBM then turned to other possible applications that Watson might have. They discovered that Watson’s abilities can be put to great use in assisting doctors – once a doctor has presented a query to Watson indicating the symptoms and other information, Watson can parse through the data provided to lock onto the most important symptoms, and then, using its tremendous capacity to analyze data, it can go through patient files, medical history and thousands of pages of medical literature in a few seconds to come up with a list of possible medical disorders, along with the amount of confidence Watson has in each hypothesis.

Not just limited to traditional diagnostics, Watson can also be invaluable in drug trials for currently incurable diseases. Watson can analyze the DNA of the patients in an extremely short period, and based on that it can suggest the various experimental drugs that can be favorable for each individual.

IBM’s Watson has come a long way. From playing Jeopardy to making medical diagnosis, Watson’s journey has been memorable but it is only the beginning. We can be certain that in the years to come, Watson will find itself assisting humans in a lot of ways and making our lives better.