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Georgia Tech Trains Watson AI to "chat," Spark More Creativity in Humans


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Ashok Goel, a professor in the Georgia Institute of Technologys School of Interactive Computing.

Researchers in the Georgia Institute of Technology trained IBM's Watson supercomputer using 1,200 question-answer pairs, to allow them to "chat" with Watson about design challenges.

Credit: Georgia Tech News Center

Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) researchers are using IBM's Watson to advance how computers could help humans creatively solve problems.

They trained Watson using 1,200 question-answer pairs, which enabled them to "chat" with Watson about design challenges in areas such as engineering, architecture, systems, and computing. The researchers then posed questions to Watson to see what it had learned, and it was able to answer the questions and guide students through the task of examining a wide volume of research that may fall outside their expertise.

The researchers say their approach, called GT-Watson Plus, could assist professionals in a variety of fields by enabling them to ask questions and receive answers as quickly as in natural conversation to help with problem-solving.

Watson's ability to retrieve natural-language information would enable a novice to quickly learn about complex topics and better determine whether their idea or hypothesis is worth pursuing, according to the researchers. GT-Watson Plus also prompts users with alternate ways to ask questions for better results, which are then packaged in an intuitive presentation that enables the average person to navigate results more easily on a given topic.

"We were able to add more semantic and contextual meaning to Watson to give some notion of a conversation with the [artificial intelligence]," says Georgia Tech professor Ashok Goel.

From Georgia Tech News Center
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Abstracts Copyright © 2015 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA


 

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