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Posts Tagged ‘Television’

IBM Researcher Explains What Makes Watson Tick [VIDEO]

18 Feb


Humanity took a beating from the machines this week. The world’s best Jeopardy player is no longer from the human race.

This week, IBM’s Watson supercomputer defeated Jeopardy‘s greatest champions, and it wasn’t even close. When all was said and done, Watson won $77,147, far more than Brad Rutter ($21,600) or 74-time champion Ken Jennings ($24,000). Its ability to dissect complex human language and return correct responses in a matter of seconds was simply too much for humanity’s best players.

A few years ago though, Watson couldn’t even answer 20% of the questions it was given correctly. And it took hours, not seconds, for Watson to process a question.

At an intimate event in San Francisco, John Prager, one of the researchers developing Watson’s ability to answer complex questions, gave a presentation detailing the work he and his colleagues did to turn Watson into a Jeopardy champion. During his presentation and a Q&A afterwards, Prager and fellow researcher Burn Lewis revealed some key nuggets of information, such as why Watson made those odd, uneven bets during Daily Doubles (an IBM researcher thought it would be boring if Watson’s bets ended with zeros, so he added random dollar amounts for kicks) or which programming languages the researchers used to build Watson (Java and C++).

So what’s next for Watson? Prager says that the next frontier is health care; he hopes that Watson’s technology can help diagnose ailments by analyzing vast quantities of data against patient symptoms and queries.

Check out the video to get a deeper dive into the technology behind Watson. Check it out in HD if you want to read the slides.

More About: IBM, IBM Watson, Jeopardy, video, watson, youtube

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Brain Slug Cupcakes at Final Futurama Script Reading

15 Jul

Glenn Fleishman shares a treat with us:

I was lucky enough to attend the last scheduled table reading (where a script is read by the voice actors) for Futurama, the animated cartoon show revived twice now after Fox's broadcast network failed to kill the show. Featured at the reading were piles of delicious brain slug cupcakes. I LOVE THE BRAIN SLUG CUPCAKES, TRY ONE.

The final script is quite hilarious, naturally, and it was a pleasure not just to hear it read in person by the actors, but to watch how much of a family the show is, cast, crew, and their friends and families. That feeling comes through in the show, which was created by Matt Groening and David "X" Cohen, through whose good offices (and my dear friend, his sister) I garnered an invite.

It was especially neat to watch Billy West talk to himself, cycling through Fry, the Professor, Zoidberg, and Zap Branigan, sometimes one right after the other. Also, John DiMaggio, who voices Bender, is 100-feet tall, and breathes fire.

Futurama is one of the only TV shows ever to feature real math and science, as well as multiple alien language alphabets (one a substitution, the other a code), and other supergeekery.

The show hasn't been canceled. This was the last of the current order of episodes by Cartoon Network, but Futurama has rebirthed itself before.

Brain Slug Cupcakes on Flickr


And here's a really cute photo of Glenn with pals on the set, including the aforementioned Messrs. Cohen and Groening.


You can pick up DVDs of past seasons here: Amazon link.
(Thanks, Glenn!)



 
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The greatest rant you’ll see this week: World War II is full of plot holes, and the writers should all be fired [This Is Awesome]

13 Jul
If you think your favorite science fiction TV show is full of nonsensical plot twists and lazy writing, you should check out the World War II documentaries, suggests Squid314 on Livejournal, in the funniest blog post you're likely to read this week. Who on Earth would believe that the Allies could actually win the Battle of the Bulge? It's total nonsense, and "Whoever wrote this episode obviously had never been within a thousand miles of an actual military." Adds Squid314, aka Scott: More »
 
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