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==== 2011-03-23 Inside the Mind of Watson ====

^WINIFRED ASPREY COMPUTER SCIENCE LECTURE SERIES|

//**Inside the mind of Watson**//

Chris Welty \\
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center

Wednesday, March 23 \\
5:30PM \\ 
200 Rockefeller Hall

//Sponsored by the Department of Computer Science//

Watson is a computer system capable of answering rich natural
language questions and estimating its confidence in those answers at
a level of the best humans at the task.  On Feb 14-16, in an historic
event, Watson triumphed over the best Jeopardy! players of all
time.  In this talk I will discuss how Watson works and dive into some
of its answers (right and wrong).

Chris Welty is a Research Scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in
New York. Previously, he taught Computer Science at Vassar College, taught at
and received his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and accumulated
over 14 years of teaching experience before moving to industrial research.
Chris' principal area of research is Knowledge Representation, specifically
ontologies and the semantic web, and he spends most of his time applying
this technology to Natural Language Question Answering as a member of the
DeepQA/Watson team and, in the past, Software Engineering. Dr. Welty is a co-
chair of the W3C Rules Interchange Format Working Group (RIF), serves on the
steering committee of the Formal Ontology in Information Systems Conferences,
is president of KR.ORG, on the editorial boards of AI Magazine, The Journal
of Applied Ontology, and The Journal of Web Semantics, and was an editor in
the W3C Web Ontology Working Group. While on sabbatical in 2000, he co-
developed the OntoClean methodology with Nicola Guarino. Chris Welty's work
on ontologies and ontology methodology has appeared in Communications of the
Association for Computing Machinery and numerous other publications.