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IBM Watson visits Stanford and UC-Berkeley to engage the next generation of leaders

Teams of students from the two universities will compete against one another and Watson in an exhibition game of Jeopardy!
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Stanford Engineering staff

A team of Stanford students will square off against a team from Berkeley and against IBM's Watson on November 17 in an exhibition game of the television quiz show Jeopardy!

The event brings together some of the brightest academic minds to collaborate on the use of advanced analytics, like those powering Watson, for question answering (QA). The event will feature talks by noted computer experts from both schools and from IBM. The Jeopardy! exhibition will be held at the CEMEX Auditorium in the Knight Management Center at Stanford University.

Follow the event and share your thoughts at #IBMWatson on Twitter and at www.asmarterplanet.com. Ahead of the Jeopardy! game, both universities will host lectures about the computer science behind Watson.

At UC-Berkeley, on November 17th:

  • 10:00 a.m.: Lecture by Bernie Meyerson, VP of IBM Innovation and University Programs -at UC-Berkeley Banatao Auditorium, 5rd floor, Sutardja Dai Hall
  • 12:30 p.m.: Technical Deep Dive into Watson technology by Eric Brown, IBM Research Scientist, Deep QA Technologies - UC-Berkeley 108 Stanley Hall

At Stanford University:

  • 4:30 p.m.:  Panel discussion on Watson with IBM's Bernie Meyerson, computer science professors Chris Manning and Daphne Koller from Stanford, and Jitendra Malik and Dave Patterson from UC-Berkeley - at Stanford Main Quad, Building 320, Room 105
  • 7:00 p.m.: "Journey to Jeopardy! and Beyond" with Eric Brown, IBM Research Scientist
  • 7:45-8:30 p.m.: Jeopardy!  Exhibition match at Stanford University CEMEX Auditorium, Zambrano Hall, Knight Management Center

"By bringing the discussion around Watson to the university community, IBM aims to inspire the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs to think about the possibilities of Watson technology and the skills they will need to take advantage of the opportunities Watson creates," said Bernard Meyerson, vice president of innovation and university programs, IBM. 

Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, is a computing system created by IBM scientists that understands the meaning and context of human language, that can analyze data and learn correlations between data. The technology introduces the capability to sift through an equivalent of about 1 million books or roughly 200 million pages of data to provide instant answers to questions posed to it.

With the amount of digital information being generated, stored, processed and analyzed each year growing at an exponential rate--and affecting every industry segment--there is a real need for businesses and governments to use business analytic technology like Watson to make sense of large amounts of data to achieve their goals.

Higher education institutions like Stanford and Berkeley benefit from the ability to work with companies to create curricula that incorporate real-world case studies and brings breakthrough technology like Watson into the classroom. The goal of this initiative is to engage and inspire students while teaching the next generation of business leaders and entrepreneurs the skills they need to build a smarter planet.

Follow the event along on Twitter at #IBMWatson and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ibmwatson and www.facebook.com/peopleforasmarterplanet.

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