A quick heads-up, for your calendar:
We will host a viewing of the 2nd of the 3 IBM Watson Jeopardy games, a week from Tuesday, on the 15th, starting at 7:00 p.m. and running until 8:15 p.m. We’ll Slingbox the HD television video onto the screen in the normal colloquium room, EE105. (Thanks to Aaron Timss for rigging this up.)
Oren Etzioni, Luke Zettlemoyer, Eric Horvitz (MSR), and some local folks from IBM will provide some technical background prior to the game itself, a brief analysis afterwards, and plentiful wisecracks during. (The game itself is 7:30-8:00.)
Like IBM’s assault on chess in 1997, this is a landmark accomplishment — win, lose, or draw.
There was a very nice NY Times Sunday Magazine article last June (in contrast to the lame-ass philosophical hand-wringing in today’s paper):
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20Computer-t.html
Please join us. This should be fun and educational.