Michigan partners with IBM to bring Watson to the classroom

Submitted by Balrog_of_Morgoth on

From the article:

Watson is going to college. Students at seven of the country's top computer science universities will get a chance to try out IBM's famous cognitive computing system as part of new classes set for next fall.

Michigan is one of the schools who will have the opportunity to work with Watson:

As part of the Watson classes, students will be given access to a Watson system that IBM will provide through a cloud. They'll then break into teams and use those resources to build and test their own applications, which will be geared toward a particular industry.

Participating students at the University of Michigan will likely develop their apps in collaboration with the University of Michigan Health Center and specifically its C.S. Mott Children's Hospital, says Eric Michielssen a professor of engineering and computer science, who also serves as associate vice president for advanced research.

It's also possible that the university's business school could get involved to help gauge the commercial potential of the apps, he says.

"Yes, we have a fantastic artificial intelligence group here, but Watson's technologies are very unique," Michielssen says. "This is a fantastic opportunity for our students to use the extraordinary capabilities of Watson."

Student response to the new class has been phenomenal, Michielssen says. The 75 spots for the fall semester filled up within two days and there are currently about 50 students on the waitlist, which is expected to grow.

The other lucky schools are Berkeley, Texas, NYU, Carnegie Mellon, RPI, and Ohio State. Here is the article for more details: http://phys.org/news/2014-05-ibm-partners-universities-watson.html

GRBluefan

May 6th, 2014 at 6:40 PM ^

This until I saw ohio state also made the cut. Now I don't feel as special. I don't know for certain, but I assume they plan to use it to do football players homework? Or perhaps just put it in a corner and task it with downloading all the pornz on the webz.

Njia

May 6th, 2014 at 9:37 PM ^

Sam Palmisano left Ginny Rometti a shit sandwich. Still, there remains considerable talent and a remarkable research unit. Watson is but one amazing innovation to come from IBM. They need a management house cleaning and a series of dismissals to find their way again.

elaydin

May 6th, 2014 at 10:12 PM ^

Similar story here.  Just a terribly managed company trying desperately to grow profits on declining revenue by short sided cost cutting.  I'm glad I got out when I did.  It's great to work for a company that actually gives a shit about their employees.

The Power development group is hemorrhaging talent and I assume they won't be in hardware development for much longer.

A great American government driven to the ground by two shitty CEOs.  A shame.

 

Njia

May 7th, 2014 at 9:00 AM ^

I still have friends at Big Blue, and despite non-stop complaints about how awfully they are being treated (just one example: no 401K matching until the last pay period of the year - and then ONLY if you are still employed with the company) they hang on. It's not like anyone except executive management gets rich working there, so I keep asking them: "Why have you not left?"

Most popular answer: "I'm waiting for the separation package."

MgoblueAF

May 6th, 2014 at 9:28 PM ^

IBM has lost some of its public fame because it got out of the hardware business, but there are still SOOO many people who are writing case analyses as we speak on their sales and IT consulting functions. Also, it's really commendable to make a switch to a services-based company while realizing your money maker (PCs) is about to get virtually displaced.

Picktown GoBlue

May 6th, 2014 at 10:04 PM ^

almost a decade since they sold off PCs to Lenovo (2005) (and 23 years since they spun off printers to Lexmark).  Earlier this year, it was the X86 server business that was sold off to Lenovo, along with severely reducing staff in the hardware division.  They still have mainframe and Power-based hardware, but as you note, their bread and butter for quite some time has been in the consulting and in the outsourced IT services business, and they're facing the reality of cloud computing and the slowdown in people buying hardware for anything.

NHWolverine

May 7th, 2014 at 12:26 PM ^

I'd be interested to see portion of IBM's profit centers surround Power and Z and what comes from product licensing, premium support and their cloud offerings (BlueMix). I would imagine the dynamic has to be shifting, especially considering they sold off their x86 business.

LSAClassOf2000

May 6th, 2014 at 7:07 PM ^

The idea of cognitive computing apps which can basically learn an industry is actually pretty exciting, particularly in a field like health care, I would think. We actually joked about it in a meeting at work about having an app that could actually understand the electric distribution system close to the way that we did, but the possibility is actually there. It will be interesting to see what sorts of ideas arise from this collaboration.